April 2024
Rega Research Limited is a name audiophiles know, especially vinyl lovers. They hold Rega’s turntables and tonearms in high esteem, but the company’s speakers, CD players, amplifiers, and other gear have also received glowing reviews. The company is known for both quality and value, and for products that embody elegant design and musicality.
I recently interviewed Roy Gandy, the co-founder and owner of Rega. I prepared for the interview by gathering information from the company’s website and got an even clearer picture of his life and accomplishments when I read A Vibration Measuring Machine, a well-written and beautifully illustrated book about Rega. The book gets its title from Gandy’s description of a turntable’s primary function.
After talking with Gandy and reading about him, I found myself reminded of something Les Paul said in a documentary on PBS in 2009. When he was a boy, Paul realized that he looked at the world in a unique way. If someone in his family switched on a light, they were satisfied when the light bulb glowed and light filled the room. Les Paul wanted to know what sequence of events created that glowing light.
Roy Gandy has always had that same curiosity. As he says in A Vibration Measuring Machine, “I think that engineering just happened to be something necessary in my life.” When he was two, he was frustrated that he couldn’t repair a broken toy sand-tipper. When he was seven, he had to repair and maintain a bicycle so he could get to school. “If I was late three times a year I was caned,” he says in the book. “You couldn’t say your bike broke down.” As a teen, Gandy built a motorcycle from “a shed full of bits.”
Gandy uses those examples and others as points along the way that led to his becoming an engineer. He was born in 1945 in Sri Lanka, but his family moved to England when he was a year old. A Vibration Measuring Machine tells his family’s fascinating story in detail. It’s clear that the interests and abilities that showed themselves at a young age continue to define him. Engineers ask the important questions that drive innovators like Les Paul and Roy Gandy: How do things work? How can I improve them?
Music is another important thread in Gandy’s life, and vinyl lovers can be thankful that he has used his talents in the service of high-fidelity music reproduction, especially vinyl playback. “I’ve always been interested in music,” he told me when I asked what moved him in the direction of audio. “My mother was an exceptionally competent pianist. She was a member of the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music, and not just a member. She was a licentiate of both bodies.
“My father was a self-taught operatic singer. He was the complete opposite to my mother, who was a wonderful, truly honest, hardworking person. He was effectively a con man. He’d forged his teaching certificate, he forged his driving license, but he was highly competent. I remember he had a beautiful voice. He could sing operatic arias in a way that most people couldn’t tell if it was [Beniamino] Gigli or other operatic tenors that he could copy exactly. I was told by my mother that he’d been on a couple of radio programs with people trying to guess if it was him or the singer he was copying.”
When Gandy was seven, his father left the family and Gandy’s mother raised him and his sister. When he was in his teens, his mother began a trip around the world that lasted three years. “I was left with an older group of teachers in her house. One of them had a hi-fi system and a huge classical music collection. And for two years, I used to get up on Sunday morning and stumble down and put his records on and listen. It was just absolute bliss, but I didn’t know it at the time because it was just what was there. I got married at 23 and left home and woke up and, ‘Where’s the music?’”
I asked Gandy about his education, and he began by telling me about an experience that helped him prepare for his later academic life. “I was fortunate enough to have a friend at school whose father was a highly competent electro-mechanical genius, and he was very much into the concepts of thinking. If we go back to the ’60s, that was the beginning of the concept of parallel thinking. One of the things that appeared at the time was intelligence tests, the idea that every single person had a fixed intelligence quotient which couldn’t be altered. And he was questioning this.
“He experimented on us. He literally tested six of us at the beginning and then we did intelligence tests every day for I think it was six months. At the end of it we’d all gone from a little bit higher than average to the Mensa level, which I think was 144.”
A few years later, around the time Gandy got married, he was enrolled in a program sponsored by the Ford Motor Company in England that enabled people to study to become engineers. “Their entrance exams were IQ tests,” he explained to me. “And I managed to get involved. And having gone through that [the earlier experience with IQ tests], I passed easily. In fact, I passed so well that they were suspicious.
“The idea was to become a chartered engineer. It was a four-year course, but then Rega took over and I never got time to join the Institute of Chartered Engineers, which was called the Institute of Mechanical Engineers then. I’m not very good at joining. I’m a bit like the Marx Brothers. So, I’m a fully qualified engineer, if I was to bother to go through the joining.”
