Company & Product Overview

Around 47 years ago, in 1973, Roy Gandy had an idea that he could make a better turntable for the money than anything else on the market.  He started working on his products in his garage which funny enough, turned out to be pretty close to Rega’s factory in the UK.  We suspect he had no idea back in 1973 where the company would be today, but we sure are happy he had a dream that turned into some of the very best turntables in the world.  Rega tables not only have great performance but seem to last forever. Their philosophy of keeping things simple leads to designs that only need maintenance to keep on making great music.  Our own in-store service department sees a Rega every few weeks that only needs a new belt and/or a replacement cartridge.

Their philosophy of keeping things simple means you will not see a new Rega model replacing the old one every year as we see from a lot of other audio companies.  It is only when the Rega engineers have come up with enough new technology to make a big improvement in an existing product will we see a change. We love this philosophy as you never have to wonder if the new model is really better.  If Rega comes out with a replacement model, you can bet your whole vinyl collection, it's a big step up!

We’ve seen this happen with the Rega lineup over the last several years with all of the Rega tables getting a big tech update that resulted in much-improved performance.  When Rega moved the RP8 up to the Planar 8, they actually took much of what they learned from their 40th anniversary $45,000 Naiad turntable.  This model was a big step up over the RP8 and still amazes us at how great it sounds for its cost.

With the Planar 8 on the market, we had been wondering when the last model in the series, the RP10, would get a facelift and as you might guess, we were not surprised to hear about an upcoming Planar 10.  After being on the market for 5 years, Rega had enough new tech around to give it a big upgrade in performance.

The Planar 10 benefits from much of the new tech Rega developed for the Planar 8 but they pushed things even further, trying to get closer to the performance of their $45,000 Naiad.  Like with many of their turntables, Rega offers some package deals when you couple their cartridges with the table. For the Planar 10, we are particularly impressed with the first package, as you save $1,000!  The Planar 10 without a cartridge is $5,695, couple it with their brand new Apheta 3 (a $2,000 cartridge) and it’s $6,695.  The top-end bundle is with their Aphelion cartridge (a $5,000 cartridge) and it’s $9,695.  Not only do you get a great package deal with the Apheta 3, but you also get a brand new, revamped version of the Apheta 2, which we loved as a cartridge.  

Since we were the first in the country to get our hands on the Planar 10, we only had it briefly before we had to send it back to Rega. This review will be more on the design improvements along with the new tech Rega employed in the Planar 10.  We plan to provide more updates as we put the table through additional tests and will also create a head-to-head comparison with the Planar 8 to give you a full rundown of all the differences you can expect.

Design & Build Quality

If you have ever seen a Rega Naiad, you’ve witnessed a design philosophy taken to the extreme!  For their turntables, Rega believes the only vibrations you should be able to measure on a turntable are those of the stylus in the record groove and nothing else.  The Naiad has a super small subchassis made of hand-carved carbon fiber with bracing made from a lightweight ceramic material. The special tonearm uses titanium and they deployed Zirconia for the hub, spindle, and bearing.  With all of that high tech and hand made material, it’s easy to see why the Naiad commands $45,000. It also looks like it could be in a museum with its modern design and beautiful appearance.

While the P1, P2, P3, and P6 all look like a pretty typical turntable, when you get to the Planar 8 and Planar 10 the look takes on that of the Naiad with its exotic appearance.  Like the Planar 8, Rega moves from multiple color choices and gives you only basic black for the Planar 10, but the Planar 10 is much more striking in its appearance.  When you see the beige ceramic platter sitting on top of the black Tancast plinth, with the new highly polished aluminum RB3000 tonearm you’ll be like us and think, wow that is cool!

With this sleek, minimal design, Rega was challenged with coming up with a dust cover to serve the part.  We applaud them for actually developing a pretty elegant solution when some other turntables with a minimal design either have no dust cover at all or resort to a clunky big plastic box.  The one for the Planar 10 is pretty similar to the Planar 8. However, there is no question, the Planar 10 just looks super cool with the dust cover off!

The Planar 10 is like all other Rega turntables and is a manual design.  It will be up to you to move the arm over the record, lower it down using the cue and pick it up at the end.   This little extra effort gives you a big bonus in much better sound which is why 99% of all the best turntables are a manual design.  

We think anyone getting a Planar 10 will want an outboard phono stage unless their rig has a very serious one built-in.  Most people will probably opt for the Apheta 3 cartridge which is a moving coil design. Rega’s Aria phono preamp should be a great match for the Planar 10/Apheta 3 combo.  

With the Planar 10, there is not a whole lot to say about build quality except it is just amazing!  All Rega products are made extremely well, but when you get to their upper-end models, the build is outstanding.  You can tell from the minute you start taking it out of the box, the Planar 10 is built to last for decades!

Features & Technology

Rather than just improve on the RP10 design, Rega wanted to make the Planar 10 as close as they could to the performance of the Naiad while keeping the price reasonable for a turntable of this level.  

