Hi all.
v910 is not a public release. While I don’t anticipate any critical issues with it, I’d advise against installing it. It would fall under the category of ‘unathorised firmware’ so if there are issues requiring a return to us, this would be a chargable repair.
I am trying to push for a limited number of community users to be added to our “internal” tester team, as reading through the threads here it seems some of you are keen.
Hello Paul,
Users are still trying non-public releases because they are frustrated with all the issues that come with the amplifier. This is emphasized by the lack of transparency and communication of Arcam around these.
Personally here you are the most annoying ones:
Some of the issue were even not present in the origine firmware and appeared in the augustus / december « updates ». All of them are still in the 910 version tested yesterday evening.
We are now in March !
The only answer of the support month after month is « we are working on it », and excuses like « it has been the holiday season with people on holidays » are not acceptable anymore.
Hearing about chargeable repair highlights the poor consideration towards us. Could you please consider you customers, show some transparency and share a status on the issues and their expected resolution timeframe ?
Hi Paul,
First of all v910 is coming from official arcamupdate.co.uk server. Is it public or not is a different story, but as you can see at least one user got it as OTA.
Second of all what you said about “unauthorized firmware” is contradictory to the information we (as community) were given several months ago about installing of beta software. In short it was said, that beta is not advised, but will be supported by Arcam.
We are keen. We are keen to get our issues solved. I strongly agree with @alex_otb
SA30 been on the market since a year, and was first presented almost 2 years ago. Yet it is still in beta stage firmware-wise. How is it possible, that we still have bugs, that shouldn’t be there in the first place? Talking now about simple things like volume scaling when “Max Volume” option is used, or ARC/CEC not powering on the amp?
You were able to make new AVRs more or less stable and usable several months ago, but for some reason SA30 is not getting the same attention. Why? I understand it’s about sales and revenue generated by those products, but we are still paying customers, right?
As Alex said - we are lacking transparency here. And because of that Arcam is losing customers and reputation. A lot of people already returned their devices to dealers and moved away from Arcam.
Some people in this community are stuck on hope issues will get solved soon, and we’re keeping our SA30’s. And then you come and say, that using long, way too long awaited v910 “would fall under the category of ‘unathorised firmware’ so if there are issues requiring a return to us, this would be a chargable repair”. It really isn’t any reassuring.
I don’t know if you can answer publicly, but maybe i’ll ask some questions here:
Hi @alex_otb
I do understand your frustration, and all I can do here is apologise. I’m sorry you feel like Support are giving excuses, but the issues you mentioned really are being worked on. Progress has definitely been impacted by the UK Governments guidelines that all office workers should work from home.
There is an internal build that is being looked at that addresses ARC issues. It specifically mentions your second issue. This is not an easy thing to test as each manufacturer handles ARC and CEC uniquely, so we want to ensure we’ve tested across as many cases as possible before release.
The drop out issue is much more complex, but again it is a high priority for us. Initially we suspected it was caused by a certain part of the audio pipeline. We have tested a few different experimental builds, which have reduced the dropouts, but not cleared them entirely. The team is working on a new approach as we speak that we are confident will improve the situation.
I do think it’s necessary to stress this particular build was not authorised for public release. I’m not sure how that URL was discovered but all official builds will be released either OTA, or via the product page on the Arcam website. You can be sure there would be an announcement here in the community too.
I use the Max volume option. What is volume scaling?
Hi Paul,
Welcome abroad! I’m really happy an Arcam representative entered this forum. Thanks.
@paulguk this is about how volume is handled by the applictions (Roon, Google Cast etc.). For example you set “Max Volume” to 50. SA30 reports 50 as maximum volume to application, so that app can only go up to 50. BUT at the same time amp is limiting that volume internally, again to the same 50. So in the end Max volume is 50% of 50%, so 25. When you set maximum volume from the app, it will go up to 25 only (despite it should be 50), and for each step change you need 2 volume key presses in the app. I call it “volume scaling” for the lack of better word.
Only in Music Life app it works ok.
When using i.e. Roon or Google Cast, only way to go above this 25 is using the remote, knob on the amp or MusicLife app.
Hi @Felix
I don’t know if you can answer publicly, but maybe i’ll ask some questions here:
As you mention, I’m limited to what I can say: not for political reasons - but more because I’m an engineer in another department (iOS mobile). I don’t want to give answers that are wrong or misleading.
- Does Arcam know the root cause of distortion and audio dropouts issues?
Is this the distortion when playing hi-res content? If so we have a build internally that addresses this. I found a relatively easy way to reproduce this, and in my testing with the new build I haven’t been able to reproduce it so I believe it is now fixed.
See above for the dropouts information.
- If so, is the issue software or hardware related?
Software I believe.
- Is there any timeline of fixing those issues, as well as other, smaller but still annoying bugs?
I’m unable to give a timeline, as I simply don’t know (again, I’m a different department).
- Is it possible for you to release “partial” updates? I mean for example i can see in 910 you fixed the volume scaling (which for me personally is VERY annoying), yet there was no update with this. We could have one less bug when waiting for more fixes. Yet for some reason you decide to wait for… i don’t know what.
Yes that’s a reasonable question. Again, I don’t know immediately why not, but I will definitely raise this.
- Are SA30 issues getting enough attention finally, or is Arcam still stuck on fixing remaining AVRs issues?
The AVR has a different team involved, so work there doesn’t impact the SA30.
- Is there any chance Arcam will be more transparent and vocal on this? For customers, but also for company’s reputation.
I don’t have an answer for this as this is business rather than engineering.
