ARCH

I Bought a Phantom. Then I Realised I Couldn’t Connect My Turntable to It. Then I found the Arch.

This is a story a lot of Phantom owners know too well.

You spend weeks deciding on a Phantom. You bring it home. You set it up. It sounds unbelievable. You’re genuinely thrilled. And then you look over at your turntable, the one you’ve had for years, the one with the good cartridge, the one that has a corner of the room all to itself and you realize there’s no obvious way to connect the two.

The Phantom is a wireless speaker. It streams beautifully over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. But your turntable outputs an analogue RCA signal, and a raw turntable signal needs a phono stage before it can go anywhere useful. And even if you solve the phono problem, how do you get that signal into a speaker that was designed around wireless streaming?

That’s exactly the problem the Devialet Arch was built to solve.

And it solves it so elegantly, so completely, that I’m slightly annoyed it took me six months of owning a Phantom to discover it existed.

What the Arch Actually Is

In the simplest terms: the Arch is a small box that takes any wired audio source turntable, CD player, television, whatever and sends it wirelessly to your Phantom. No cables running across the room. No adapters. No compromise on quality. Your source goes in one end of the Arch, and the Phantom receives it over your home network as if it were any other streaming source.

But calling it a wireless transmitter undersells what’s inside.

The phono stage in the Arch isn’t some budget circuit Devialet bolted on to make the product viable. It’s directly inherited from their Expert Pro range, a line of amplifiers that serious audiophiles have used for years as some of the finest electronics available at any price. The same phono circuitry that lived inside amplifiers costing several times more is now inside this 11×11 cm box that sits next to your turntable.

That matters. A lot. Because the phono stage is the most sensitive link in the vinyl chain it takes the tiny, fragile signal from a cartridge and amplifies it without adding noise, distortion, or colouration. A bad phono stage at this point will degrade everything that comes after it, no matter how good your turntable, cartridge, or speakers are. A genuinely excellent phono stage, like the one in the Arch, gets out of the way and lets the music through clean.

The Moment It Clicked For Me

I’ll be honest I expected it to be fine. A useful add-on. A problem solved.

What I didn’t expect was to sit down with a record I’ve heard a hundred times and hear things I’d missed. Not because the Arch added anything. Because it subtracted something from the ground noise, the hiss, the slight grayness that even decent phono stages introduce. Through the Arch into the Phantom I, the background was completely, disconcertingly quiet. And into that silence, the music arrived with a presence and body I hadn’t fully experienced from that turntable before.

The reviewer who tested it described the experience as “zero ground noise nothing, completely quiet, it’s not often I experience it.” That matched exactly what I heard. Voices hang in the air. Instruments have weight and texture. The bass through SAM® is deep in a way that vinyl really rewards there’s a warmth and density to a well-pressed record that digital can approximate but never quite replicate, and the Arch preserves all of it on the way to the Phantom.

It made me fall back in love with records. Which I hadn’t expected a small white box to do.

It’s Not Just for Turntables

This is the part people miss when they first read about the Arch. Yes, it’s marketed around vinyl. Yes, the phono stage is the headline feature. But the same input is reconfigurable in three other ways through the Devialet app:

As a line input connect any analogue source. CD player, cassette deck, a television’s analogue output, a secondary streaming device that doesn’t natively support AirPlay. Anything with RCA outputs goes in, and the Arch sends it wirelessly to your Phantom. Suddenly your Phantom becomes the output for the whole room, not just for streaming services.

As two digital coaxial inputs plug in up to two digital sources simultaneously. A CD transport, a disc player, a gaming console with a coaxial output. The Arch accepts up to 24-bit/96 kHz digital audio and sends it over the network at full quality. You choose which source to play through the Devialet app.

As a phono stage (MM and MC) for turntables with moving magnet or moving coil cartridges. The sensitivity is adjustable in the app via a slider from 0.5 mV to 10 mV, which covers the vast majority of cartridges on the market. If you have a very low-output MC below 0.3 mV, it’s worth checking the spec of your specific cartridge before buying but for most people, it’ll work without any fuss.

One box. One input. Four possible configurations. All switchable in the app without touching anything physically.

The Size of It

I want to say something about how this thing looks in person, because photos don’t quite convey it.

The Arch is 110 mm × 110 mm × 37 mm. That’s roughly the size of a large coaster. It weighs 400g. You can hold it in one hand. It’s designed in the same Iconic White finish as the Phantom, with the same monolithic, minimal aesthetic, no visible screws, no fussy details, just a clean white square with a single button on top and the necessary connections on the back.