Rega is no stranger to the use of high tech materials and you’ll find plenty of them in the Planar 10!  Their goal was to reduce mass, increase rigidity, and improve speed accuracy through the use of great design and the best possible materials.  As you’ll see here, the Planar 10 is packed with parts that help bring it closer to the Naiad!

With most of our turntable overviews, we like to start from the bottom and work up, which we will do here with the Planar 10.   

The feet on the Planar 10 are the same as those on the Planar 8 and as a matter of fact, came out when they developed the Planar 6.  Rega used a very lightweight rubber material for the feet called Santoprene. These are hollow with an aluminum ring that goes in between the foot and the plinth.  Rega developed these as the first step in keeping vibrations from getting into the turntable.

The plinth design on the Planar 10 comes directly from what Rega learned when making their no holds barred Naiad turntable. This design was first used in the Planar 6, then modified for the Planar 8 which shares the same type of plinth. You get a concept of just how lightweight the plinth is when you start unpacking the Planar 10. Rega uses material from the aerospace industry called Tancast 8. Tancast 8 is a polyurethane foam core that Rega sandwiches between high pressure laminate. The laminate is super thin yet very rigid. The Tancast 8 coupled with the HPL (high-pressure laminate) appears to be a great way to get close to the much more expensive carbon fiber plinth’s characteristics found on the Naiad turntable. On the Planar 8 and Planar 10, Rega leaves the edges open and greatly reduces the size of the plinth to reduce mass even more. If you look at a Planar 8 or 10, you’ll see that the plinth is cut out to just have what is necessary to hold the other critical components. The plinth is basically just a skeleton for the feet, motor mount, bearing, and tonearm. The new Planar 10 plinth is actually 30% lighter than the one found on the RP10 model it replaced. 

When you look closely at Rega turntables starting with the Planar 3, you’ll notice a structure that sits on top of the plinth and couples the tonearm mount to the platter bearing. This is Rega’s famous double bracing design. On the Planar 10, Rega uses a ceramic top brace and phenolic resin bottom brace to increase rigidity between tonearm mount and main platter bearing. Rather than making the brace a solid piece of material, Rega reduces mass and cuts out most of the material much in the way a structural beam is made. This double brace design helps the cartridge/arm combination pick up even more information in those delicate record grooves! Plus we love the way the ceramic top part of the brace matches the platter too!

When you have a high performance audio system, anything that is added to the music can take away from your enjoyment. On turntables, one of the most important things we have found is the quality of the bearing. We suspect this is why on some turntables the silence between the notes sounds even more silent than normal. If you think about it, any noise made by the bearing sitting under the platter will get transmitted up to the platter and picked up by your stylus. When Rega came out with the Planar 8, they developed a new low mass central bearing assembly. The subplatter is single machined piece of aluminum with a hardened steel spindle that sits inside a custom brass housing. Rega took this design and improved the mechanical integrity even more for a main bearing that is about as good as anything we have seen. Of course, this all trickled down from what they learned in the Naiad as they tried to get as close as possible to the integrity of its hub assembly. 

When you talk about space age materials, Rega can surely brag about the ceramic used for both the main platter and top brace. The RP10 had a similar ceramic platter. As our Rega rep told us, it’s made for them by a company that produces nose cones for missiles out of the same material! Ceramic oxide powder is compressed, fired, then diamond cut for a marvelous finished product. The platter itself is quite heavy and Rega gives it a flywheel effect by adding mass around the outer edge. We’ve talked about this in other turntable reviews, but for those of you wondering about the flywheel effect it's a great idea. On a turntable, unless you are a DJ, it really does not matter if it comes up to speed instantly. Most people push the on button then a few seconds pass before they lower the stylus. One goal of a turntable is to spin at a perfect speed. If you have a round disc, with a heavier outer edge, this keeps it spinning more constantly with minimal variation. Yes, it may take a few seconds to get up to speed, but once it gets there, it's more likely to stay constant. Weighting the outer edge gives it this flywheel effect. And we have to say, the ceramic platter looks and feels even cooler than their famous float glass designs!

When Rega designed the Naiad turntable they came up with a motor mounting system that was different than anything they had done before. This originally carried over to the Planar 8 and was improved upon even more on the Planar 10. They mount their precision 24v low vibration motor from the bottom. This keeps any stress from being put on the motor while at the same time holding it perfectly still for better speed stability. It also keeps any energy from being transferred to the plinth. Rega also individually matches up each motor with the external power supply. This does two things for the sound. Speed is as good as it gets and by matching up the electronics of the outboard power supply to the motor, motor vibrations are reduced, pretty cool!