Thanks for explaining that. I use Max Volume set at 80 as that is the setting I have to set for the input from my Yamaha processor from outputs as Yamaha pre outs are only about 1V.
Fair enough 
Yes, it’s about hi-res playback distortion. Thank you for information.
Strange thing was, that we were not able to find any pattern here. For me v867 was perfect - haven’t had distortion since December. Others were less lucky. For me distortion came back with v910.
Hope it’s really fixed. Would be nice if some of us could help with testing that. I’m not the best candidate here, as for me it wasn’t really an issue on 867, but other were still experiencing this, so they could help with testing (if they are willing to of course, and if Arcam would allow for that).
I can of course also test.
Hope we will hear more on this once it’s fixed. I still think it’s a combination of software and hardware, as for some users switching to wireless and eliminating potential interference (potentially causing jitter) like moving the WLAN AP away from the amp, helped to reduce the number of distortion occurences.
Sure, didn’t know which department you’re in when asking a question
Thank you.
Thanks. So unfortunately for us seems AVR team is much more responsive.
Fair enough. But maybe this is also something you could raise with your management? I think it would really help to re-gain some customer trust and benefit the business in the long term.
No problem.
With 80, you probably do not see the issue that well, considering usually no one is throwing a wild party every day
I have small kids, so i have Max Volume set to 40 not to damage the speakers and my familie’s ears
With 40 it’s very, very visible and annoying, as i can only go up to 16 using the app, with 2-3 key presses required for each step up.
There are several issue going on once the Max Volume settings is used.
I believe this web client suffers from this issue too, it is listed here: Webclient: volume control broken, #ref103
And this one is listed here: Volume +/- commands from the TV remote will require more presses, ref#34
I’m not using web client, so i wouldn’t know
Yes, it’s same story to every “app” that is affected, including ARC.
But this is all related to one issue, and it has been fixed in v910. So hopefully fix is coming soon in form of release firmware.
There is still issue with ARC/CEC volume control, but it’s something else actually, although might look similar at first glance.
When holding volume key on TV remote pressed, or pressing button quite quickly, it also requires more time/presses to set volume. BUT if pressing the button slowly, like with 1s breaks, it actually sets volume correctly, so 1 key press = 1 step up.
So it’s more related to how it’s reading CEC commands, than to volume scaling.
Sounds like it’s timing related as outlined in this comment: SA30 remote: commands are ignored, ref#7 - #7 by jvs1
Very old topic
I am not sure if CEC is using same settings/intervals as RC5. If so, than it means not much has changed since July 
And actually in case of CEC holding the button doesn’t help, as it should based on reply you got back in July.
I believe the distortion fix was added after v910. I did find it was easier to reproduce when playing MQA and switching between sample rates (e.g. in a mixed playlist).
So, I mentioned this in our daily standup meeting today. We will discuss further on our longer Wednesday call, but I just wanted to assure you we are exploring options. I think for this to work we’d ideally need to limit testing to a handful of willing participants. Limiting this to pre-approved people would then mean we can warranty any issues that come up.
Of course this discussion doesn’t guarantee we will be able to open it up, but it is a promising first step. I’ll share more when I am able to.
Hello,
And first of all thanks for all the feedbacks Paul.
We finally get heard in a way, and ut gives hope.
If needed, you can count me in for all the arc related issues (sound drops, amplifier not powering on, no sound after standby)
But seems 910 was also different than 867. For me (and i think only for me in this forum) 867 was basically distortion free, unlike 910 is.
You’re right about MQA with mixed sample rates. When testing yesterday with 910 it was basically during the first change from 44,1kHz MQA to 192kHz MQA when distortion kicked-in. Same thing happened few minutes later, when switching back between those same files (from 192 to 44,1).
Hope fix is public soon.
Thanks. Indeed sounds promising. Let’s see what happens.
And as @alex_otb i would also like to thank you for your feedback, and the fact you found time to talk to us on this forum. I think it’s a first time someone at Arcam SHOWED some interest in this and us, customers. Unfortunately support stuff is answering like support stuff. Probably bound with company policies, so cannot really blame them personally.
You are very welcome.
And thanks to you for all the patience and optimism you share.
At some point of time I was about to return the unit but you convinced me all these issues would be eventually solved.
Fingers crossed that Arcam can turn my frustration experience into enjoyement of this unit.
Regarding the distortion issue, I want to put this into the mix and ask the opinions of others who perhaps understand the science behind this.
Last year when I purchased the SA30 along with some new speakers I initially wasn’t happy with the musicality of the sound I was getting at certain times of the day. During lockdown I have had the opportunity of being able to play a lot more music during the day. Often it just didn’t seem to have any rhythm and just sounded down right dull whereas later in the day it would sound a lot better.
I did some reading up on this on the internet and found various discussions about how the quality of the mains can have a massive effect on the sound output. Nowadays there is a lot of RF type of interference from peoples wifi’s, mobile phones etc that all can affect the quality of the mains. I asked for some advice on this on a well known AV / HI FI forum where I asked if I should invest in some form of mains conditioning. It opened up a can of worms however where it was suggested all this sort of thing was snake oil. A dealer was however willing to let me have a trial of a product made by a company called IsoTek. As soon as I tried it straight away it sounded perfect. I had to swap it out several times over a period to convince myself I wasn’t allowing it to fool me.
An aside to this was that the distortion issues of the SA30 also seemed to stop. Several times I have taken the IsoTek out and I have had the distortion re occur. I did ask one of Arcam’s field engineers if there was any logic behind this and he seemed to think there could be in that mains quality could induce jitter.
So, is it just coincidence or could I be onto something here?