I had realised for some time that my system had never had a CD player that was truly capable of matching its quality. The situation with the Cambridge Audio and the external DAC, which was inexpensive but good quality, was satisfactory, but the idea of a nice, proper CD player had been buzzing around my head for quite some time. After the negative experience of buying a nice used Meridian, I should have been much more careful. Unfortunately, my finances weren’t helping, but I continued to search the classified ads for the three British brands suggested to me by TNT Audio: Naim, Rega, and Cyrus. Given that I had a Naim amplifier in my system, the most sensible choice would have been a Naim player. I had also found an interesting advert for a player from the same series as my amplifier, namely a CD 5XS, but at a price slightly higher than I could afford. Alternatively, there were CD 5i players closer to my budget. The Cyrus CD6 and CD8 were even more expensive. So was the Rega Saturn. In the end, I opted for something I could try out for myself: I had to choose between a Naim CD 5i-2 and a Rega Apollo.

They cost exactly what my minimum budget allowed, but in the end I chose the Rega Apollo because it uses a Sanyo mechanism that is still available. The Naims had Philips mechanisms that are no longer manufactured, but there are compatible third-party units available to repair them. I felt I was playing it safer with Rega, as CD players in the same price range sound almost identical. The differences in theory would be that the Naim players are obviously very precise and essential in their presentation, the Cyrus players are even more detailed, and the Rega players, while not lacking in detail, would offer a more spacious and enjoyable presentation. But, I repeat, I’m told these are minimal differences that can only be heard with very revealing systems.

So, one fine day in January 2026, I drove to the private individual who was selling a recently serviced and fully functional 2006 Rega Apollo. He even had the purchase receipt, manuals and original packaging. When I tested it with some of my CDs, I had no problems, so I bought it. I didn’t go home but stayed overnight at my parents’ house because I had to work in the office the next day. After spending the night in its packaging at home, the player remained in the car throughout the working day and for the entire journey home, which took just over an hour. In my enthusiasm, I made the mistake of connecting it to the system straight away and trying it out. It didn’t play… It read the disc and started playing, but no sound came out. I was starting to worry when, at a certain point, the player quietly started playing, but the sound seemed rather dull to me, with the bass prominent and the other frequencies lagging behind. Was this the character of the Rega? If so, I didn’t like it! Had I become accustomed to modern digital sound with the Schiit Modius? Then it occurred to me that perhaps it wasn’t a good idea to start up a cold CD player. So I let it acclimatise overnight. The next morning, I plugged it in and left it on for about an hour. Then I played a CD on repeat for over an hour, and at one point it froze in the middle of a track! I tried to get it to read the disc again, but it would stop playing after 30 seconds, pause for another 30 seconds or more, and then start up again on its own. Sometimes I couldn’t get it to read the disc, other times it would start, stop and start again, over and over. At this point, I wrote to the seller, but, confident from the brief tests carried out at his home, he defended himself by saying that as a private individual he could not accept returns, in short, he had no intention of taking the item back.

Cursing myself repeatedly for insisting on using old-but-high-quality CD players rather than looking for something newer and working, I kept trying to play it until at one point it played an entire disc. The interruptions began to become increasingly rare and brief.
I began to think that the cold might have increased the viscosity of the lubricant along the rails that move the laser longitudinally as it reads the disc. This could explain the difficulty in moving the laser and therefore in reading. Probably, once it had reached temperature, the player was slowly starting to recover and play correctly. In fact, the sound had become simply fantastic! Over time, occasional reading errors occurred, but I was able to play several CDs in their entirety. I tried to keep the player on all the time, as I already do with the Naim Nait XS amplifier. In short, it seems that it was all due to some kind of thermal shock suffered by the player. Sure, there was also condensation on the lens due to the temperature change.

The previous owner had had the laser repaired, or rather its power supply, and hopefully the technicians had checked its overall functionality. Finally, I had a CD player that was a match for the system! An honourable mention goes to the old Cambridge Audio, which, when connected to a modern, good-quality DAC (though I imagine still inferior to the Rega Apollo’s internal one), sounds truly incredible, losing out by a narrow margin to the twenty-year-old Apollo, which is more defined, with a wider soundstage, capable of extracting even more detail.

