Rega Planar 10 turntable - without cartridge

REGA PLANAR 10 TURNTABLE - WITHOUT CARTRIDGE
- It will last a lifetime making beautiful music that anything else would be profligacy.

I started my higher-end music listening journey with the Rega Planar 3 (with Linn Basik LV V Tonearm and Linn Basik MM Cartridge). It was all I could venture to commit, and it served the music wonderfully for more than a decade with variations in cartridges. The Grace F9E was my most loved cartridge with it. The Rega Planar 10 is so much more advanced and innovative that I mentioned the my Planar 3 only to highlight Rega's ability to deliver long-term musical relevance. Seriously, if you examine the turntable landscape, Rega is an outlier.

• Tancast 8 foamcore plinth
Rega turntables was mission-purposed for extracting as much information from the record groove. It was true then, even more true now. From the black, laminated particle-board plinth of my Rega Planar 3 to its most recent top-of-the-line models, Rega has utilized designs with the lightest, stiffest plinths possible. Now the Planar 10, Rega has completely done away with the traditional rectangular plinth, switching to a minimalist, skeleton-base that combines the lowest possible mass with as much stiffness as practicable. The RP10 utilized a skeletal plinth composed of two layers of HPL (high-pressure laminate) with a layer of polyolefin foam in between. The Planar 10 takes this design further, using Tancast 8 instead of polyolefin foam, resulting in a plinth that is 30% lighter than the RP10’s, but with increased rigidity.

• Ceramic Oxide diamond cut platter
The platter is one key ingredient why the Planar 10 can extract so much information from the record grooves. It is made of a super-hard ceramic material, aluminum oxide, first used on the P9. In the case of the Planar 10, the edge of the platter is thicker than the center portion to provide additional rotational mass and, thus, a flywheel effect that increases speed stability. The traditional Rega 100% wool mat is still used, but the Planar 10 has an improved thin, white wool one. The platter sits on a new sub-platter driven by two belts and rests on small, machined nibs at the sub-platter’s circumference to provide high contact pressure and therefore maximize the transfer of energy from the motor and belt.

• Double Brace (DB) technology with ceramic top brace
The Planar 10 also uses two skeletonized braces (first found in the Rega P9) that tie the main bearing and tonearm subassemblies into a single, integrated, stressed member that provides additional stiffness with a very minimal increase in overall mass. The top brace is ceramic; the bottom brace is phenolic; and these different materials have different resonant frequencies. Together, they further improve the ability of the system to extract information from the record groove.

• New RB3000 Tonearm
Rega has been long-renowned for its tonearms; indeed, for years many other turntable manufacturers have used Rega tonearms. The company has continually refined its tonearm-manufacturing process, developing (among other things) a sophisticated means to lap both ends of the tonearm bearing surfaces simultaneously, which results in bearing tolerances of one micron. For mental exercise, a human hair is typically between 50 and 100 microns in diameter, making a single micron betweeon 50 to 100X smaller. Imagine this feat of tolerance! The top of the line RB3000 is the first Rega arm to benefit from these improvements. The tonearm was specifically designed to have the lowest possible number of joints, while concurrently maximizing stiffness in key locations. As with the previous-gen RB2000, the arm is not painted, but hand-polished to a beautiful finish to keep mass as low as possible.

• Hand-tuned 24V, synchronous low noise motor
The Planar 10 uses Rega’s latest-generation, 24V, synchronous, low-vibration motor technology. This new motor is mounted using a maximal level of coupling, while simultaneously producing less vibration than previous-generation models. The new motor-mounting approach is the same used on Rega’s statement turntable, the Naiad. The rationale for this is to remove all stress from the motor body, while holding the drive pulley perfectly still, which results in greater speed stability and accuracy. Each motor is hand tuned to match its own PL10 PSU power supply, before being fitted to the turntable.

• EBLT Reference Drive Belt
The quality of the drive belt has a significant impact on sound quality. Rega has put forty years of R&D into developing a bespoke rubber compound for its belts. The manufacturing of this new rubber belt involves a special curing protocol, which results in a molded belt that has a modulus of elasticity that is extremely consistent throughout its length. The new belts are molded using a Rega-designed, state-of-the-art, super-accurate mold tool, to produce belts that are perfectly round and dimensionally accurate. These new belts provide perfect speed stability and are key contributors to the Planar 10’s exemplary overall sound quality.

• Fine-tuned P10 custom matched PSU
The PL10 external power supply provides exceptional speed stability, and convenient electronic speed changes at the press of a button. It also has advanced anti-vibration control and user-adjustable electronic fine-speed adjustment to ensure maximal accuracy for the life of the motor. Housed in Rega’s latest custom-designed case, the PL10 PSU runs the low-noise motor as quietly and as accurately as possible. The speed and control of the motor is achieved by using a new digital-signal-processing generator controlled by a high-stability crystal oscillator. This device references the highly accurate square wave from the crystal oscillator to turn the platter at the selected speed. its Digital Signal Processing (DSP) core will also generate a near-perfect sinusoidal waveform to power the motor. Factory-set vibration removal and fine-speed adjustments are then made to the power supply to tune each motor.

I prize this turntable. It is so well designed and made that it should provide reliable performance for decades, possibly even a lifetime :-) With its cutting-edge materials, single-minded design principles, and unrelentless focus on extracting maximum information from the record grooves, the Rega Planar 10 is easily one of the best turntables around, regardless of price.

Yes, you can spend more money on a turntable, but, why? You won't have a more immersive experience than the one accorded by Planar 10. It’s an outstandingly well thought out, superbly engineered, executed, and crafted product, it will last a lifetime making beautiful music that anything else would be profligacy - you don't want to be that!