On the back there’s an RCA stereo input (doubles as two coaxial digital inputs), a ground connection for your turntable, an Ethernet port, and a power inlet. That’s it. There’s nothing else because there doesn’t need to be.

Sitting next to a turntable on a shelf, it looks completely intentional. It looks like it was always supposed to be there.

Setup: Genuinely Five Minutes

Open the Devialet app. Go to Accessories. Select Arch. Press the button on the top of the Arch. Done.

That’s actually it. The app walks you through choosing your input type, setting the sensitivity if you’re using a phono source, and naming the source so it appears in your input list alongside Spotify, AirPlay, and whatever else you have set up. From that point, selecting your turntable as a source in the Devialet app is exactly the same as selecting any other input.

The Arch connects to your home network over Wi-Fi (dual-band 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) or Ethernet. Ethernet is recommended when possible the signal path is more stable, and for high-resolution digital sources it removes any potential for network congestion affecting playback. But Wi-Fi works reliably for most home setups.

One thing that’s genuinely clever: PLC (Power Line Communication). If your Wi-Fi is patchy in the room where your turntable lives, the Arch can transmit audio over your home’s electrical wiring instead. It uses the same powerlines that supply electricity to route the signal to your Phantom. No additional hardware needed, no new cables, just a different transmission path that uses what’s already in your walls.

The Wireless Turntable Thing Is More Useful Than It Sounds

Here’s something I didn’t think about until I had it set up: my turntable is now effectively wireless.

I mean, there’s still a cable from the turntable to the Arch. But the Arch sits right next to the turntable, and from there everything is wireless. Which means if I want to move the turntable to another room for a listening session or if I rearrange the room entirely the only thing that changes is where the Arch is physically sitting. The Phantom doesn’t move. The network doesn’t change. I just pick up the turntable and the Arch, put them where I want, and keep listening.

For people who listen to vinyl in more than one space, or who have a setup where the turntable and speakers are far apart, this is genuinely freeing. You can have the turntable in the study and the Phantom in the living room and they’ll work together perfectly, because they’re connected through the network, not through a cable.

You can also have up to four Arch units on the same Devialet system. One next to the turntable, one next to the CD player, one connected to the television’s analogue output all of them selectable from the Devialet app as independent sources. For someone building a more complete Devialet home audio setup, this is how you turn the Phantom from a great wireless speaker into the heart of a full analogue and digital music system.

Who Actually Needs This

If you own a Phantom and you have a turntable, the Arch is not optional. It’s the missing piece. Before the Arch existed, the only way to get vinyl into a Phantom was through an external phono stage into a DAC into the Phantom’s optical input, a chain of adapters that introduces potential failure points and costs more in components than the Arch itself. The Arch collapses all of that into one small box that does the job better than most of those components would have anyway.

If you own a Phantom and you have other sources you want to connect a CD player you still love, a television in the same room, anything with analogue or digital outputs the Arch is worth serious consideration. It turns the Phantom into a proper integrated system rather than a very good streaming speaker with limited source flexibility.

If you’re building a Devialet system from scratch and you know vinyl is going to be part of your life, just buy the Arch at the same time. You’ll get around to wanting it eventually and you might as well have it set up from the start.

The Honest Part About the Price

₹75,000 is not nothing. I understand that. For an accessory, even a genuinely excellent one, it’s a significant number.

But here’s the context. A good standalone phono stage in India starts around ₹20,000–₹40,000 for something decent, and climbs quickly from there for something that genuinely does justice to a quality cartridge and turntable. Add a wireless audio transmitter of any quality ₹10,000–₹25,000. Add a DAC if you want to feed digital sources into another ₹20,000–₹60,000. Add cables and adapters. You’re at ₹50,000–₹1,25,000 minimum for a cobbled-together solution that still won’t sound as clean, won’t integrate as seamlessly with the Phantom, and won’t look like it belongs in the same setup.

The Arch does all of it in one purpose-built box with Expert Pro-grade circuitry, designed specifically for the Phantom ecosystem, for ₹75,000. In that context it’s not expensive. It’s actually quite efficient.

Final Thought

The Arch is the quietest product Devialet makes. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t have a power output rating or a frequency response graph to show you. It just sits next to your turntable, looking discreet, doing something quite remarkable: taking a signal from one of the oldest formats in home audio and delivering it cleanly, wirelessly, with no audible noise into one of the most advanced speakers in the world.

The first time you put on a record and hear it through your Phantom with zero ground noise and full, physical SAM-controlled bass, you’ll understand exactly what ₹75,000 just bought you.

The Devialet Arch is available in India through The Den India with nationwide shipping and official manufacturer’s warranty.

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