Audio Dropping Out on Rega Apollo and Saturn

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.

Fillmoor's comments regarding the Saturn match mine exactly. I typically play a disc from beginning to end without any skipping back and forth, which probably translates to one initialization error in 15-20 discs. Opening the top, rotating the disc a bit and closing usually works; only twice have I needed to turn the machine on/off to reset the process. I'm glad that Fillmoor explained what I have been suspecting, which halps me try to overlook the odd annoyance and just listen to the music.

This is in response to Fillmoor.

I did not mention that my problem was CD skipping. It was audio drop-outs. There is a difference. The audio on the player seems to drop out from time to time, as it is playing a CD.

The fact that I experienced this problem with both the Apollo and Saturn, with the same CDs, and not on my Jolida CD player, leads me to believe there is some sort of design glitch with the Rega players. Maybe the Apollo and Saturn at my dealer do not have the latest firmware. I will ask my dealer to contact Rega to see if other customers have complained of this.

Wkass:

Occasionally, My Saturn does drop out the audio. It may occur intermittently several times and either correct itself or drop out altogether. Although rarely, this has occurred on discs which had minor a minor scratch, and also on discs which needed a cleaning. The scratched discs could not be fixed, but cleaning the others corrected the problem. NOTE: The discs (evidently) in need of a cleaning had been cleaned two months prior and did not appear to be dirty at the time of the audio drop-out.

My bottom line: The Saturn is a bit finicky at times, but the musical delivery is fine enough to induce me to overlook the occasional glitch. Hope this helps.