REGA VALVE ISIS CD PLAYER BLACK

The valve Isis shares the same digital and USB sections as found in the solid state version, however, the analogue stage is valve based with passive filtering. This stage uses two military specification triple mica 5814A (ECC82/12AU7) triodes being driven by the revolutionary Wolfson WM8741 ultra high performance digital to analogue converter. The output buffer and transformer driver stage uses two ECC88 (6DJ8/6922) triodes. This, like its solid-state stablemate, is of an un-orthodox design. The design goal with this player was to keep away from the normal design approach of “let’s run it through a valve to make it sound warm”, but take advantage of industrial valve circuits to make an articulate and competent valve based CD player. Careful choice has been made for every component in the digital and the analogue signal path to ensure the integrity of the signal.

Careful design of the PCBs ensures isolation of not just the digital and analogue sections, but also the motor, display and user interface processor. All sonically critical electrolytic capacitors have been by-passed with polypropylene or polyester film capacitors.

In addition to this, large value electrolytic capacitors have also been by-passed with audio grade electrolytic capacitors. Power supply impedances in the digital to analogue converter are kept very low by the use of solid polymer capacitors. All power supplies utilise custom Rega K-Power smoothing capacitors, and fast diodes have been used throughout in power supply rectification.

The Isis uses enhanced and optimised control code for the control of the CD processor and user display; this will speed up the initialisation process by means of a tighter control interface between the user micro and CD processor.

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

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.

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.

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.

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. The USB input uses an isolated double-clocked USB interface, which permits the digital to analogue stage to be used with a computer USB interface and its own regulated power supply. The USB benefits once again from galvanic isolation from the main circuitry of the Isis player which eliminates the flow of earth currents between the CD and host computer, and eliminate computer power supply noise.

Wavelength

780 nm

Digital Sampling Frequency

44.1 kHz

Power Consumption

46 W

Dimensions (W × H × D)

434 × 112 × 350 mm

Dimension needed to operate (W × H × D)

434 × 200 × 350 mm

Weight

19.5 kg