Rega DAC Black

REGA DAC BLACK

The Rega DAC maxes the music within your digital audio.

Rega is world-known for making some of the most musical audio gear available - be it analog or digital. As usual, Rega took their sweet time to develop a DAC (digital to analog converter) that maximizes the sound quality potential of digital audio. Coax, Digital and USB inputs are provided.

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 optimize 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 aluminum 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.

Technology
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 reference 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 minimized 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 micro controller, 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.

Reviews
The Rega DAC - Positive Feedback Issue 53
A New $1,000 Benchmark - Tone Audio Review No.34