Audio Dropping Out on Rega Apollo and Saturn

Rega has been absolutely silent on this issue. I have not heard from the distributor, nor Rega UK about it. The dealer insists that I am the only one of his customers who has had any issues with the units. I believe this dealer is a man of integrity, and though the odds of that are smaller, I believe it could be true because the pool of customers is smaller for him than the overall sales population for the Apollo/Saturn. Nevertheless, I see too many reports of issues from online forums, private emails, and my own experience with the units to conclude it is just my having some "bad luck". I do not believe in luck; I do, however, accept probability. The probability in this situation indicates that there are larger issues with the production of these players.

I should point out that I did not really expect conversation with Rega's headquarters. It would be exceptional if they contacted one owner of a product with a malfunction. If their dealer is also stating that he has no issues with other buyers then they would likely conclude the problem is isolated. Over time the issue became more pronounced (i.e. multiple players) and manifested itself to include a wider population (people who have voiced concerns, but may not have yet contacted Rega's headquarters) than just me.

I did, however, expect that the issues with just produced players would die out after 1.5 years. I assume they would be more likely to take notice or make changes if larger numbers of customers with problematic players contact them. In a nutshell, Rega UK needs to hear from a lot more people about this if anything is to be done about it.

I'd like to add that those who have the machines currently and say they operate fine, you may be in for a suprise. My 3rd Apollo worked fine for 6 months before bugging out, and got worse as time went on. I am convinced that the problem is bugs in Regas new operating software. That Rega was unable to supply a properly working machine over a two year period and that Rega and distributers/dealers continue to say "your the only one" or "there's just a few" is a lie. I have owned 3 of their turntables, several of their cd players and one of their amplifiers. The whole experience with the new rega machines has led me to the decision that I personally will never buy another Rega product again.

Good Morning

The last time I posted onto a site was several years ago and gave up as basically it seemed some people did not want to be confused by the facts. At that time someone was asserting that Rega cartridges were being made in the Far East, when I corrected that and said no actually all made in the UK and hand assembled even the $145 Bias I was told that was just my "opinion".

Anyhoo, as the US Rega distributor I think I can offer a unique insight as I actually know how many units we have sold how many failures and the nature of the faults.

The first batch of Apollo's several years ago now had a sporadic issue with a chip set and the wave soldering process, it exhibited itself pretty much after a few days and we swopped out all the units concerned which was in the region of about 5%.

Since that time both the Apollo and Saturn have been remarkably reliable. Any electronic product will have the odd issue some may be down to impact damage during shipping that does not exhibit as a destroyed box. With both CD players some of the odd issues we have had relate to the unit's software getting glitched.

The Apollo and Saturn as you may be aware use a very different type of disc reading and the memory used is an order of magnitude above other units, so in some ways it is more akin to a computer than a CD player. During the "Initialization" process if the remote is pressed urging the unit to play it will still accept these commands and this over time can cause the player to misread.

Unplugging the unit and leaving overnight to fully reset in 99% of the cases that customers have called upon gets the machine back up to full reading capability.

Do we have the odd issue absolutely but no more or less than in any other area and having been involved in audio for more years than I care to mention Rega's reliability is superb and even shames way more expensive product that I have sold.

To the dealer who posted "feedback" issues we have not heard of this from any dealer that I am aware of so please give a call to ascertain what might be going on in the system.

Doug's issues seem particularly perplexing as I know that we and his retailer have not been able to duplicate many of the faults described. But as Doug will attest we and the dealer have given 100 % effort to making him a happy customer. We have been in contact Doug via your retailer and of course we communicated when you undertook your review.

So I guess to sum up if we had some widespread problem we and Rega could not afford or would continue to sell the players, but for every issue you may read about on the web you don't see the literally hundred's of customers who have a CD player that offer's amazing performance and plays music for them on a daily basis, so the ratio and outlook gets a little skewed.

Hope this may help

Best regards
Steve Daniels
The Sound Organisation

Steve, thanks for your response. I'd like to say that indeed you and Allen at Audiowaves provided superior customer service surrounding the issues I had with the new Rega cd players. I am well aware you do not make the machines, merely provide sales support and service and to that end I commend your excellence, and to Allen as well. I have suspected and posted that it is the new operating software for some time now. I would like to state I am not doug shroeder but had the same problems he did. I have used the machine in accordance with all operating instructions and do not have any unconventional lighting system in my house. With the Saturn I never even used the remote control. Here is what happened twice in last 2 months with my Saturn (and about 7 or 8 times total with my 2nd and 3rd Apollo machines). So I had the fault on 3 out of 4 machines. I pressed stop on the front panel button, it did not stop, I pressed stop again, and the disc kept playing. After a few more tries (my experience is if the first stop command does'nt work none of the following ones do). Since The machine still would not stop playing the disc, I opened the lid....the disc kept playing. The only way to get the machine to stop playing was to turn the power off. To me this was the most bothersome of the problems I experienced, but I also thought unreliable operation of the remote was an inconvenience as well as disc initialization failures. You may argue otherwise but I feel you should not have to turn the power off to change a disc on a 2600 dollar cd player. Taken alone each thing would maybe not be enough for me to jump ship, but all the issues taken together were enough for me to seek a cd player elsewhere. I asked Allen to see if there are any firmware updates for the machines (I thought of this because I heard Denon had provided firmware updates for some its DVD players). Allen told me no. At that point I decided to not send my Saturn for service, because I had 3 machines back and then get the same old problems again. I really dont know how you would explain that Doug Shroeder and myself had a total of 9 or 10 machines and none operated correctly. Are you saying our sample is part of only 5% error rate? As Doug says this seems highly improbable. Additionally if you read this thread there are other posters besides that have issues with the new Rega machines. How many Saturn/Apollo users post on forums? I dont know. In retrospect I should have hung onto my Jupiter machine.