REGA Planar 6 turntable
“Perfection is not possible” says Rega, rather disappointingly. Yet the Planar 6 gets impressively close at the price.
Rega’s entry-level decks — currently Planars 1, 2 and 3 — have been consistently a top choice for those re-entering the vinyl world with a reasonable budget. The company’s latest deck, this Planar 6, offers a jump to a higher level. You might view this as a halfway house to Rega’s reference offerings, the RP8 and RP10. But in fact it seems from the new technologies and materials here that Rega intends the Planar 6 to lead the way, rather than merely offering middle-ground for upgraders. And we found its performance to confirm this path.
Equipment
Philosophy first. You might think this looks a fairly bare-bones kind of turntable for the price of $1999 without cartridge. Some rivals offer large and solid plinths, following the thinking that high mass will create rigidity, lowering and spreading any possible resonances, rejecting external vibration.
That is not the Rega way. Rigidity yes, but not through piling on weight. Mass absorbs energy, notes Rega. Slowly-released energy adds coloration, and lost energy equals lost music. The company’s Roy Gandy [who, for declaration’s sake, once put this reviewer up overnight in his castle-like residence] settled on his engineering-based view long ago — for Rega it’s all about lightness, stiffness and bracing. It aims for the lightest possible chassis, with the stiffest possible brace. Over the years the company’s turntables have implemented this ideal to ever further levels as new materials and investment costs have allowed.
So is this approach right, and the mass-gatherers wrong? Mr Gandy certainly thinks so, even if results from both sides would suggest there are clearly merits to each approach. Some cite a car comparison — consider a Lotus versus a Mustang. Both can win races, but they offer hugely different driving experiences.
But first things first. Is the new Planar 6 a potential race-winner at all?
At first glance the light plinth looks a little plain, but closer examination shows that the dark surface is not common plastic but a Polaris HPL (high pressure laminate) which is matte grey on top, mirrored-polymer shiny along the plinth edges, which nicely matches the smoked lid when it’s down. Polaris comes from Italy’s Abet Laminati, makers of synthetic resins for (amazingly) more than 60 years, tarantellaing through the decades with a devastating dancecard of designers, most notably the Alchymia and Memphis movements
which defined modern Italian style. Its Polaris HPL is non-marking and scratch-resistant, and also follows Rega’s philosophies by exhibiting high rigidity. We are not sure which thickness of Polaris laminate Rega has selected, though we notice the 10-12mm variants make use of a phonilic resin core, a longtime favourite of Mr Gandy. As for colours, Polaris is, so far as we can ascertain, only available in shades of grey, and one of those is the standard finish here. So for now it seems there’ll be no repeat of the 2012 RP6, which arrived in Australia with a stock-challenging eight high-gloss colour options.
Between these laminate layers lies an aerospace-developed ultra-lightweight polyurethane foam core called Tancast 8. It’s the first time Rega has used this particular material, and we note that other Tancast variations are available, up to ‘Tancast 20’ at double the density of Tancast 8. But as we’ve seen, Rega is agin the density thing! If there were a Tancast 4, we suspect it would be been snapped up.
The platter has two layers — one smoked-Pilkington glass, one OptiWhite clear — bonded together so that the outer edge is thicker than the centre, thereby achieving a stability-enhancing flywheel effect without increasing the platter mass to a level which might affect the bearings. The platter is one area Rega does compromise between the requirements of stability versus mass.
“The turntable platter itself needs to be of enough weight to spin at a constant speed within the confines of the chosen bearing and motor drive system,” the company (and it reads like Mr Gandy) wrote in its RP10 manual. “Many amateur designers choose one component in a design and try to achieve an extreme in size, weight and quality. They believe that by taking one theory to its extreme, the design will become ‘perfect’. The reality of all engineering, design (and life) is that perfection is not possible. Based on this reality, Rega’s goal has always been to optimise a mixture of numerous ‘correct compromises’ thus bringing the designer nearer to the unachievable goal of perfection.”
He restated this philosophy in relation to the entire turntable in a 2013 conversation with Stereophile magazine. “The turntable is a whole,” he told UK hi-fi stalwart Steve Harris. “The cartridge, and the arm, and the turntable itself are all one measuring machine — that’s the way I like to look at it — and it measures vibration. You can’t make it perfect. There’s no such thing, in life or engineering. But you design the compromises to get the closest to perfection in a number of conflicting engineering parameters, and that’s it. That’s a turntable: a series of real-world engineering compromises.”
