Elicit pleasures

Rega Elicit MK5 integrated amplifier

Say Rega; think turntables. It’s inevitable: not only have Rega Planar record decks been around since the original 1970s renaissance in source equipment, they have stood out in their design, Rega guru Roy Gandy favouring lightness and rigidity over the weighty high-mass approach of most manufacturers. As the years went by and Rega’s ambitions rose, their turntables got ever more skeletal and brilliantly braced, so that one imagines the ultimate realisation of Gandy’s engineering path will be something like an anti-black hole — weightless but infinitely rigid, with cosmic forces that somehow spin its local area of space with a resonance of 3.487168 radians per second (or, more familiarly, 33⅓ rpm).

But what’s this? It’s a Rega amplifier. The first one of these appeared back