Rega Research was founded in 1973 by Tony RElph and Roy GAndy (REGA). Roy Gandy, an engineer at Ford Motor Company, grew up learning to build and repair anything he couldn’t afford, from bicycles to motorcycles to electric guitars. Unsatisfied with the performance of various Thorens, Lenco, and AR turntables, and unable to even dream of owning a Linn Sondek, the turntable par excellence of the time, Roy ended up building his own. And so Rega Research began producing its Rega Planet turntables by hand at home, initially with third-party tonearms. Over the years, sales volumes grew, prompting the company to become increasingly comprehensive, producing not only its famous tonearms, but also prestigious speakers and amplifiers.

The advent of CDs in the early 1980s saw a decline in sales of turntables, for which Rega had become almost synonymous. But Rega entered the CD player market somewhat late, even making headlines. Roy had never been satisfied with the sound of CD players, but the market was pushing in that direction. The manufacturers of players were giants such as Sony and Philips, inventors of the system, as well as Pioneer and Marantz. Small companies such as Rega had stayed out of it, but by then even British competitors such as Quad, Naim, and Arcam had entered the CD player market. In the end, it was Sony that offered Rega its own CD player development kit, based on KSS mechanics. Terry Bateman, the Rega engineer now famous for his work on the Brio amplifier, was tasked with coming up with a player that sounded different from the ones on the market, which Roy didn’t like at all. In addition, it was decided to eliminate the classic tray that pulls the disc inside (considered a source of several problems in competitors’ players) and instead use a top-loading mechanism more similar to that of a normal turntable. Roy was very pleased with the result, and thus the Rega Planet CD was born.

It was particularly well received by the public because, in line with the designers’ intentions, it had a more analog sound than the CD players that were around at the time, in the 1990s. The digital sound of those days was perceived as cold and sterile compared to that of vinyl. It must be said that vinyl had decades of research behind it, while CD players had only been around for about ten years. Generally speaking, the main characteristic of a good analog system is its tonal consistency and rhythm, which digital turntables of the time could not achieve. The Rega Planet, on the other hand, seemed to have made a big step forward in these areas. Listening to it today, it might seem to have a slightly recessed high end, probably done intentionally to give it a slightly warmer sound than its competitors. The Planet was sold for £995 specifically to make it the best CD player available for under £1,000.

In the early 2000s, it became known that Sony would stop supplying CD kits globally. It was a severe blow to all small CD player manufacturers. Rega, through Terry Bateman, learned of a British company, Global Silicon, which produced high-performance custom chips. Having predicted years earlier that the big players Philips and Sony might limit supplies or even stop producing kits altogether, they had wisely decided to develop their own chip but had not yet implemented it in a real CD player, as they had initially been heavily funded to create an alternative to the iPod.

The Global Silicon chip with 20 Mb of memory and 32-bit computing power was significantly superior to those normally used; it allowed all the information necessary for subsequent playback to be stored when the disc was first read. This allowed for a significant reduction in error correction, freeing up a lot of computing power for more accurate data extraction, thus allowing it to collect an amount unknown to standard competitor chipsets. What’s more, since it was designed to extract data from a moving player, who knows how much more information it could extract when inserted into a stationary tabletop CD player. After receiving a sample for testing, Terry Bateman built a prototype CD player around it, which Roy Gandy found truly exceptional.

After lengthy negotiations, despite Global Silicon beginning to consider leaving the digital sector (it would eventually close its doors), Rega was able to take advantage of the company’s need to offload a huge quantity of ready-made chips at an extremely competitive price. This meant Rega could continue producing CD players without fear of running out of stock. The Global Silicon chipsets were stored in a bank vault. In 2004, the new Rega Apollo CD was launched, featuring Sanyo mechanics (still available today) and the new Global Solutions custom chipset, exclusive to Rega. The Rega Apollo significantly improved sound quality but retained the same price as the Planet. The first owner purchased my unit in July 2006 when the normal retail price was €1,000. In addition to the computing power of the chipset, the Apollo boasted a dual Wolfson DAC, separate class A output stages, and high-quality components put together by the brilliant Terry Bateman. It was a huge success. The Rega Apollo was able to extract an amount of information never before heard from a CD, with unprecedented musicality.

