• A classic made more classic
• Useful upgrades
• Fantastic sound
• Thin lid hinges
$1,899
Happy birthday, Rega. It’s 50 years, a bit more by the time you read this, since Roy Gandy and Tony Relph each put a thousand British pounds into a pot and officially formed Rega Research Ltd on 1st July 1973.
It was a good plan, at the right time. Relph already owned two hi-fi shops down in Southend-on-Sea in Essex, and this was a time when “on Saturday when we opened there was a queue… people wanted to throw money at you to buy hi-fi” .
Gandy, meanwhile, had been round to Relph’s shops and others selling his first turntable design, ‘The Planet’, developed as a side project while Gandy was working as a technical writer for Ford Motor Company.
The Planet was so called because instead of a solid platter it had three circular supports rotating like moons around a central ‘planet’, a design curious enough to sell sufficiently for Relph to suggest an expansion into the joint venture.
As the new company increased production and acquired measuring equipment, the limitations of this skeletal support were realised, and Gandy decided that a glass platter might be the solution. From the tale told in Rega’s chunky history book ‘A Vibration Measuring Machine’, Gandy was outstandingly lucky to meet Clifford Rankin of Rankin Glass, who seems to have dived into the project with a bare minimum of business guarantees, and whose high-precision platters made possible Rega’s next generation
