Rega Aria phonostage touches down in Manchester....

Our very own demonstration Rega Aria Phonostage has arrived and is warming up nicely and our Brighton store have unboxed theirs, take a look at the blog right here.

Meanwhile we thought we would take a closer look around the back and under the bonnet.

As you can see there are various capacitance, resistive load settings and gain settings to match a variety of moving coil cartridges.

Terry Bateman, Rega's head designer likes to personalise the equipments pcb's with little quotes !!

There is definitely something poignant about this one !!. Nice one Terry !!

 You're the real bobby dazzler here chromy....don't you worry.

 

Our own experience of the Aria phonostage comes from the Manchester Show back in March this year. Dave Mac & Paul Darwin used it in the Audio-T room. 

Having a weekend of continuous listening and impressing the public, the Aria excelled with all genres of music.

Give us call on 0161 8398869  if you would like to listen to the Rega Aria at the Manchester store. 

For more information on the Rega Aria Phonostage you can visit the official website here.

Rega Aria Phonostage Arrives In Store!

Unveiling of the new Aria in store...

The Aria is housed in the Rega R series casework to match with their existing Apollo CD Player, Brio Amplifier and Dac and available in a black finish

The Aria is a moving magnet and moving coil phonostage in one neat box. The moving coil stage includes adjustments for resistive input loading, capacitive loading and gain enabling matching for the moving coil cartridge you use.

We were lucky enough, along with some of our customers, to have a sneak preview of this on our vinyl day here at the shop with Diverse Vinyl and were suitably impressed, so we could not wait to get our hands on our demonstration one to put it fully to the test.

So time to plug it in and spin a few records, so we will report back soon with our conclusions.

In the meantime don't just wait for our report, come in and try it for yourself and don't forget to bring your favorite album.

Update

on 2013-06-21 10:55 by Brighton

Now having had the chance to put the Aria through its paces a little more on some of our tried and trusted records, I'am pleased to say we were more than a little impressed.

Using an all Rega system composed of RP6 with Exact cartridge, Brio R amplifier and RS3 loudspeakers, we added the Aria phonostage and started to listen, we felt the performance of the Aria in this system was quite remarkable.

The Aria had a sense of space around all the instruments, enabling you to follow the tune and become immersed in what was being played. It coped incredibly well with surface noise giving an almost inky blackness to the background with no distractions from the music, with its even handed balance, great sense of timing, whether we were listening to Falla - Three Cornered Hat, a 1960s' Decca recording, through different eras and genres all the way through to the current Low - The Invisible Way album, every record just sang as if you'd recently just bought it.

The Aria has a performance you'd expect from phonostages of a much higher cost, so if you're in the market for a significant upgrade to your record playing system, we'd suggest this is a very good place to start.

Don't just take our word for it come in and have a listen for yourself.