Rega Planet players used Sony KSS 213 mechanisms (exactly like the one in my old Cambridge Audio), which are no longer available and cannot be repaired, not even by replacing them with something compatible; they simply do not exist. Rega was forward-thinking in adopting Sanyo mechanisms when both Philips and Sony stopped producing the ones that were also fitted in prestigious players of the time. While a Naim player from a few years ago has to be repaired with compatible third-party playback mechanisms, the old Rega players have original Sanyo spare parts available. It is no coincidence that the only CD player still produced by Naim today, the CD 5si, uses Sanyo mechanisms.

A distinctive feature of Rega CD players has always been the way the disc is loaded: since the first Planet model, there have been no motorised trays that pop out with a platter on which to place the disc. At the top of the player, there is a lid, reminiscent of the Star Trek spaceship Enterprise, which must be lifted and the disc placed by hand in the reading compartment, where the laser is also exposed. The reading system is mechanically isolated from the aluminium alloy chassis. While loading from above can be inconvenient because it requires the player to be positioned so that it has space above it, this solution eliminates several motorised parts that can break down sooner or later. This gives Rega CD players a rather original look and a touch reminiscent of analogue, as you have to place the disc on the player by hand before you can listen to it. Who knows if the similarity between the CD compartment lid and the Starship Enterprise is intentional, given that the first player was called Planet and the second Apollo (with reference to the various real space missions). Perhaps Rega wanted to tell us that their CD players are astronomically good!
And in fact, besides the original look, which may also be a reason for choosing them, the sound is truly fantastic.

When the CD tray is closed, the word ‘Initialising’ appears on the display. Thanks to over 20 MB of memory and true 32-bit processing power, the system reads all the metadata from the disc in advance, avoiding the need for real-time corrections. Rega immediately made use of new advanced chips with much higher processing power than those of the past. The digital signal is then processed by a highly respectable conversion section, centred on Wolfson WM8740 chips, the best available at the time, which perform 24-bit Delta-Sigma conversion. The analogue output section, which, together with the DAC, is largely responsible for the sound of a CD player, is entirely designed by Rega, with separate class A output stages for the two channels.

Rega products, both turntables and amplifiers, like those from Naim and Linn, are also known for favouring pce, rhythm abd timing (PRaT). At first, I didn’t understand what PRaT meant. What is the point of talking about a piece of music equipment’s ability to keep time? It’s not the device that keeps time. It’s the musicians who have to do it while they perform. I know this because I’m an amateur musician, and keeping time isn’t easy! If you make a mistake, you can hear it even on the recording. But it’s not the recorder that’s out of time! It’s you! 😉

Then I thought about it because it’s not as if all the audio reviewers had gone mad; there must be a reason why people talk about PRaT. I thought that the precise and essential construction of the circuits in these machines causes them to generate audio peaks that are so clean, precise, clear and defined that it is easier to follow the rhythm when listening. They are not “more on tempo” than others because the tempo is recorded as it is. But the tempo, i.e. the musical peaks (all the drum beats, bass, rhythm guitar…) are so finely articulated that they can be perceived very well, well isolated from the background, more so than with other systems where the peaks are there, even beautiful and full-bodied but less defined, not to the extent of high PRaT machines.

While Naim focuses almost entirely on this, Rega also offers excellent tonal balance and, above all, a naturally wider and deeper soundstage than its Naim rivals. For this reason, although the CD players from the two British manufacturers certainly perform at their best when paired with amplifiers of the same brand, Rega + Naim combinations are usually known to be successful in high-end systems, systems that certainly have a respectable sound stage, but which nevertheless tend to completely immerse the listener.

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Links Rega Apollo MK1 reviews:

https://www.stereophile.com/content/rega-apollo-cd-player-sam-tellig-march-2007

https://www.whathifi.com/rega/apollo/review

https://www.techradar.com/reviews/audio-visual/hi-fi-and-audio/cd-players-and-recorders/rega-apollo-78188/review

https://www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/rega-apollo-cd-player/

https://the-ear.net/review-hardware/classic-components-rega-apollo-cd-player/

The Rega Apollo CD Player

https://www.stereophile.com/content/rega-apollo-cd-player-measurements

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THE PAST

Cambridge Audio D500SE (2018-2026)
Meridian 506.20 (–)
Oppo DV-980H (2010-2018)
Cambridge Audio CD6 (2001-2010)
Pioneer PD-8500 Reference (1993-2001)
Philips and JVC players (1987-1992)