Gandy was married, working for Ford, and in training to be an engineer. He had a small record collection but no way to play it. A Vibration Measuring Machine gives some history of hi-fi in England at the time: “Roy’s dilemma lay in the fact that inexpensive music reproduction systems were widely available, but were largely poor quality, while those systems of an acceptable quality were prohibitively expensive.”
“I couldn’t afford the equipment,” he told me, “so I started to build it. I built motorbikes and cars, so loudspeakers were relatively simple.” A Vibration Measuring Machine recounts an important step in Gandy’s hi-fi journey. A friend’s father, John Chesney, was head of Ford’s instrumentation department. Gandy was reading an article about building an integrated amplifier and showed it to Chesney, who read the article and then asked Gandy, “Why do you want to do this?”
After some more questions from Chesney, who also remarked on the time and effort that learning about electronics and making an amp would require, Gandy realized that “resistors and capacitors are not what interests me.” Chesney gave him some books by Gilbert Briggs, who in 1933 established Wharfedale Speakers, a venerable English brand that is still well loved by audiophiles. Gandy read the books and built his first pair of speakers. He hooked them up to an old valve amplifier and a turntable from a radiogram, what on our side of the pond is called a hi-fi console, and was finally able to play his record collection.
A Vibration Measuring Machine presents that first attempt somewhat modestly: “It transpired, more through luck than design according to Roy, that his early speakers were an enormous success. The drivers he bought just happened to fit the cabinets that came from the book, and the concrete slabs that he used for construction turned out to be the correct size by some chance, and these speakers produced a quite respectable, if not spectacular sound.”
“As soon as I built loudspeakers, friends wanted to buy them,” he recalled during our discussion. “And then I got involved in supplying them with amplifiers and turntables.” Interest in hi-fi was beginning to grow in England and elsewhere in the late ’60s, but there were few dealers at the time. Gandy noticed that turntables he ordered for friends often arrived damaged. “I used to repair them before selling them to my friends and very naively thought, ‘It’s going to be easier to make one from scratch.’ It wasn’t anything about sound quality at the beginning. It was about reliability.”
Most ’tables in the late ’60s, such as the Goldring Lenco GL79, used a rubber idler wheel that ran along the inside of the platter. They were noisy to begin with and became more so as the idler wheel hardened. The Swiss manufacturer Thorens introduced a belt-driven turntable in the mid-1960s, but, as Gandy points out on Rega’s website, “the arm offended what was, by then, my well-developed engineering sensibilities. The arm was generally fragile, resonant and the bearings broke easily and the suspension prompted the arm to jump at the slightest footfall.”
Gandy tried his hand at improving turntables then available, including a Sugden Connoisseur that he found in a garbage dump. The UK-manufactured Connoisseur was available until the mid-1970s. Gandy took the bearing and platter from the turntable and mounted them on a chipboard plinth. He cut a piece of Formica to cement onto the plain aluminum platter to make it more attractive and discovered it made the turntable sound better. He tried other materials on the plinth, with varying results. Rega 50x 33 and a Third, a video celebrating Rega’s 50th anniversary, includes a description of his work on that first turntable.
At this point, around 1970 or 1971, Gandy was still building a turntable strictly for his own use. The Connoisseur motor was too big for the ’table he was developing, but a turntable model then getting attention and awards for design, David Gammon’s Transcriptors Reference, used one that was smaller and quieter, and Gandy was able to get hold of one. The completed turntable platter Gandy fashioned included alloy pillars that supported the LP, which was also an idea adapted from the Transcriptors Reference. A friend machined the platter so it could be belt driven.
As interest in high fidelity grew, so did publications that catered to it. Hi-Fi Sound, a British magazine, did a monthly feature on readers’ sound systems, and in February 1972 had a look at Gandy’s. He was using a Leak amplifier and a Truvox tuner, but he had made the turntable and speakers. He was able to purchase the Leak because of money he made from selling hi-fi gear and from making and selling speakers. He continued exploring ways to improve his speakers, especially by using lighter materials.