Underneath the platter, Rega’s “upgrade belt” is fitted as standard to the Planar 6, around the single-piece machined aluminium sub-platter and the custom drive pulley, driven by a new 24V synchronous motor which is “hand-tuned and matched” to its own Neo power supply. And again this is clear evidence of the higher levels to which the Planar 6 aspires — the off board power supply offers electronic speed change and user-adjustable fine electronic speed adjustment, something which was previously only available on the range-topping RP10. You use an Allen key to move through steps of 0.01rpm — not that Rega anticipates you needing to correct its factory-set speed, mind you, but this adjustability could allow pitch-correction when an LP has been recorded at the wrong speed, or tweaking if the speed of an LP is required to be altered to bring it in tune with a fixed-pitch musical instrument, such as a piano.
We noted that Rega’s Planar 6 manual recommends the ‘RPM’ app to test its turntables, so we did so (right). The app scored unadjusted speed at 33.37 (+0.12%) with wow/flutter at 0.26%. The red outer trace on the RPM app image shows local variations in wow/ flutter. But we have no idea what standards the RPM app is working to, or the base accuracy of an iPhone’s gyroscope under this application — repeat tests yielded slightly different results. Newport Test Labs will be undertaking tests of this unit for a future report in Australian Hi-Fi magazine.
The PSU box (pictured below) follows Rega’s usual friendly design, the company logo illuminating on the front when powered up by the first push button, while the second button changes speed, with the Rega logo changing from red for LPs to green for 45s. Its electronics are built upon a high stability crystal controlling a 24V AC balanced signal “completely un-affected by any changes in the mains/line voltage and conditions,” says Rega.
While much of the turntable incorporates new materials, the handmade precision RB330 arm is more familiar, as is Rega’s double brace technology, which works to further support the lightweight plinth, being mounted
specifically where the increased rigidity is required, between the tonearm mounting and the main hub bearing (what Rega in its engineering-speak calls a structurally sound “stressed beam” assembly). It’s ‘double’ because two different materials are used for the stressed beam — not specifically stated here but previously magnesium on top and phenolic resin on the bottom. Combining the two different materials lowers the influence of airborne vibrations on both elements.
There are also aluminium foot trims on the Planar-style feet, not that you’ll see them unless your turntable shelf is quite high. Finally (though first out of the box), there’s a very nice ‘smoked’ hinged lid, which stays open at 90 degrees, and closes properly with no gap to the plinth.
Performance
We note that in Europe the Planar 6 is being promoted mainly with the sexy transparent moving-coil Ania cartridge (shown, if you peer closely, in the image opposite). This is available in Australia as a $2799 package. Our review sample was supplied with a factory-fitted yellow Exact moving magnet cartridge — a $2399 package. (Without any cartridge the standalone Planar 6 is $1999.) The Exact’s bright yellow shell may encourage some to investigate the higher option, but as we’ll see, it’s no slouch in performance terms.
Set-up was enjoyably simple; up on the turntable shelf for levelling, remove the transport card from the subchassis, load the platter and felt mat. Run the flying output cables to your phono stage or amplifier’s phono input. (There’s no earth spade, because Rega turntables earth through the arm cable’s own screening.) For power you connect the lead to the Neo PSU, the PSU to the mains — it uses a 24V 350mA AC adaptor plug, and given the attention to detail elsewhere it’s surprising the thick cable to this adaptor is folded so tight in transit that it’s doomed to a very kinky existence thereafter.
Follow the manual’s instructions to move the counterweight up until the RB330 arm floats at a zero point just above a disc on the platter, then apply the 2.8g recommended tracking force on the dial and (as close as you’re able) to the bias adjustment slider underneath. Et voila.
We were up and listening within 15 minutes. One early revelation came from the 3-LP set of the 1979 ‘No Nukes’ concert at Madison Square Garden. Side two kicks off with what sounds at first a slightly muddy-vocalled take of The Times They Are A-Changin’ with James Taylor, Carly Simon and Graham Nash reprising the Peter, Paul & Mary arrangement. But as they warm to the task, the harmonies and the performance solidified under the Planar 6 and Exact combination into quite the hair-raising delight. We listened on: after Graham Nash’s fine performance of Cathedral he’s joined by Jackson Browne for the Crow On The Cradle, where David Lindley’s fiddle work is a standout, rendered here as immediate and stadium-intimate as we’ve ever heard it. The Rega delivered the spatial impression of the arena and crowd throughout, thanks to continuous but subtle crowd-miking (under the artists’ own production, according to credits), maintained even when Crow... rises to its climax sections, and especially as Lindley’s fiddle frequencies pick up the hall ambience’s higher reverberation across the width of the soundstage. So clean and noiseless were these LPs that the digital re-release couldn’t hope to match this for sheer involvement — not to mention the CD’s inability to present the endless inner sleeve notes and images to similar effect.
