Rega Planar 2 (2020)

Verdict

It’s a minimalist bit of kit but the Planar 2 is an exceptional turntable that is a delight to live with.

Introduction

Ever since vinyl became a mainstream format, the number of different manufacturers active at every price point from entirely affordable to ‘basically a telephone number’ has exploded. 

Analogue is big business and it has encouraged a number of companies to try their luck. Of course, not everyone making turntables has come back into making them because some never stopped. Rega recently celebrated their 50^th birthday and for the entirety of that time, they have been making record players. 

This gives the Planar 2; the second most affordable turntable that Rega makes, a pedigree that most rivals would kill for but what does that mean in terms of performance? After all, turntables are the perfect definition of ‘mature’ technology so it begs the question what can Rega know that isn’t already common knowledge to everyone else? Is this still the best disc spinner at the price or is it trading off reputation? 

Availability

The Planar 2 is available through a chain of authorised dealers for £499 in the UK. Many of these dealers have been selling Rega for most of the fifty years that the company has been trading and they know everything about both the Planar 2 and the rest of the range. There is also a healthy number of them and some of them are authorised to supply the Planar 2 online which should make getting hold of one fairly easy. 

In the USA, the Planar 2 is available from a selection of dealers for $775 and in Australia it will cost you $999 AUD. It is also worth pointing out that the Planar 2 has been on sale in various forms for a very long time. If you search for ‘Rega Planar 2’ online, as well as clearly labelled new options, there will be a bewildering selection of used choices. These will generally be similar to the model reviewed here; they are all record players after all, but they will differ in detail aspects. 

Design

• Belt drive via 24v motor
• Rigid plinth 
• Glass platter and sub platter 

The Planar 2 is a belt driven, unsuspended turntable. This should not be a huge surprise because every model the company has ever made is a belt driven unsuspended turntable. The motor acts on a sub platter beneath the main platter and does so at a fixed speed. There is no suspension or internal isolation and everything is instead attached to the same plinth. 

The Planar 2 is the most affordable model that the company makes to feature a glass platter; something which is then used all the way up to the Planar 8. Rega feels it’s an optimal playing surface and it has the added benefit of looking fantastic. The Rega is a genuinely pretty thing, in part because it is so simple. 

Nothing that doesn’t absolutely need to be there is present and it makes the Planar 2 extremely elegant. Four finishes are available; the white in the pics, gloss black, gloss red and the recently launched walnut. The manner that the Rega is bolted together is exemplary and it’s finished to a very high standard too. 

Features 

• Designed to be light and rigid 
• RB220 tonearm and Carbon cartridge 
• Designed for use on a wall shelf

The core of the Planar 2 is an Acrylic plinth covered in the gloss finish of your choice. It’s designed to be as light as stiff as possible and it mounts the 24v motor, the self-securing brass bearing which holds the sub platter and platter and the tonearm. The sole control on the unit is a power switch on the underside of the plinth which sets the motor spinning. 

To change between 33 and 45rpm you need to lift the platter and move the belt between two spindles which might be less than ideal if you have a lot of media in both speeds. This plinth sits on three fairly solid feet and Rega says that for the best possible performance, it should really be placed on a wall shelf which they will happily sell you although an isolation platform will also work well. 

The arm is called the RB220 and it is a descendent of one called the RB300 which launched in 1983 and that, in various evolutions has been in production ever since. Older versions of this arm had a fixed value of anti-skate; the force which the arm applies to stop the cartridge shooting to the centre of the record, which limited the types of cartridge you could fit to it but this latest model has reinstated it which means you have reasonably free choice in what you might fit in the future.

Out of the box, the Planar 2 comes with an example of Rega’s Carbon cartridge with a version of the Audio Technica AT-91 that features on a lot of affordable turntables. This is not the last word in audiophilia but it is capable of decent performance and is cheap to find replacement styli for. You can also buy higher quality replacement styli aftermarket for a simple upgrade or look to one of the cartridges that Rega makes in house for a performance boost. 

Unlike many designs at this price, the Rega does not have a phono stage built in. From Rega’s perspective, this is because they make a selection of phono stages and fit them to the integrated amps that they make at this sort of price. It’s impossible to argue that there are rivals being sold at this sort of price that do more than the Planar 2 does though.

Something else that warrants mention is that unboxing and setting up the Planar 2 is a masterclass in how it should be done. It comes out of the packaging and together in a way that is a demonstration of things Rega knows after 50 years that many of its rivals do not. 

What’s more, if you can set a Planar 2 up, you can also set up a Planar 8… or even a Naia; Rega’s statement turntable that launched last year and costs over twenty times as much. If you like what the Planar 2 does, you can be fairly confident that other models will press the same buttons. 

Sound Quality 

• Excellent pitch stability
• Fun sound
• Default cartridge isn’t the best

Viewed objectively, the Planar 2 looks like a number of other record players on the market, it’s simpler than many of them and there’s nothing about the technology involved that is truly radical. You might even question if the very loyal following the company commands might be hype driven. It takes about half a side of a record you are in any way familiar with to realise that there’s something a bit special going on here. 

First, the basics. Once the platter is up to speed, the pitch stability is excellent and the noise floor; the amount of perceivable noise that the Rega makes is extremely low. The less noise the turntable itself makes, the more of the record you’ll hear and the Rega is extremely good in this regard. So long as the arm is set correctly, the Planar 2 will also successfully play through wear and damage that will flummox rivals. 

And, more than any of these things, the Rega is effortlessly good fun to listen to. The live concert version of Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm begins with a crowd absolutely hyped to be there, waiting for the opening guitar of Like Eating Glass to begin. When it does and noise creeps higher, the Planar 2 captures the excitement and intensity of that moment better than almost any turntable at the price. 

Some of this experience is down to how agile the Rega sounds. The complex and layered All My by DJ Shadow can feel almost broken if it’s not reproduced with its very particular time signature reproduced correctly. The Rega effortlessly unpicks this and what can often sound like a discordant mess of a track snaps into focus. There hasn’t been a record I’ve tried on the Rega at any tempo that has unsettled it, regardless of how notionally fast or complex it is. Likewise, put on Vince Clarke’s calm, almost chilling Songs of Silence and the Rega never forces it or leaves it sounding relentless or wearing. 

Not everything is perfect though and a fair bit of this can be levelled at the Carbon Cartridge. This isn’t a bad piece of kit but it’s realistically the limiting element of performance at the £500 asking price of the Rega. It’s tonally pretty good and it generally leaves voices and instruments sounding convincing and well defined but there are fine details on records I’ve played that I simply can’t discern here in the way I can on other turntables at not too dissimilar a price. 

Happily, changing a cartridge on the RB220 arm is a simple business and one of Rega’s own cartridges or something from Audio Technica’s VM-95 series would unlock a significant extra level of performance at a sensible price. 

As a device for experiencing music though, the Planar 2 isn’t ‘good for a turntable’, it’s good full stop. You can argue over a mass of measurements and figures but when the time comes to play something you love at a volume level it deserves, the Rega is able to get you into the heart of what you love about it better than pretty much any rival. Half a century of experience counts for an awful lot and the Planar 2 has it where it matters.

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