Rega P1 With Rega Carbon Cartridge, $595

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There’s a wide world of cheap, plastic Chinese turntables out there trying to grab your interest. If you’re jumping into record playing for the first time, or returning to the hobby, please don’t fall for a rumbling pile of bolts/plastic. Listening to records through this noisy hail storm will much diminish your enjoyment of this uber mechanical medium.

Instead, please buy an English built, Rega Planar One from us. It is made with serious attention to playing records well at a great price.

A record has zillions of undulations within its grooves. You want your stylus to trace those very specific hills and valleys as precisely as possible. Any extraneous vibration from the record playing mechanics will distort and take away from the music itself.

Think of it this way. Your friend is driving the car. You’re sitting shotgun trying to write a letter with a piece of paper on the dash ahead of you while the car is moving. It will be very difficult to write anything legible with all that vibration going on. It will be impossible to write meticulously. THIS…is the equivalent task of playing records.

We need to kill the outside world of vibration. We need to make sure the mechanical vibrations of the record playing machine itself won’t interfere with the musical vibrations of your album. We start from the agreement that nothing is perfect. Achieving the “absolute” is impossible.

Our goal is to attain excellent performance with an eye on the point of diminishing returns.

We don’t care that Mr Fancy Reviewer thinks a $500k table/arm/cartridge is better than one for $350k. We want people who work for a living to find a satisfying record playing system that’s better than punched out contraptions from China. Rega has the answer.

Belt Drive

We need to start with belt drive or all is lost. If you play a piano on a direct drive table, the smearing is omnipresent. Direct drives are ringing all the time. There’s no quietude between the notes to allow us to properly hear piano hammers striking individual cords. All Regas are, of course, belt drives. Planar 1 comes with Rega’s Ebelt. Rega does offer a cut above Reference belt with higher precision manufacturing prowess for $75. The Ref belt is worth $75 IF you get the Ortofon cartridge described lower in this article. If you run the Carbon, the Ebelt is high enough up the totem pole.

Brass Well

We need a brass well for the spindle/bearing housing. Regas use brass wells, or chambers, for the ball bearing to spin with as little friction as possible. Stamped aluminum or Teflon have less smooth surfaces and add vibration to what your stylus reads.

Finely Machined Bearings

Rega is constantly comparing materials and machining processes to attain ball bearings that are ground with such precision that we don’t hear them chugging along as they play. While we agree that nothing can be perfect, Rega bearings spin with far less friction than the mass produced Chinese alternatives.

Rega uses similarly tight QC in the bearings within its tonearms. There’s no such thing as a perfect record. Watch your arm move with any LP. It will have some manner of up/down and left/right. It’s a very mechanical system. Rega’s tonearms use their high tolerance bearings to allow their arms to come close to floating with the record as its being traced.

Tone Arm Construction

Rega arms are made of extruded aluminum. The walls of the arm vary in thickness to tune its resonance to where Rega wants it. There is no removable head shell to allow easy cartridge changing. While that can be fun, removable shells compromise sound quality due to extra mass, wiring and more connections. Rega grounds within its R&L wires, you don’t need a third wire for grounding. Nice! Tonearm bias is done automatically with Rega’s magnet structure, not strings and weights.

Turntable Base

Rega tables use 3 (tripod) hefty rubber feet to provide a secure, damped platform for the MDF record playing deck. The platter is made of low resonance, phenolic resin, vs ringing metal or plastic.

Motor

Planar 1 uses an outboard, 24V motor to keep vibration OFF the plinth.

Cartridge

Rega’s Carbon cartridge is OK. They literally throw it in as a starter to get you to buy the table at a cheap price. Its output is a mundane 2.5mV.

Ortofon of Denmark makes far superior cartridges. The Ortofon Red is $100 and I would like to twist (OK, break!) your arm to put the Red on your Rega, instead of using the Carbon that comes with it for free. The Orto Red sounds much better, is physically tougher and has much higher (5.5mV) output. It’s well worth me shaking you down for $100 more.