[BlackCat]

I have a new Rega Planet CD player.  It was playing just fine at all volumes when I had it hooked up to a crumby Adcom Pre-Amp.  When I got a new pre-amp (Monolithic Audio PA-1), the Rega all of a sudden started mistracking badly at high volume playing, worsening towards the inside tracks.  The Rega is on a marble slab with Final Labs isolation doo-hickeys under it, with a 25 pound bag of lead shot right next to it.  Anyone have any idea what gives?  Should I send it back to Rega for "repair"?  It never did this before I changed pre-amps, but I sure can't see any reason why a pre-amp would cause this...coincidence or something more sinister?  Suggestions welcome.

[JoshK]

Try taking it off the isolation platform or putting a slab of wood under the player.  The reason I say this is because my first guess is that maybe instead of dispelling vibration your isolation platform is channelling vibration into your player.

Ah....another thing to check.  I didn't see that your preamp was a passive at first.  Check the input impedance of your amp.  Check the output impedance of your player.  Maybe at high volume your player has too much strain driving the load.

[tkp]

It has nothing to do with your preamp.  My Rega Planet skipped intermittently about a year after I bought it.  I sent it back to Rega for repair but they kept saying that there were nothing wrong with it and sent the unit back to me un-repair.  

The unit continues to skip until this day.  I debugged the problem and narrow it down to the metal ring underneath the hood that is used to hold the CD in place while the CD is playing.  It is a design flaw and I cannot fix it.  This metal ring is attached to the hood via the plastic piece that spin along with the CD.  You can see it spins while the CDP is playing.  The attachment is an accident waiting to happen.  Over time the metal ring came loose and will not centered on the CD when the hood is closed.  As a result the CD will not spin symetrically and intermittent skipping will occur.

[BlackCat]

l can see the problem occuring with wear on that metal ring, but this Planet is practically brand new...probably less than 80 hours playing time on it.  The problem is definently volume related.  Playing a particularly brash and bassy track (The Cult - Wildflower), I can make it skip and stop skipping simply by using the volume control, turn it up to 11 o'clock, it skips like crazy, down a skootch, it plays.  It is in a VERY hard room, tile floors, no carpet, little furniture.  I'm going to try the piece of wood, and maybe some sand bags underneath it.  If that doesn't work, it's going back to Rega.  Thanks for your suggestions, if it plays this badly with the old Adcom GFA-555 it's hooked up to now, my new Odyssey mono-blocks will probably only make it worse.

[tkp]

Blackcat,

My unit was not used much when the problem occurred.  I experienced the same thing as you are.  It started with the player skipped intermittently at high volume and I thought vibration was the caused of the problem so I did very thing I could to isolate the player from the shelf it was on and even damping the interconnect between the player and the preamp.  The problem seemed to minimized for about a month and then came back.  It has nothing to do with the plastic being wore out but more with the type of glue that was used to glue the metal ring to the plastic piece.  I took it apart and found out that the glue dried up and the plastic piece was skipping while the whole thing spin.  This was the cause of the problem on my unit (yours might be some thing else but it sounded too similar).  Any way, I tried to glue the metal ring back to the plastic piece but was not very sucessful at all.  If your player is new, I would send it back to Rega for repair before it too late.