He also moved forward with developing a turntable he could sell to his customers, and his early emphasis was on durability and reliability. He pointed out to me that at the time, no one was giving thought to the effect components could have on music playback. “People would listen to loudspeakers to make a choice, but the idea of listening to an amplifier or a turntable was anathema. The accepted wisdom was a turntable just needed to go around accurately. There was no concept of a turntable having an effect on sound quality.
“And I wasn’t involved in that, either, at the beginning,” he continued. “It was what would break, what was easy, what looked nice. But once I got started in it, the feeling of sound quality grew. The Connoisseur BD1 was a kit turntable—people put it together themselves. It was half the price of the Thorens, but the people that made one were finding, ‘Hang on, everything’s sounding much richer. Why was the Connoisseur so nice, but the systems with Thorens ’tables didn’t sound as good?’ I started to develop these controversial feelings that turntables would affect the sound quality of a system.
“When I started making turntables, I didn’t have the confidence to push that,” he went on. In time, his natural curiosity and desire to improve sound quality would define his work with turntables. A Vibration Measuring Machine describes his methods for testing his ideas: “When you’re making something at low volume of five or six at a time, you can change it very quickly when it’s not working quite as well as you’d like. When friends own the products, you’ve got immediate access to them. You can say, ‘Can I have your turntable back? I’ve got something better for you.’ It’s a normal development process.”
As I noted earlier, Gandy’s first turntable had used his adaptation of the Transcriptors Reference ’table’s pillars to hold the LP above the platter. For his new turntable, Gandy settled on a platter consisting of three outrigger points around a center hub. He described the outriggers to me as “little discs that looked quite spectacular.” Trial and error led to the development of the materials that would work best for this outrigger/hub design, including the bearings that would be needed for the platter to spin steadily and quietly.
His experiments with his first ’table also led him to the conclusion that lighter materials for the plinth resulted in less vibration transfer and, therefore, less noise. He began to question the conventional wisdom at the time, which was that a heavier plinth led to a reduction in motor-hum transfer and other background noise. As Gandy points out in Rega 50x 33 and a Third, “In making a heavy plinth, it became obvious that I was just creating a way of transferring the hum from the motor even more loudly into the rotating turntable and into the record.”
Gandy noticed that lighter materials not only reduced noise transferred through the turntable itself but also led to improved sound overall. The solution was a chipboard plinth, with a laminated top and sides. Most turntable plinths at the time, including those on Thorens and Goldring units, used a spring-loaded suspension system on a wooden or plastic base. More moving parts on a turntable lead to more potential unwanted sources for noise that can travel to the stylus and be played back through the speakers. Even later ’tables in the ’70s, such as those by Pioneer and Technics, had hollow plastic plinths. Current turntables now use solid plinths, made of materials similar to those Gandy used for his design.
When it came time to choose a motor, Gandy went with one manufactured by Philips and marketed in the UK by Impex. The motor was designed for use in pinball machines, but Gandy made adjustments to other aspects of the turntable, such as the pulley and center hub, to adapt the motor for his use. It ran quieter and vibrated less than other turntable motors in production. Another challenge was how to mount the motor in the turntable in a manner that would minimize or eliminate noise traveling through the plinth. Gandy first tried mounting the motor underneath the plinth using an O-ring for suspension. After further experimentation, he made some modifications that allowed for the O-ring suspension but gave the motor more stability.
Given the turntable’s unique design, with the outriggers circling around a central hub, it made sense to name it the Planet. The Planet was popular with Gandy’s friends, who were hi-fi enthusiasts, but he was eager to extend his reach. He contacted an audio dealer in Southend named Tony Relph, who owned a couple of shops. Relph agreed to add the Planet to his stock, and soon suggested that he and Gandy form a company that would manufacture the turntable. They took the first two letters from their surnames and in July 1973 formed Rega Research Limited.
Relph had some space above one of his shops and he and Gandy set it up as a space to assemble Planet turntables. Relph’s mother had been a solderer for an electronics firm and worked on the wiring and motor assemblies. Gandy was still at Ford, and came to Rega’s space in the evenings to polish bearings and attend to other aspects of final assembly.
At first, people who wanted a Planet could request their own tonearm. Soon, Gandy wanted to give the Planet a tonearm that would work best with his overall design. He heard about a company in London named Cosmocord that was importing a tonearm from Japan called the Acos Lustre and was looking for a way to market it. Gandy made some changes to the arm and added it to his turntable. Cosmocord distributed the turntables as the Acos Rega Planet.
