The Rega website simply says;
"New styling September 2018
Housed within our latest half width custom designed case to give it a fresh new look and match the range are two entirely separate, high performance phono stages. One fully adjustable, dedicated moving coil and one moving magnet. Each stage is designed and engineered to maximise the potential of your vinyl system whilst remaining easy to use and set up."
If it was anything other than just the case, I'm sure it would have been called 'Aria Mk2' and Rega would have announced it as an 'improved and better sounding' revision.
After all, they have done this on their website, in respect of the Fono MM being Mk3 from Mk2 and also the Fono Mini A2D now being Mk2.
Its would seem logical, therefore, to announce any sonic improvements to the Aria
The video is from early 2017 and I don't remember when the Aria was first introduced?
Agreed. Some person on the Rega facebook site was talking some nonsense about Rega changing some internal parts which have led to a sonic improvements. He said that Roy Gandy confirmed this on a recent Michael Fremer video visiting the Rega factory. I watched the video and nothing of that sort was mentioned. Actually Roy said that they actually didn't want to put both a MM?MC in the same box for obvious sonic reasons but that's what the market wanted.
There is no sonic compromise in putting an MC stage in the same box as an MM stage.... It would be pretty bizarre to have two completely separate stages in one box though!
Which the Rega does!
Nope it just has separate input stages according to some bumpf I just looked at. This gets around the issue I outlined above. The cheapo Cambridge Audio 640P (and all it's derivatives) does the same thing but very badly. When I make these into Arkless 640P's I remove all this and make one much better stage, switchable for MM and MC. At this price point a switchable stage done well can be much better than dedicated input stages done crap!
To quote Rega: "Housed within our latest half width custom designed case to give it a fresh new look and match the range are two entirely separate, high performance phono stages. One fully adjustable, dedicated moving coil and one moving magnet. Each stage is designed and engineered to maximise the potential of your vinyl system whilst remaining easy to use and set up."
Something I looked at said it was just separate input stages and this is what I would expect. It would be pointless having separate circuitry after the input stages as it would just be duplicating. I assume there is only one output rather than MM out and MC out?