We stayed with live performance, and enjoyed the wonderful 1981 Philips pressing of ‘Friday Night in San Francisco’, a three-way guitar meeting of Al Di Meola, John
McLoughlin and Paco De Lucia. The second track, Short Tales Of the Black Forest, is a duet between the first two of these three players, and while the wide panning makes the soundstage slightly artificial, the highly dynamic interplay is beautifully captured on vinyl (a Bob Ludwig master) and impressively extracted against a wonderfully quiet floor by the Rega combination, so that every entertaining wood knock and squeak of the increasingly bizarre guitar battle — the random drift into the Pink Panther theme, the drop into blues boogie, the shrieks of the crowd — it makes for a great night in.
Leaving audiophile fare behind, we span up Nick Lowe’s Labour of Lust, an LP retrieved from a record fair and cleaned by a Spin-Clean (see elsewhere in the issue). While the Rega sounded just a little light on opening track Cruel to be Kind, by Cracking Up and Big Kick, Plain Scrap! the Planar 6 was showing how its nimble nature could drive along Terry Williams’ beats and the Rockpile rhythm with enough cleanliness to survive full reference-level replay without any sense of distortion.
In rather better condition, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (1960s DG Australia pressing of von Karajan/Berlin Phil) simply soared in this early stereo recording (the 1953 mono recording in the digital EMI Karajan ‘Complete’ is far thinner in tone), whether driving the rhythmic first movement or the second’s sad restraint — and then a disc flip required, reminding us why the 74 minutes of CD was such a revolution for classical listeners!
A Rega shade of green
Moving to the other end of the temporal scale, we punched the second button on the PSU and the front-panel Rega logo turned a delightful ‘Rega’ shade of green, indicating a speed of 45rpm. We pulled a hand-grab of ‘O’ singles from our rack, and listened to the Planar 6 punch out delight after delight, so much, indeed, that after a couple of discs we ran our preamp’s tape loop sockets into a Zoom recorder and started archiving them for posterity. Of three singles by The Only Ones, only the classic Another Girl Another Planet is digitally in our collection, and that a different version to our single. The B-side As My Wife Says was an interesting novelty, but the B-side of Trouble in the World a real discovery, Your Chosen Life proving a langorous blues with a trippy flanged vocal. Here the Rega went all magical on us with a glorious presentation of the big generous natural drum sound flanked by edgy guitar, a band clearly loving the almost Zeppelinesque groove. Thank you Rega!
Orange Juice followed, but we stopped archiving when we hit a wall of Osmonds singles, family and solo, through which we chose not to tread.
But case proven for single replay, especially given none of these 45s had enjoyed other than a Nagaoka Rolling Record Cleaner swipe per play since their original acquisition back in the day.
Many of the Planar 6’s merits mentioned so far focus on delicacy and detail, but we should supplement that with the experience of one of the last LPs we played, for simple pleasure by this stage — ‘1000 Airplanes on the Roof’ by Philip Glass. The roaring intro and the synth-led title track absolutely energised the room, the overtones of the brass and the undertones of Martin Goldray’s synth bass pushing the limits of vinyl’s envelope, and all clean as a whistle, tight as a platypus pocket, even at full climax — not a hint of compression, distortion or soft edges, but full-on bass and in-yer-face impact. (This through a Musical Fidelity phono stage.) We’ve always known this album on vinyl; our digital version at 160k is pressed into service only for road travel — and that no longer, as we took the opportunity to digitise the Rega Planar 6 delivery. For 50+ minutes, it entranced us.
Case proven, then. As for competition, we made direct comparisons with a reference somewhat below this price, the $1499 Thorens TD 203, a previous Sound+Image award-winner. Both turntables are wonder-performers at extracting detail, but did deliver slight differences in tone and tracking. The Rega/Exact combination defined the soundstage more clearly in its tightening the image of, say, a central vocal, where the Thorens could shift some lower-mid frequencies from the vocal slightly sideways. This translated to a more exact soundstage overall from the Rega. The trade was a slightly leaner sound, where the Thorens could sometimes warm the guts more. But overall, as the price might suggest, it was a win for the Rega.
This was all using the supplied and fresh Exact cartridge, of course, so one can only imagine to what additional heights the accuracy would be lifted by going moving coil to the Ania. Meanwhile it’s worth noting that this is a cartridge on which the stylus alone can’t be replaced, so you’ll need to budget for occasional full cartridge replacement. (How regular depends on your rate of spinnage, of course — recommendations range from 150 to 1000 hours, depending on how much you care. Listen, and you’ll know when.)
Conclusion
The Planar 6 is easy to set-up, but very hard to stop playing, given the precision and musicality of its transcription. In this turntable Rega has delivered a perfect step up for those desiring a real hi-fi level of playback from their vinyl. Jez Ford