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Cambridge Audio turn their back on Home Theatre


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This happened with little or no fuss but the local distributor confirmed with me last week that Cambridge audio have stopped all production of AV related products including blu ray players and AV receivers.

 

Their blu ray and UHD players were tightly linked with Oppos so that's no surprise and thier AV Amps always put sound quality on top of features and that never sat well with the masses who would choose inbuilt spotify streaming over watts per channel, real watts per channel that is!

 

A shame considering thier CXR AVR range was a brand new platform and design that looks slick and streamlined and finally they got the performance and stability right too!

 

Having owned a few integrated Amps in my setup I have always felt the CXR200 is more like a big integrated amp that can do 7 channels and passes all my video sources too, IMO. It sound just as good!

 

So I now own a collectors item, one of that last powerful sound quality first "affordable" AV receivers ever made, now all I need is the oppo tax to translate to my Cambridge AVR and I'll flick it on eBay for $6000!

 

 

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That is a shame. And I do wonder which companies will stick it out as they may remain to be quite profitable. 

There's a market, perhaps even a dwindling market but there is one. So I guess gaining that market share or abandoning is the way.. 

 

I had great quality things from them over the years... 

640R Receiver 

751BD Blu ray player 

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owned a few cambridge disc players in my time and was disappointed with the withdrawal that followed oppo....though that waste surpassing.... I too noticed the AV gear disappearing off the website... but just hoped was a range refresh or somemthing. but a bit sad if they have exited.... was one of the brands that had decent sound quality and backed up their claims with decent engineering...

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  • 3 weeks later...


28 minutes ago, Mr_Gadget said:

I was just about to see if they were coming out with any new AVRs or pre/pros and then I read this news :(

 

First Panasonic and now CA!

yeh a shame for the few die hard fans that put power and sound quality ahead of features. Guess they just don't have the funding and R&D sharing the other companies have.

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 05/02/2020 at 9:12 AM, Mr_Gadget said:

I was just about to see if they were coming out with any new AVRs or pre/pros and then I read this news :(

 

First Panasonic and now CA!

Same here.  That's a real shame.  I was really hoping to see an AV processor from CA. 

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On 05/02/2020 at 9:42 AM, Hi-Fi Whipped said:

yeh a shame for the few die hard fans that put power and sound quality ahead of features. Guess they just don't have the funding and R&D sharing the other companies have.

Exactly the problem ; it takes a lot of know how integrating hdmi now and will only get worse with hdmi 2.1.

Small companies struggle with getting all the interpretations of hdmi "standards" that each ce individually have .

So you see small players like monoprice getting their outsourced code from an oem source [MDS] that is shared with others like Arcam; audio control; jbl synthesis .. And getting it built by ATI ..

The big boys like Denon/Marantz/Yamaha have plenty of software engineers so you see close to foolproof compatibility [ and they have long experience with audyssey so comparatively nothing to tweak; why switch to dirac -its more complicated ? ]

Cambridge audio always preferred to engineer components in house and that's hard these days ; very sad :/

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51 minutes ago, cwt said:

Exactly the problem ; it takes a lot of know how integrating hdmi now and will only get worse with hdmi 2.1.

Small companies struggle with getting all the interpretations of hdmi "standards" that each ce individually have .

So you see small players like monoprice getting their outsourced code from an oem source [MDS] that is shared with others like Arcam; audio control; jbl synthesis .. And getting it built by ATI ..

The big boys like Denon/Marantz/Yamaha have plenty of software engineers so you see close to foolproof compatibility [ and they have long experience with audyssey so comparatively nothing to tweak; why switch to dirac -its more complicated ? ]

Cambridge audio always preferred to engineer components in house and that's hard these days ; very sad :/

Is it that or just the cost of licensing etc? 

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3 hours ago, Bunno77 said:

Is it that or just the cost of licensing etc? 

Smaller concerns haven't got the resources to program code with banks of engineers Bunno . As you can see with the really long gestation of better more stable code that you would be familiar with concerning Emotiva say. They had an arrangement with TI chipsets [MDA] with the XMC1 but switched to Analogue Design so they are now playing catch up having to program themselves the api from dirac they received later than the deal stipulated ie monoprice and arcam have dirac up and running already as their common MDA architecture benefits them . 

Its the old saying possibly ; overflow the tub and all boats rise ; or words to that effect :) No clue as to the cost of licensing but its worth noticing the company registries as to who owns what in the consolidation of small into large ;Samsung owns the lot of the new 16ch pre pro's O.o

 

Quote

Samsung/Harman now has Arcam, Mark Levinson, Revel, Lexican, JBL Synthesis under its belt and shares engineering expertise, particularly in amplification, across the group.

 

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