We have already been wowed by Rega's $1499 Apollo CD player. Its unique feature was the use of a new UK-developed and sourced chip set to control the disc drive mechanism and extract the digital data from the discs. This was believed responsible for a substantial improvement over its Planet predecessor.
Down the road, Rega has had the time to develop its more upmarket Saturn, based on the same disc drive and control chips used in the Apollo. The more expensive design adds considerable extra engineering in the DACs, power supplies and analogue circuitry. The starting point for the Saturn was Rega's earlier Jupiter model, which was itself the upmarket derivative of the Planet... all of which makes us suspect Patrick Moore thinks up Rega's CD names. Once the development work began, however, it quickly became clear that it was worth taking the player rather further, because the new data retrieval technology was that much more effective than before. Accordingly, the Saturn goes several stages beyond the Jupiter, which explains why it costs more than the Jupiter it replaces.
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As Britain's leading manufacturer of turntables, tonearms and cartridges,
Rega was a late entrant to the CD player scene, though when the top-loading Planet finally arrived in 1995 it was very well received. The company tries to avoid changing its products unless absolutely necessary, so the essentials of the Planet and Jupiter remained unchanged for many years, apart from a substantial cosmetic revamp in 2000. But even that was instituted because the tooling for the original cast casework became worn.
The Saturn looks exactly like its cheaper Apollo sibling, and both are also almost indistinguishable from their Planet and Jupiter predecessors. All four share the same stylish casework, with a fascia divided into three sections. The top of the widest central portion is scalloped away to make room for the cover over a central top-loading disc drive mechanism. This cover features a clever double-hinged lid, so it tilts backwards as well as up, and therefore doesn't require too much space above – total height with the lid is 17cm.
Finished in either satin black or satin silver, the casework is aluminium alloy, and unlike the plastic front used on the Apollo, the Saturn also has an aluminium front panel. A modest central red coloured display provides basic operational information, with a defeat option, and four elegantly shaped buttons unambiguously supply basic play, stop and skip functions. A handset is supplied in order to include the functionality needed to support the replay of discs recorded in compressed MP3 format, which may contain hundreds of tracks. This slim, light affair has fine button differentiation and is easy to operate one-handed.
Although you wouldn't necessarily notice it at first, the only visible difference between a Saturn and a Jupiter lies in the centre of the loading bay lid. The Jupiter's lid incorporated a rotating disc clamp, but no such device is needed with the Saturn, because the disc drive mechanism has a clever ‘ball-chuck' mechanism to grip the disc. The disc is clipped onto and held in place by three spring-loaded ball bearings, an arrangement which not only adds virtually no inertia to the drive mechanism, but also grips the disc tightly and pulls it flat against the platter, for more accurate laser reading.
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Ironically, the players might never have come about had Rega not lost the source of its key CD components a couple of years ago. Of necessity, specialist hi-fi brands rely on in core components like integrated circuits and drive mechanisms from outside suppliers. Rega, like a number of British brands, used to buy in most of these components from Sony Europe. Until, that is, Sony decided to pull out of the business and Rega, along with a number of its competitors, was obliged to make alternative arrangements for CD sleds.
It's said that every cloud has a silver lining, and that cliché seems particularly apt for Rega. Certainly it has brought much greater diversity in the core components used throughout the marketplace, as each brand has come up with its own solutions.
Rega likes working with local suppliers, and for that reason it was one of the first to employ Wolfson DACs in its players. The Saturn uses two parallel WM8740 dual-differential converters for superior dynamic range and linearity. The most interesting part of the story, however, is that Rega found a British software company that had developed a brand new chip set specifically intended for CD operation.
Whereas traditional suppliers have focused primarily on DVD replay in recent years, treating CD as a mere adjunct, this all-new CD-oriented approach incorporates the latest chip design developments including much more memory than earlier designs, ensuring that both signal processing and error correction demands are satisfied without compromise in sound or specification.
