Appearances can be deceptive.

There is the rather wonderful (but slightly surreal) story of a lady in San Diego, who was discovered sitting bolt upright in her car, with her hands clasped tightly over the back of her head and her eyes fixed in a wild stare. When worried passers-by eventually tapped on her side window to question her, the lady announced that she had been shot in the back of the head and had to keep her hands there to hold her brains in. Paramedics were called, but it was only when they cautiously entered the car, that the truth became apparent: the lady in question had in fact dumped a load of groceries on her back seat, after a supermarket shop, then settled down to take a bit of a nap in the drivers seat. The hot sun had heated her groceries to the point where a can of Pillsbury dough had exploded with a bang (the supposed gun shot) and propelled a wad of soft, warm dough into the lady's hair. Having been woken with a start by the 'gun shot' the lady had instinctively reached round to where she felt an impact and jumped to the conclusion that the squidgy dough was in fact her brains. She had frantically pushed the dough against her head and then, petrified to move an inch, she had sat in that exact position for an hour, until the paramedics had arived and put her out of her missery. Oh how they all laughed.

So the moral of the story is that things are not always what they seem, which ties in nicely with the real subject matter here, Arcam's excellent new AVR280 - an amp that appears to be an AVR250 with HDMI switching, but isn't! The correct way of viewing the 280, is that it is really a slightly scaled down version of Arcam's all-conquering £1500 AVR350. The 280 has a smaller power supply, but is otherwise very similar to its big brother. This means that it utilises the same expensive op amps and processing circuitry as the 350, which in turn were derived from Arcam's flagship AVP700 pre-amp. Not surprisingly, the result is class leading sound, with the 280 comfortably outperforming not only the old 250, but also the AVR300. Consequently, the AVR250 and 300 have now been discontinued! This amp is streets ahead of the Japanese competition, particularly when listening to music. Performance into KEF KHT / KEF iQ5 / Dali IKON 6 is nothing short of breathtaking. So just like our lady in the story above, use your brains, get some dough....

.......and buy yourself an AVR280.

In a nutshell...