ON TEST
38 Australian Hi-Fi http://www.aushifi.com
Rega RB880 ToneaRm
The tonearm fitted to the Rega Planar 8 is
Rega’s own RB880, but with an improved
pre-loaded vertical bearing assembly con-
structed using aluminium and stainless-steel
components. You can’t really see this (well
you can... just... if you peer through the
back of the assembly housing the bias adjust-
er) but what you can see quite easily is that
the new RB880 now has a thinner stainless
steel counterweight, which the company says
‘allows greater adjustability and compatibility.’
This arm is a single-piece moulding,
which is great for rigidity, but means the
headshell is an integral part of the arm and
cannot be removed. This makes install-
ing cartridges more difficult than it might
otherwise be, plus it effectively rules out
swapping different cartridges in and out of
the tonearm. Why might you do this? I use
an arm with a removable headshell so that
I can use a special mono 78 cartridge when
playing 78s, a low-cost cartridge with a
spherical diamond for playing old, worn LPs,
Although the Rega
Planar 8 comes
with a ‘dustcover’
the dustcover that
is supplied does
not protect your
records...
and a good-quality cartridge with an ellipti-
cal (removable) stylus for day-to-day use. I
reserve my top-line moving-coil cartridge for
use with brand new records, which I always
rip to hard disk while they’re new, and for
critical listening sessions using the vinyl
direct. Having a removable headshell makes
all this easy. I’d never do it if the headshell
were not removable.
If you’ve been paying attention, you’ll
realise that Rega does not believe in remov-
able headshells because they will always be
slightly ‘loose’ and, as Gandy correctly says:
‘Any unwanted movement between the stylus
and the disc of 0.001mm can create a massive
measurement inaccuracy of 100%.’
Tracking force for the RB800 is not
applied via the usual static method. On the
RB800 you move the counterweight along
the tonearm shaft until the arm is perfectly
balanced, then tracking force is dynamically
applied via a spring system activated by a
knurled knob adjacent to the tonearm pivot.
You can apply downforce of up to 3.75
grams using this knob, but a warning in
advance that you might need to wear a
head torch and magnifying glasses when
using it, because the knob is black and the
engravings on it are also black, so it’s not the
easiest to read. I prefer to use a digital gauge
to measure down-force, and according to
this gauge the Rega’s knob calibrations were
accurate, though I’d still always recommend
using an external down-force measurement
gauge when setting up any turntable: You
don’t need to go to the expense of a digital
gauge; there are any number of high-quality,
low-cost, passive gauges available.
Anti-skating is also set using a spring
system, with calibrations from ‘0’ to ‘2’. Thelack of calibration points on the anti-skating
scale would seem to tie in with Rega’s philos-
ophy that although some antiskating is de-
sirable, extreme accuracy is not essential. The
fact that even at the ‘0’ position there’s still
some anti-skating force applied to the arm
would also seem to bear out this observation.
The tonearm rest has a locking catch that
works very effectively, which is a plus in my
book. It’s very easy to damage a cartridge by
accidentally knocking a tonearm from its
rest.
Whereas many turntables either are not
supplied with connecting cables at all, or
they’re removable, the Rega Planar 8 not
only comes with its own phono cables, but
they’re extremely high-quality cables indeed,
fitted with equally high-quality locking
phono plugs.
The cables are permanently attached, so
you can’t remove them, but since they’re
94cm in length, they should be sufficiently
long for most system connections. As with
all Rega turntables, there is no earth wire,
because Rega says it provides grounding via
one of the shields on the RCA cable.
Although the Rega Planar 8 comes with
a ‘dustcover’, the dustcover that is supplied
does not protect your records from becoming
dusty while they’re playing, because it’s de-
signed in such a way that it can only be used
when the turntable is not playing.
The Rega Planar 8’s ‘dustcover’ is just a
sculpted piece of plastic that sits flat on the
platter mat, preventing the mat itself from
getting dusty when you’re not using the
turntable, and simultaneously providing a
modicum of protection for the tonearm (but
not the cartridge) against accidental knocks
and bumps.