Rega P7

Overview: Price: £1,298 Website: www.rega.co.uk Size (WxHxD): 13x45x36cm Weight: 6kg RB700 tonearm Ceramic oxide powder platter Twin drive belts Plus points: High resolution record player with ceramic platter, very decent cartridge, lots of detail, great sense of timing Minus points: Good isolation is essential

Rega is committed to making kit for stereo music, an approach that despite the apparent commercial madness of ignoring home cinema has done it plenty of favours over its 30-year history. The fact that it introduced two new relatively expensive turntables in June suggests that things are pretty healthy in the analogue stereo market place for a company that's this dedicated.

Of the two decks the P7 is the more expensive and ambitious. The cheaper P5 costs £698 and in construction it has a core plinth made of cellular chipboard, a technique that gives great stiffness for relatively low mass. This functional plinth is augmented by a square section aluminium tube around the edge which gives the turntable the right proportions for a lid to be able to sit comfortably over everything inside.

The P7 was originally to have been called the P30, its predecessor the P25 celebrating Rega's 25th anniversary and the P30 marking another five years. At some point, however, a desire for consistency across the range encouraged a change to the P7, which slots in between the P5 and the P9.

Unlike less expensive Regas which use glass platters hiding under the felt mat, the P7 has a white ceramic platter. This is an evolution of the one used on the range-topping P9, but unlike that version it has peripheral mass loading in the form of small cylinders on the underside. Ceramic oxide is an unusually high-tech material for any turntable let alone one at this price and its very high density ensures that resonance is not going to be an issue however lively a record you choose to play.

The bearing and platter support are the same heavy-duty items found on the P9. Made using CNC machined aluminium and featuring three support points for the platter, the sub platter is driven by a pair of round-section belts. The outboard TT power supply unit (PSU, pictured) is supplied and generates a 24-volt balanced supply which drives an onboard anti-vibration circuit. Speed change is electronic, and on/off switching is inconveniently located behind the supply but then there's no real need to switch off between LPs.

The pick-up arm on the P7, the RB700, replaces the RB600 found on the old P25 and there are marked differences between the two. The precision, hardened, stainless steel bearings are of a higher tolerance and they fit onto ground shafts using an interference fit. The arm tube itself is the classic Rega silicon/aluminium casting found on all its tonearms but the arm base has a three-point fixing derived from the range-topping RB1000 that offers considerably greater rigidity than the standard Rega fixing.

Sound

Using the P7 with a Rega Exact cartridge (£275) proved to be a very pleasant experience. It is a distinctly calm and natural sounding turntable with a strong sense of body and shape to the presentation. This is also a highly sophisticated and fine-sounding record player with a great sense of timing and impressively high resolution of both the bigger and smaller sounds in a recording. You can hear right down through the mix, familiar albums revealing subtleties that had previously remained indistinct.

This is at least partly because backgrounds are extremely quiet, if the vinyl allows, which means that all the fine details come through - and unfortunately, all the problems as well, if the album is worn or dirty. The ability to track the build-up of tension is also particularly strong which suggests that this is a truly wide-bandwidth turntable.

There's a slight shortfall in image scale compared to more expensive designs but that's not for want of detail. You do get differences in the way the sound being is presented from one LP to another however, which suggests that there is sensitivity to variations in imaging if not the ability to make the most of large-scale recordings.

The Exact is a pretty impressive cartridge for the money but the temptation to fit something rather more capable in the form of a van den Hul Grasshopper (£2,800) proved irresistible. This required three spacers under the RB700 to get the right tracking angle but proved a very worthwhile exercise, even if it meant that the counterweight was hanging off the end of the arm this cartridge is a lot heavier than an Exact.

The Grasshopper added a sense of acoustic space to the P7's many skills, refining the tone of instruments and exposing more shape and colour in everything played. The sound is still a little restrained in grunt terms but there's no getting away from the big differences it reveals between LPs - the real sign of high resolution. What's more, albums that had previously seemed compressed ceased to do so, which is a nice trick.

Installing a Tom Evans Groove phono stage added some of the energy desired alongside a greater sense of poise, which comes in very handy when you are cranking out dense and heavy music. Under these circumstances the P7 revealed that it is a truly high resolution record player with considerable finesse and great sensitivity to the music.

Verdict:

While its unsuspended nature means that decent isolation is pretty essential there are few other reasons why the Rega P7 shouldn't end up ruling the roost in its price range. Superb.