Arcam MusicBOOST improves your iPhone’s audio and battery life

In-keeping with their new one-box solutions, Arcam gave me a sneaky peek at their new MusicBOOST – a slender battery pack, DAC and headphone amp all wrapped up in a slide-on sleeve.

The Arcam MusicBOOST is a combined battery pack, digital to analogue converter (DAC) and headphone amplifier built especially for the iPhone 6 and 6S.

Up until now if you want to upgrade the audio of your mobile phone you’d probably go for something like Oppo’s HA-2 which you’ll strap to your phone using elastic bands. Now, or at least in December onwards, if you are rocking the very popular fruity phone you could opt to slip on the surprisingly svelte sleeve from Arcam.

The MusicBOOST hardly adds any extra girth to the iPhone 6S and, because it’s hardy exterior surrounds the phone (there is a cut-out for the camera lens, obvs), it works as a 3/4-style case.

The new phone accessory offers another 120% over the standard iPhone battery which also goes to powering the high-precision DAC and headphone amp so they don’t slurp juice from your phone.

MusicBOOST takes the digital audio stream directly from the iPhone’s Lightning connector through its Lightning Audio Module and thus bypassing the iPhone’s own audio hardware in favour of the improved tech in the Arcam MusicBOOST.

This natty little unit will upgrade all iPhone audio from iTunes, Apple Music, YouTube, Spotify, Tidal, Qobuz, etc and will play nice with FLAC, WAV files etc using 3rd party apps such as VOX, Flac Player+, and the likes. The MusicBOOST has enough oomph to drive sensitive IEMs right through to power-hungry cans.

MusicBOOST is recharged via a bundled microUSB cable which will pass the power on to the phone too.

The Arcam MusicBOOST will go on sale early December with a RRP of £120 and I hope to review it soon.