Roy Gandy’s high-end audio equipment manufacturing company Rega grew out of his obsession with creating the perfect hi-fi system. An ex-automotive engineer and lifelong music fan, Gandy began by repairing and building turntables for himself and friends in his spare time.
In 1973, Gandy and his then business partner, Tony Relph, created Rega, an Essex company that has become respected by audiophiles around the world thanks to the high-quality sound reproduction its products achieve.
This success can be attributed to Gandy’s passion for engineering precision, plus the skilled workforce who make many of the intricate products by hand.
When it comes to record players, which Gandy says are essentially “vibration measurement machines,” for Rega it is balance and stiffness that are the keys. The company’s design approach will often go against the grain, with many in the industry focusing on heaviness as the most important feature needed for a quality turntable. “A turntable is the sum of all of its parts. Get one wrong and it destroys the whole product,” says Gandy.
He uses an example of comparing a road car with a Formula One vehicle. “If you set the tyre pressure wrong on a road car there will be little change in performance. If you change it on the F1 vehicle it won’t perform as well. With turntable quality the same is true, and when you improve the science of one element the whole machine becomes more uncompromising.”
While Gandy admits that the platter – the rotating disc that the record sits on – which per-forms as a flywheel, must have mass to turn and rotate, mass is not important to the exclusion of everything else. An elegant solution to reduce mass has been for Rega to create platters that have more mass on the outer edge, which also serves to smooth out any vibrations from the motor.
Rega makes platters out of a range of materials including phenolic resin, which Gandy says is stiffer Rega’s applications than carbon fibre. Importantly for a small company such as Rega, which is just about to reach 120 employees, it is cheaper than carbon fibre too.
The company also supplies precision-engineered glass platters for some of its more high-end players that must have a central hole with a tolerance of 0.05mm.
However, according to Gandy, the ultimate material to create optimum stiffness is a ceramic called aluminium oxide, but it comes at a high price. “Thirty years ago I was quoted £2,000 for a company to produce an aluminium oxide platter, which must be diamond ground,” he says. Nowadays one costs £206.
What is surprising, considering that the company makes 3,500 turntables a month, is that everything at Rega is handmade. Gandy says: “We struggle to find the skills needed, and seek out the right employees all over the world.”
Rega’s Apheta moving coil cartridge is a great example of the firm’s attention to detail. The cartridge is the component at the end of the tone arm that contains the needle. The design features a super-high-powered neodymium magnet and a coil meticulously hand wound on an iron cross that is 50% smaller than earlier designs. The weight reduction achieved from this is said to allow greater freedom to track the vinyl groove, ensuring that even more detail is extracted from the record.
As the firm is always looking to refine its products, the third generation of the moving coil cartridge, called Aphelion, features a stiff boron cantilever. It is housed within a single-piece aluminium anodised body, with a clear rigid cover to protect the internal fine wires. It also features a diamond stylus (needle) made by a Japanese jewellery company.
To help the staff in the incredibly fiddly task of creating the cartridges, the company has in-vested in high-definition magnification cameras and displays so they can work at much higher detail and create far tighter tolerances than before.
Another signature Rega product is its tone arm, which the company has spent 30 years invest-ing in to remove even microns of movement. “Our approach is to think of it as micron measurement engineering and to try to reduce all the possibilities of vibration,” says Gandy.
The supply coordinator at Rega, Ky Gandy, says that even though the single-piece cast-aluminium tone arm was first introduced in the 1980s it is still an incredibly hard part to make. “We changed the tooling eight years ago and we’d go to good diecasting companies and say we’d like to be able to make one of these and they’d say it couldn’t be done,” he says. “I would have to explain that we’ve already made 300,000 of them.”
The company has achieved “near frictionless movement” horizontally and vertically with its tone arm designs, while having “no measurable free play in the bearing assemblies” – which in reality is around one or two microns of movement.
“We’ve always been paranoid about bearing movement in our arms,” says Roy Gandy. “All our requirements are impossible. Our bearings need to have no friction and vertical movement but still have free movement and no vibration.”
This challenge saw Rega working with supplier Igus to explore the potential of using plastic ball bearings, which have more capacity for compression than metal ball bearings. They also do not require lubrication and so reduce maintenance and prevent contamination from dust.
Gandy was not convinced that plastic ball bearings could be created to the precision needed. In fact, he told Igus it would be a “waste of time”. However, after years of development, Igus managed to create a bespoke Xiros bearing that met the stringent requirements for producing a perfectly balanced, friction-free tone arm, with no drag. The arm features four Igus Xiros bearings – two on the vertical axis and two on the horizontal axis.
The bespoke Xiros bearings now produced for Rega are among the lowest-friction bearings Igus has ever made. They compare favourably with metal ball bearings in terms of noise, vibration and acoustics. The Xiros bearings are used in Rega’s two top-selling turntables.
Gandy stresses that the project with Igus would probably have never happened without the growth bubble caused in his industry from “trendy record buyers”.
Gandy welcomes the innovative manufacturing companies that have sprung up in the UK, some of which have helped to create products for Rega.
“That is amazing,” he says. “As a country we would have innovative ideas but once they got out into the world they disappeared. But now we have lots of manufacturers who are pushing the edge and working with us in a way that we feel gratitude for. It allows us to make things now that were once dreams.”
Did you know? The evolution of sound
Prices of Rega turntables range from £500 to £3,000.
Roy Gandy is publishing a book called The Vibration Measurement Machine which is an anecdotal look at his goal to create the perfect record player and how Rega designs have evolved over time.