Rega Jupitor.

The first Rega cd player I ever heard. It is a one box unit and is a toploader. Comes in black or silver and has a red display. Before I had ever seen one of these cd players I naturally assumed that it was made out of metal, it isn't! I was quite shocked that a manufacturer could charge £1098 for a piece of plastic (it looks like fisherprice!) Anyway once I had got over that little shock I got down to listening.

Now coming from a company who made their name for producing excellent turntables at very reasonable prices, I expected a lot out of this machine and on the whole it delivered. What this machine is good at is rhythm and timing, it is excellent at getting the timing just right, from top to toe it is never anything but totally coherent.

It also sounds amazingly good with recordings of lesser quality. You can put up with the worst recording you have and not lose all of your fillings in the process. It doesn't sound particularly smooth and it is certainly quite detailed but for some reason bad recording don't hurt as much as with other players.

It must be the way it handles high freqeuncys, what ever it is doing, it is doing it right! It is also good at separating the different instruments, it is easy to hear each musical strand and as such is very easy on the ear.

The sound stage is of reasonable size and the player falls towards sounding live rather than concentrating on the recording although it does not emphasize this as much as some. Tonal qualities are good, this is not the most colourful player you will ever hear but it does not sound grey either and it is neither bright or dark sounding.

So on the whole a very good cd player. Again possibly it's main problem is that it does not sound all that distinctive. You won't be immediately impressed by this player, it does not favour any particular genre so can lack the instant wow factor that other manufacturers might have.

Give it time though and you will grow to like the Rega and another plus point is that it works really well with most other products. It is what I would call a middle of the road product, a bit like a toyota, you will never find any reason to complain about this product, you could easily live with because it does absolutely nothing wrong.


Conclusion.

For the the kind of money it sold for it represented excellent value, it is not a giant killer yet it could easily be the cheapest component in a system because it's sins are of omission rather than anything it does do.

In terms of other players at this kind of money I would say that although there are machines that can beat it in specific areas, none are as complete as the Rega and I can forgive it for being made out of plastic because the performance is so good. It sounds very grown up and quite classy and is very capable with all types of music. Put simply If you want to listen to music instead of your hifi this is a very good place to start.

Ebay alert!

Still incredibly popular and have fantastic reliability. I would be happy to pay up to £400 for one of these on the basis of just how good it is!