Rega Isis CD Player

Rega’s flagship CD player, the Isis, is a product manufactured to the highest achievable quality inside and out including Rega's own unique CD technology, genuine black chrome lid, and front fascia and a custom solid anodised aluminium case weighing in at a notable 19kg! We hope you enjoy this very special CD player; we have spent a very long time creating it, drawing on our many years of experience in specialist hi-fi manufacturing.

 

Product Details

Technology behind the design of the Isis

One important design goal was to take the current output, with no internal amplification within the D to A converter, and convert this to an analogue voltage, using discrete class  A  operational amplifiers and filters.

This circuit can then be optimised for sonic performance. (With most CD players the use of standard operational integrated circuits locks you into the sound of those particular integrated circuits, thus narrowing the scope for improvement). The class A current to voltage conversion amplifier evolved out of the development of the first stage of the Rega Ios MC amplifier.

 

Analogue section

The analogue section employs two Burr Brown PCM1794 digital to analogue converters, running in a parallel dual mono mode, driving a high-performance discrete class A current to voltage amplifier.

This combination generates an exceptionally wide dynamic range, low distortion, and linear signal. This drives an enhanced discrete Class An output amplifier. The circuit is fully balanced from the digital to analogue converters to the balanced analogue XLR outputs.

The analogue stage has its own dedicated 50VA mains transformer which ensures galvanic isolation between the digital and analogue sections of the player. You will find 10 separate power supply regulators are used in the analogue circuit and each individual amplifier stage has its own dedicated low noise voltage reference.

Digital section

The digital section is blue printed and selected, with major improvements to the mechanism, optical amplifier, DSP core, PLL, master clock & motor power supplies. Another 10 separate power supply regulators are used in the digital circuit.

The motor, user interface processor & display also have their own power supply. The digital stage also has its own 50VA transformer again ensuring galvanic isolation. The mechanism is graded and matched to the servo circuits, to ensure the servo and optical amplifiers are working at their optimum point, improving error correction and playability.

Digital

This revolutionary player has been five years in design. Rega, together with its design partners have pioneered a highly advanced servo controller that uses the latest signal processing techniques to ensure that the raw data that is recovered from the disc is of the very highest quality. Because our fully digital servo can use highly advanced algorithms, the laser spot is kept in the optimum position for data recovery in terms of focus, size and tracking.

Extra Error Correction

Previous chip-sets always made compromises on error correction. Formerly it was possible to have good jog resistance or better musical performance.

The Rega chip-set allows optimum musical performance and optimised jog /vibration resistance.

Super-stable phase lock loop

The entire IC is clocked via a very special PLL of our own design. This allows better CD data recovery as well as a big improvement in the quality of the data delivered to the DAC.

Low noise digital design

In the design of our CPU IC, we went to great lengths to ensure that the data and address bus noise was kept to an absolute minimum. This ensures the ground and signal connections to the DAC are as 'clean' as is possible.

USB Input

Allowing direct connection to a laptop or PC via a USB A-B lead to stream internet radio, MP3 or WMA files directly from your computer via the high-quality Isis internal DAC.