By the end of 1973, sales of the Planet were picking up and Gandy had left Ford. Rega moved into a larger space so it could meet increased demand, and also began to build relationships with distributors to increase their visibility and sales in other European countries. The Acos Rega Planet soon began selling briskly.
The Planet’s appearance made it appealing, but Gandy knew it could be improved. “If you make something that’s very spectacular,” he said during our interview, “you get a few people that love it, but it very much limits your market. But at the time, it meant that we could sell one to three hundred a month. That allowed me to start experimenting with sound quality. I had a growing feeling of using my abilities as an engineer to understand what was happening.”
A turntable’s function, Gandy continued, is “actually measuring the vibration in the record. And if you’re measuring very, very fine levels of vibration, then, of course, the turntable is enormously important. I started to realize it wasn’t the sound you were getting; it was the sound you were losing. It was being lost within the turntable, with bits moving and vibrating. So as an engineer I think, ‘Let’s make them move less.’”
Less movement started with rethinking the platter. Gandy was confident that the plinth he had designed for the Planet was fine, but the platter for the Planet didn’t sufficiently support an LP—and that led to extraneous vibration. He tried an aluminum platter for his new ’table, which he named the Planar. Rega introduced the Planar in 1975 and made 200 before deciding on glass as a better material because of its stiffness. Rega introduced the Planar 3 in 1976. It had a glass platter and a wool mat.
The tonearm on the Planar 3 was the modified version of the Acos Lustre, now renamed the Rega R200. Gandy wanted to develop his own tonearm and concluded it would be most effective if it had a minimum number of joints, or, as it says in A Vibration Measuring Machine, “ideally, none at all.” He worked with a Japanese manufacturer for five years with no success. He continued working on the project when Rega moved to a bigger manufacturing facility in 1982.
One area of frustration with tonearms at the time for Gandy was the use of a removable headshell to mount a cartridge. For the cartridge to be at the correct angle to track a record properly, the tonearm had to use an S-curve design. Gandy thought a single-piece straight arm with the required cartridge angle at the end would require fewer materials, be more rigid, and dramatically reduce the number of joints involved.
Gandy’s new arm would also use a new bearing assembly. Most ’tables, even today, use a gimbal or unipivot method that allows for some play in the pivot point. Rega employs a unique tracking approach using separate vertical and horizontal bearings that work together in a more rigid assembly with zero play.
After a few tries at making the prototype tonearm in-house, Gandy heard about a talented tool maker named Ken Palmer. Palmer worked with the schematic Gandy provided and soon had a tonearm machined from solid aluminum for him to test. Pleased with the results, Gandy started to look for a company that could make the tonearm. Several firms told him it wouldn’t be possible to produce it as designed, but Gandy finally found a manufacturer, Morris Ashby Castings, that was willing to meet the challenge.
In 1983, Rega introduced the RB300 tonearm—the “B” designated that the arm was British-made—and Rega’s turntables would include their own tonearm from then on. The RB300 was also successful as a standalone tonearm customers could buy to install on other turntables. With few exceptions, tonearms today no longer have detachable headshells, largely because of Gandy’s work on the RB300.
At the same time he was working on a new tonearm, Gandy was also thinking that Rega should have its own cartridge as an option for customers. He examined several cartridges from Japanese manufacturers and chose the best characteristics from each to commission the R100, which Rega began marketing in 1980. It was an unexpected success, but staff at Rega soon lobbied for the company to manufacture its own cartridge domestically. Gandy first collaborated with Goldring, an established British cart maker, to develop the RB100, which Rega introduced in 1985.
The RB100 was not as successful as its predecessor, and Gandy and his team went back to the drawing board. They developed new methods for wiring their cartridges, which A Vibration Measuring Machine describes: “All cartridge coils, when manufactured in quantity need to be fashioned by an automatic coil winding machine using tiny plastic bobbins. Achieving the voltage output needed using conventional techniques involves a large number of turns on the bobbin, and the resulting coil has excessive resistance creating unwanted electrical issues, a problem that exists throughout the cartridge world. So a process was developed where Rega could wind wire directly onto a pole bar, bypassing the bobbin entirely, reaching the desired output with less than half the length of wire, thereby making the whole generator more efficient.” Rega’s method also reduces cartridge mass significantly.
