Audio Dropping Out on Rega Apollo and Saturn


I borrowed a Rega Apollo and Saturn for home audition from my local dealer.

On both CD players, I experienced audio drop outs from some of my CDs as they were playing. I noticed that these CDs did have some minor scratches, but nothing major. When I would play these same CDs on my Jolida JD100 CD player, I never experienced these problems.

Are there any Rega Apollo or Saturn owners that have experienced this problem with some of their CDs? It seems like to me that Rega does not have a very good error correction system as the laser scans the CD. So if you do happen to have some CDs with scratches, it could hinder an otherwise pleasant listening experience.

If there is no clear explanation or work-around for this, then I have no choice but to remove these players from my consideration.
wkass
Eldarado,
Thanks for coming to my defense. I auditioned these players to determine if it is a worthwhile upgrade over my Jolida player.

It looks like Jalanc42069 experienced the same issue.

I am using the same input into my Audio Research LS-7 preamp.
I borrowed a Rega Apollo and Saturn for home audition from my local dealer.

Sorry about that - I take it back.
Should have payed more attention.

It is interesting, since I have never heard about such a problems. I also have few CDs in less then perfect shape
but they played just fine.
As if it is a worthy upgrade over Jolida.......it is your choice of course. I think that I would probably keep the "J" and send it to get few mods and in the future upgrade to a player from the top shelve.
I own a Saturn I bought new. Definitely finicky with CD-Rs. Some have suggested that burning at a slower helps (to be honest, some of the discs that skip are so old I can't remember what speed I burned them at).

No problems to date with store bought discs.
As one of the first in North America to own privately, then review publicly, both the Apollo and the Saturn, I have added a Preface to my review published on Dagogo.com in January of '07. It is pertinent to this discussion and to any potential purchasers.

Note that there is an error in the last line which will be corrected; "preference" should read "preface".
The Stereophile test results on the apollo (both use the exact same transport and operating system) were excellent for error correction. I never had a problem with a disc skipping on a Saturn or an Apollo. Any player will probably skip with a scratched disc. But there are bugs in the software of Apollo and Saturn players. I had 3 Apollos and a Saturn. I have never used a cd player that does some of the things these new Rega players do. If you play discs from beginning to end and don't change tracks alot, then all you should get are occaisional initialization failures, just open and close lid again. However if you like to sometimes change tracks, it might not go to the right one, or it may lock up, or it may leave the first few seconds of the next track out, also if you press stop it might not. I had instances where the only way to stop the disc was to turn the power off. These errors will be more bothersome to some than others. In my experience every single one of the new Regas that I owned had faults (I had a total of 4 machines). My own feeling is that you should not have to turn the power off to change a disc on a 2600 dollar cd player. I dont bother to have it "fixed" because every machine came back with the same issues. As far as I can tell these bugs are unfixable, or have not been fixed yet. Every machine I sent back was found to be fine by the distributer, to their credit they sent replacements. Only to have te same issues with every replacement. My own experience with the new Regas was that the operational issues were not limited to early production runs of the Apollo. Doug Shroeder, who posted a reply here was also one of the first people to post on the internet about the bugs with an early Apollo. Although I think he likes the sound of the machine alot judging by his review.