Audio Dropping Out on Rega Apollo and Saturn

Doug, It is in the Sam space (stereophile) review of the Saturn and there is also information about it on Regas own website if you click on the review link to "what russ andrews thinks about the saturn". Sony and phillips announced awhile back that they would stop making chipsets for cd players. A british software company thought that people would still be buying cd players and began to develope a new system, using the original Phillips/Sony "Redbook" as a point of reference. Rega entered into a partnership with this as yet unknown company (anonymity was part of Regas partnership agreement). Here's a qoute from the sam space article, Sam consulted directly with Rega founder Roy Gandy for this article. "Some venture capitalits in the UK foresaw that the chipsets would cease to become available, while sales of cd players would continue, so they set up a company with between 20 and 40 computer software engineers, none of them from hi-fi, and fed them the original Sony/Phillips "redbook"." If you read the russ andrews article it basically rehashes the above and mentions that Rega was "to assist with debugging".

In addition, this is straight out of their Apollo manual on their website.

To the best of our understanding, there have only ever been five large multinational companies with the technology and knowledge base to develop the remarkably complex operating software for CD players.

Development of this software and chip-sets to operate CD transports was generally curtailed around eight to ten years ago. All development effort was directed towards the
design of DVD players and other advanced formats.
Rega and other specialist Hi Fi manufacturers were totally reliant on companies like Sony and Phillips to supply transports and their operating chip-sets.

In 2003 Sony stopped supply and sent the specialist Hi Fi industry into a flurry of activity in search of feasible alternatives. Many manufacturers were able to resource their supply from Far Eastern companies.

Rega has worked hard in locating a British software company who were in the development of a totally new disc operating system. A system, which was highly advanced, even in the early development stages.

Rega is the only manufacturer to develop the unique new disc operating system. Due to ever increasing computer processing power and memory fabrication it has been possible to build in an enormous amount of memory capacity. This has allowed the data retrieval to meet the original CD 'Red Book' specifications without compromise to the musical performance. All previous chip-sets were unable to achieve this due to their limited memory and signal processing capacity.

Rega's new British designed chip set contains over 20MB of memory with 32 bit digital signal processing capacity and Rega has used this computing power to give a far greater musical performance.

We hope you enjoy this very special CD player; we have spent a very long time creating it, drawing on all of our 32 years of experience in specialist Hi Fi manufacturing.

Thanks for the lead on that article!

In addition, I inquired of Rega why the units have silent FF function as opposed to virtually every other player under the sun. The answer I was given was that particular functionality had not been built into the chip set. It certainly opens up the possibility that there have been some other glitches in the operating system.

Indeed Rega has made no secret of all this, actually they made a big deal that they were the first ones to use the new system (which will probably eventually appear in other players as well), what they do make a secret of is that there are still bugs in the system.