The motor pulley has two precision slots for the dual belt system. This is another level of tech derived from the Naiad and used in both the Planar 8 and Planar 10. The belts themselves are pretty special too. Being a maker of belt drive turntables, you can imagine the Rega team is always interested in new and better materials for their belts. They did a lot of work with a team of chemists and ultimately came up with a new belt material called EBLT. Rega and the chemists developed a new curing system for this material that gave it a more consistent elasticity. Now that they had this great material, they had to figure out a way to machine it into a belt that was as round as could possibly be made. They teamed up with a company that makes motor parts for Formula 1 racing cars to design their own machine to precisely create this new belt. Think about that for a minute. They developed a new material, then built their own machine to produce it so it would give you perfect speed. While many companies buy off the shelf generic belts, Rega goes to this length for better sound!

Rega also goes to great lengths to power the precision motor. With the Planar 10, you get an external power supply called the PL10 PSU. The electronics inside are the same as those used in the RP10, but they improved the chassis that houses them. They use a very high stability crystal to generate a perfect square wave. This wave is then manipulated using digital signal processing to give the motor a perfect and constant power signal. Then, each and every one is fine tuned to make the motor run as smoothly as possible. This system also means the motor gets a perfect signal no matter how bad the power coming out of your wall is. The PL10 PSU also gives you the convenience of being able to switch from 33 to 45 with the push of a button.

When you backtrack through the bearing, spindle, platter, motor, belts, and motor power supply, you see all of the attention Rega puts into the Planar 10 just simply to spin the platter. It seems like overkill, but boy oh boy, when you get perfect speed, magical things happen to your sound!

Now we are getting to the last few, but very important parts of the Planar 10. First we have the brand new RP3000 tonearm. Rega tonearms have always had some of the best bearings we have seen on turntables. They take pride in very tight tolerances. On some entry level turntables you can wiggle the arm around and even feel some play in the bearings. We’ve never encountered this on a Rega and they seem to keep improving their bearing technology with each new model. Rega set out to find a way to machine their tonearm bearings down to a 1 micron accuracy. This allowed them to assemble the entire tonearm with no adhesive at any point during its construction. You may wonder what is so important about tonearm bearings. 

If you think about the size of the tiny modulations in the grooves of a record, it's pretty simple. You want your stylus to pick up as many of these modulations as possible. If your tonearm has friction going either up, down, left, or right, your stylus will not have a chance to pick those subtle modulations up. Also, if the tonearm wobbles in any way at all, it could cancel out some of the signal coming from the grooves. 

The RB3000 also uses a very low mass aluminum arm tube they designed to reduce resonance and stress. You’ll set the stylus pressure the conventional way using a zero balance then turning a knob. Rega has a pretty unique antiskate adjustment on the RB3000 which we really like. It is a little tube you pull out from the arm, with antiskating force going towards zero as you pull it out. There are markings for tracking force, but this should be pretty cool to use with an antiskate test record to really dial it in. We can’t wait to try this out when we get our demo Planar 10.

The tonearm cables, like all Rega tables, are not detachable and these look like they are made of very high quality materials. They are hard wired from the tonearm all the way to the locking RCA connectors.

If you get the Rega Planar 10 with one of the better Rega cartridges, you’ll be able to take advantage of their three point mounting system. This triangular mount assures you of perfect alignment. While we are talking about Rega cartridges, we should also mention the package with the Apheta cartridge.

When we tested the Apheta 2 with the Planar 8, we fell in love with the combination. There is definitely something to be said for getting the phono cartridge from the same company that makes your turntable. When you think about it, Rega puts all of the effort you have just read about to make a perfect platform for your phono cartridge. A Rega cartridge is designed to drop into this beautifully designed system and perform as best as it can. Rega designs their cartridges to match up perfectly with their tonearms and tables.

The Apheta 3 takes the amazing sounding Apheta 2 and gets a new and improved stylus assembly. The Apheta 3 was designed side by side with the Planar 10 as Rega tried to make a cartridge closer in performance to their reference $5,000 Aphelion cartridge. They developed a new fine line diamond tip, designed to reach even further into the record grooves to extract more information. It is then mounted through a slot in the end of the Apheta 3 cantilever. We can’t wait to give this a serious listening test.

As you can see from all this great tech, the Planar 10 is an impressive turntable. After hearing the Planar 8 Apheta 2 combo and being bowled over, we can not wait to hear the Planar 10 with the Apheta 3.

Performance

We got to hear the Planar 10 for a few brief moments. We heard it at our Music Matters event in Charlotte connected up to a McIntosh stack driving a set of Martin Logan electrostatic speakers. Unfortunately, this setup was out in our main lobby so crowd noise made it hard to tell much, until at one point things were quieter and the guys from Rega put on an old Johnny Cash LP. The emotion we heard in his voice was spectacular and everyone standing around just stopped talking to listen. Then the crowd got noisy again and before we knew it the team from Rega was packing it up to go off to one of our favorite analog reviewers.

Overall Recommendation

Based upon the very brief listen and the way the Planar 10 is put together, this could be a turntable that rivals the big rigs in the 10K+ range. Even at its basic package price of $6,695, it is obviously not for everyone, but bear in mind, your system is only as good as the first step, where the sound is pulled from the record. We will know more when we get a demo back in, but we think it's safe to say this is going to be one heck of an amazing table for the price.