Rega introduced the Elys and Bias cartridges in 1987, along with the RB78, a mono cart for 78-rpm playback. One notable aspect of the Elys was its three-point mounting system. Rega tonearms have three installation screw points for the cartridge, which allows for easier, more accurate alignment. Rega currently markets eight cartridges, four of them moving-coil models.
Rega’s moving-magnet cartridges are unique because, except for the entry-level Carbon (about $75, all prices USD), the styli aren’t replaceable. The cartridge is a single piece, with no removable parts. As Gandy explained to me during our interview, “We identified many years ago something that prevented sound quality improving was the replaceable stylus concept on the moving magnet. This gives you a lot of little joints. It means everything has to be wider apart, the pole bars have to be wider apart to fit the replaceable stylus. That means you have to have more turns of wire to get enough output. More turns of wire means you roll off the frequency response earlier.
“We made a cartridge where the cantilever was fixed,” he continued. “Not everybody wants that. They believe it would be nice to be able to replace the stylus, but in reality, they can last for ten years. And with moving-coil cartridges, you don’t have a replaceable stylus anyway.”
I’ve long played my styli for more hours than recommended by cartridge manufacturers, who generally say a stylus is good for a maximum of 2000 hours of play. I still replace my styli every three years or so, and I wondered if that was necessary. Simon Webster, Rega’s sales and marketing coordinator, had joined us for part of the interview and responded: “Who honestly keeps track of how many thousands of hours they’ve played their music for? I’ve never met anyone who knows. There’s a lot of smoke and mirrors going on in that part of the world.
“For me it’s quite simple,” he went on. “If I ever hear a very old worn cartridge that’s seen a lot of use and played a lot of dirty vinyl, it’s the top end that seems to dull down.” He suggests that listeners can use their own hearing to determine if a stylus is worn. He pointed out that he’s used the same stylus on a magnetic cartridge for 13 years.
Beginning in 1980, Rega returned to the loudspeaker market with a floorstanding speaker, the RTX, but a lack of manufacturing space led to limited expansion in that market. By the late ’80s, Gandy was eager to introduce an affordable, high-quality speaker. Rega’s Ela speaker appeared in 1990 and at first was produced in a factory in Denmark, but demand rose and Rega moved its speaker manufacturing closer to home. Gandy decided that his company needed to build its own drivers to ensure higher reliability and quality. Rega has introduced several models over the years and currently makes three speakers: a bookshelf speaker, Kyte, and two floorstanding speakers, the RS10 and the AYA. It makes its own bass and midrange drivers and designs its own tweeters.
A friend from Gandy’s school days approached him in the late ’80s about an amplifier design he was working on. The amplifier needed more work, though Gandy and his staff thought it sounded great. Rega funded an additional year of work on the amp, but Gandy’s friend could not iron out the problems that were keeping the amp from going into production. Rega hired Terry Bateman, who had worked for a company that made PA systems and recording equipment, as an electrical engineer. Bateman was excited about the amp’s possibilities and was able to perfect it. In 1990, Rega introduced the Elicit MK1 integrated amplifier. The company has continued to include amplifiers in its product line and currently makes six.
Bateman was also instrumental in helping Rega develop a CD player that would be consistent with its goals of musicality and durability. Sony had approached Rega with an offer to use the larger company’s CD development kits. Bateman created an exceptionally musical CD player that Rega christened the Planet, resurrecting an important name in Gandy’s history. The audio press was near unanimous in its praise, and Rega continues to make CD players. There are three models in the current lineup. All of them use a bespoke CD solution of Rega’s own design.
On the pure electronics side, Gandy defers to Rega’s electronics engineers, especially Bateman. “I have no input into the design of amplifiers. That is not my field,” he told me in our interview. Gandy does have a say in speaker design but collaborates with someone who handles the electronics aspects. “Loudspeakers are essentially mechanical, and with the loudspeakers Rega has produced, I’m usually involved with at least one other person. If we need a more complex crossover, [an electrical engineer] is much more adept at calculating that. The input I can offer is asking questions or giving direction.”
