Pink Noise

REGA DAC

Diapason Avril 2011 : comparatif
Rega DAC (675€). Qualité musicale : 6 étoiles. Points faibles : aucun.
Meridian Soloos MC200 (2850€) : 5 étoiles. Restitution manquant un peu de résolution.
3DLAB Master (1250€) : 5 étoiles. Points faibles : léger manque de matière.
Moon 100D (555€) : 5 étoiles. Points faibles : musicalité un peu en retrait.
Restek MDAC+ (1500€) 5 étoiles. Points faibles : tendance à l'intimisme.
M2Tech Young (1090€) : 5 étoiles.. Points faibles : petites duretés de caractère numérique.
Arcam rDAC (390€) : 4 étoiles. Points faibles : résolution un peu insuffisante entraînant une impression très " numérique ". Différenciation des timbres un peu sommaire.
Marantz NA7004 (890€) : 4 étoiles. Points faibles : restitution un peu insuffisante.
Lector Digitube (1399€) : 4 étoiles. Points faibles : tendance à la coloration/extraversion.

Extrait de "Positive Feedback, february 2011" :
Sur PC, en USB, le Rega sonne très musical et plus chaud que le Ayre QB-9 et le DCS Debussy. Avec l'interface Diverter et le Rega, pour la première fois, la musique venant de l'ordinateur sonne comme de la musique. En retournant au DCS, la magie avait disparu.
Le SACD sur le Ayre 5xeMP est moins bon que la piste CD rippée et le DAC Rega !
Même l'entrée SPIF du DCS Debussy est inférieure à celle du Rega.
Sur le disque de Herbie Hancock, face à l'ensemble CEC TL-0 et DAC Audio Note 4.1x (32.000€…), j'ai préféré l'équilibre légèrement plus chaud du Rega, musicalement plus engageant.


Finitions : noir ou silver.

Prix : 649 €

The Rega DAC is a 16/20/24-bit at 32kHz to 192kHz digital to analogue converter incorporating an enhanced version of the Rega designed circuit. Developed to be simple to set up and use, the Rega DAC is designed to optimise performance from any two channel PCM digital audio source such as a CD player PC or streaming device.

With the PC/Laptop and MAC now widely accepted as creditable mediums for storing and streaming music. The use of high quality lossless files such as WAV, FLAC and ALAC offer performance through the DAC equal to and in some cases better than red book CD.

Housed in a custom aluminium and steel case and boasting a pair of Wolfson DAC IC's, 5 user selectable digital filters, two isolated Co-axial inputs, two Toslink SPDIF inputs and an isolated USB input. The Rega DAC is designed and engineered to perform way above its class.

The input stage comprises a Wolfson digital receiver with a high stability low jitter clock. The receiver and PLL have their own dedicated power supplies. The DAC stage comprises of a pair of parallel-connected Wolfson WM8742 DAC's, which are driven via a buffer stage, which ensures the integrity of the data being fed to the DAC IC's similar to the arrangement used in the Isis (Rega's refrerence CD player). Great care has been taken to remove noise generated by the PC and other input sources. During development this was identified as a major drawback with many DAC's on the market today.

The output amplifier employs a discrete differential multiple feedback filter and output amplifier, with a high cut-off frequency for use with higher sample rates. We decided not to use a sample rate converter and process the data at the incoming sample rate which keeps the signal processing to a minimum. Jitter was minimised by synchronously clocking the digital data with our receiver PLL (removing any jitter from the input signal).

All the capacitors associated with the analogue signal path are Nichicon FG bypassed with MMK polyester capacitors, and low impedance conductive polymer capacitors are used for DAC decoupling. The power supply utilizes a toroidal transformer, fast rectifier diodes and again Nichicon FG capacitors. There is a power supply for the control microcontroller, separate from the digital & analogue audio stages. Special attention being paid to the inter IC control signals ensuring the control data noise is kept to a minimum.