Company & Product Overview
Around 47 years ago, in 1973, Roy Gandy had an idea that he could make a better turntable for the money than anything else on the market. He started working on his products in his garage which funny enough, turned out to be pretty close to Rega’s factory in the UK. We suspect he had no idea back in 1973 where the company would be today, but we sure are happy he had a dream that turned into some of the very best turntables in the world. Rega tables not only have great performance but seem to last forever. Their philosophy of keeping things simple leads to designs that only need maintenance to keep on making great music. Our own in-store service department sees a Rega every few weeks that only needs a new belt and/or a replacement cartridge.
Their philosophy of keeping things simple means you will not see a new Rega model replacing the old one every year as we see from a lot of other audio companies. It is only when the Rega engineers have come up with enough new technology to make a big improvement in an existing product will we see a change. We love this philosophy as you never have to wonder if the new model is really better. If Rega comes out with a replacement model, you can bet your whole vinyl collection, it’s a big step up!
We’ve seen this happen with the Rega lineup over the last several years with all of the Rega tables getting a big tech update that resulted in much-improved performance. When Rega moved the RP8 up to the Planar 8, they actually took much of what they learned from their 40th anniversary $45,000 Naiad turntable. This model was a big step up over the RP8 and still amazes us at how great it sounds for its cost.
With the Planar 8 on the market, we had been wondering when the last model in the series, the RP10, would get a facelift and as you might guess, we were not surprised to hear about an upcoming Planar 10. After being on the market for 5 years, Rega had enough new tech around to give it a big upgrade in performance.