Rega’s philosophy of audio is stated in the brief historical outline on its webpage: “From day one every Rega product has been designed to achieve the best musical performance and deliver a lifetime of musical enjoyment at an affordable price.” That attitude, it seems to me, was formed by Gandy’s approach to perfecting vinyl playback, and carries through to its other products.
So central are turntables to Rega that the second section of A Vibration Measuring Machine, “Book Two: The Engineering,” is a detailed explanation of the working parts of a turntable. The functions of the plinth, motor, platter, main bearing, tonearm, and so on are carefully explained, along with how Rega has approached each of them in making its turntables. If you want to know the anatomy of your turntable, even one not made by Rega, the 78 pages in “Book Two” are where you can turn.
My favorite section in “Book Two” is titled “Myths,” and takes on the many assumptions that have arisen about turntables over the years. Gandy disputes the need to worry about vertical tracking angle (“fiddling around with VTA is entirely futile”). He also discusses platter materials, tonearm wiring, bias compensation (i.e., antiskate), and other areas of turntable design and performance.
When Gandy and I spoke, I asked him about such aftermarket enhancements as record clamps. “Anything you add to a turntable will change the sound,” he explained. “Now, we’re not saying they might not work on all other manufacturer’s designs, but Rega, absolutely not. Why would you add mass to a turntable that we’ve spent three or four years designing to have as little mass as possible? We would love it if people just enjoyed the product as is because we feel that the Planar 3, for example, is already as good as it can be at the price.”
Rega has continued over the years to refine its turntables, and to introduce new, even more innovative models. In 1995, the company introduced the Planar 9, which used a ceramic platter for reduced resonance, a new bearing design to handle the additional weight of the platter, and an external power supply. With the Planar 9, Rega also introduced a new tonearm, the RB900, which used higher-specification bearings with a greater preload to ensure very low friction and no play in the arm.
Rega has made improvements to its turntable motor, now employing a 24V low-noise motor that has very little vibration and allows for speed changes without moving the platter belt. Older ’tables can be retrofitted with the new motor. Rega has also made significant changes to its drive belt that give it greater speed accuracy and stability, and longer life.
The Planar 9 moved Rega into the high-end turntable market, costing $2600 when it was introduced in 1995 (about $4900 in today’s dollars). The company now has ten turntables in its lineup, ranging in price from $600 for the Planar 1 to around $13,000 for the Naia turntable ($17,000 if you buy it with the Rega Aphelion 2 MC cartridge).
All Rega’s ’tables are the culmination of the company’s 50 years of turntable research. Even the affordable Planar 1 uses Gandy’s discoveries on plinth materials and tonearm design to make it one of the most impressive ’tables in its price range. The Planar 1 is a significant upgrade of the P1, the budget turntable Rega introduced in 2005 to serve the entry-level market that other manufacturers, many using Rega’s ideas, had captured. The MDF platter on the earlier Planar 1 has given way to one made of phenolic resin, which is even more rigid and stable, and there are many other enhancements to the original.
In contrast to some manufacturers whose high-end turntables are large and imposing in appearance, Rega’s flagship models, the Planar 8, Planar 10, and Naia, are elegantly designed and compact. Their plinths are minimalist and low-mass but rigid, with the materials becoming more esoteric and advanced as the price increases, and with increased ability to prevent unwanted noise. The tonearms are also more advanced as the price of the ’tables increases, but, again, designed with the goal of pulling as much detail as possible from every LP.
Rega’s tonearms, even the one on the modestly priced Planar 1, are hand-assembled, and all the company’s products are designed to give listeners the best performance at each price point—and many years of use. Roy Gandy’s ideas about turntable design, especially plinth materials, have set the standard in the industry. Pro-Ject, Music Hall, U-Turn, and Mobile Fidelity all show the influence of Rega’s designs and materials.
There are quite a few companies that market upgrades for Rega’s turntables, but as I noted in my article about turntable tweaks and upgrades, Rega discourages fooling with what they’ve worked hard to achieve. Rega has made adjustments here and there to its products when it found they led to improvements, and will no doubt continue to do so. The company’s plant in Essex employs about 130 people, large enough to meet demand, but small enough to keep an eye on production and give a bespoke level of attention to even its entry-level products. After more than 50 years, the quest to give audio lovers high-quality audio at a good value is still Rega’s mission.
. . . Joseph Taylor
josepht@soundstagenetwork.com
