The Federalist
Building a tone-arm that’s theoretically impossible to produce to playing table tennis with a mushroom grower’s assistant: it’s all in a day’s work for Roy Gandy… along with not wanting to be in charge of the company he owns
Malcolm Steward: For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, would you explain how Rega Research began?
Roy Gandy: It started, I suppose, in a stereotypical way, with a student who didn’t have any money trying to make things he needed but couldn’t afford to buy. I was working for the Ford Motor Company and sharing a flat with three or four teachers, one of whom had what I thought was an amazing hi-fi system – a Rogers GH88 amplifier, a Garrard SP25 turntable and a pair of home-made loudspeakers. It was far better than anything I’d heard and I used to use it to listen to his record collection. It was heaven compared to having nothing and struggling with the bits and pieces I’d tried to make as a younger kid. When I left the flat and got married I suddenly realised I no longer had any access to music. I couldn’t afford to buy the bits I needed so I asked friends how to build them. I wanted to make an amplifier because I’d read an article about it in Practical Electronics so I asked a friend who said: “Knowing you and what happens with amplifiers in that magazine, you’ll make it and within two or three months there’ll be another article telling you what’s wrong with it and you’ll be dissatisfied. If I were you I’d build some loudspeakers and save up to buy an amplifier. He duly gave me some books on building loudspeakers, including Gilert Briggs’ ‘Bible’ and I ended up making some loudspeakers from concrete paving slabs, while saving to buy my amplifier. Someone then gave me an old turntable that he’d found on a rubbish tip, which I was able to dismantle and re-machine to look a bit like the Transcriptors turntable that was popular at the time.

The best part of that system was the loudspeakers, which were made faithfully according to Briggs’ specifications and sounded rather good. People started asking me to build them a pair and I became more and more interested and realised that the biggest problem with these speakers was that they weighed  around three cwt each and getting them up and down stairs was impossible. So I started trying to make speakers that were based on similar concepts but which were lighter and easier to produce.

The Ford Motor Company was, at that time, a fertile source of customers. There were lots of wealthy managers who were into hi-fi because it was the cult interest of the day, so I ended up becoming a sort of dealer/consultant/manufacturer making loudspeakers, selling amplifiers and turntables such as the Thorens TD150 and Goldring GL75.

The biggest problem I found was that nearly every turntable arrived broken having bashed itself to death in transit. I used to spend two or three hours putting each one back together before I could sell it. In my naivety I thought that if I was spending that much time rebuilding other people’s turntables I would be better off making one myself. So I set out to build my own design, which became the Planet. Originally it was made to look spectacular because I didn’t have the confidence to compete directly with people like Thorens or Goldring. In hindsight I made the right decision because when you make something that looks a little spectacular, 90 per cent of the market might say ‘It’s interesting but I want something normal’ but ten per cent will say ‘I really must have one of those.’ I sold a few and a local shop that was very interested in buying British-made products also started to sell it. After a short while the owner of the shop asked why I didn’t go into business making the turntables. At that time sales were growing and distributors were showing interest, so he (Tony Relph) and I established Rega.

We started the company and I went off and found some distributors in Europe, and things just snowballed from there. Tony was very good at running small businesses and I was okay on the manufacturing and design side, which gave us a good start. We stayed together for about two years while the company grew, at which point it became clear that he and I had different aims so we split – very amicably. I’d taken voluntary redundancy from Ford, and the settlement helped me to buy Tony’s share of Rega.

At that point the company started on a roll and our main problem was making enough products to satisfy demand. So we made a conscious decision to limit our market to the amount we could make ourselves within our own quality parameters, which, when I look back, were quite shocking at the time. But we recognised that and wanted to improve things: we didn’t want to make poor quality products – we wanted to keep improving their quality. That restricted our output but it grew steadily and it went through the phase when we had our famous ‘waiting list’ period. We’ve reached the point today where we make all hi-fi components – I think, in fact, more than any other company does – in-house. We’ve reached the situation where, I suppose, we’re just interested in seeing where the future lies. The trouble is that nobody seems to know.

MS: So, you’ve successfully spent the past thirty years – because this is Rega’s thirtieth Anniversary – doing more of the same thing, including building turntables, which you were doing when the company began. Given that we’re now in ‘the digital age’, that seems strange. Are you pleased the company has been able to do that?
RG: While Rega is a business, and has to run profitably to stay in business, it’s also an enthusiastic pursuit for most of the people in the company. I’m sure that there are one or two people who see it as just a job but most of the people at Rega really enjoy their life – what they can do at Rega and what they can put into the company. I think that turntables are probably closer to our hearts.

MS: It’s good to hear that: it’s rewarding that you can spend 30 years doing what you first started out doing because you were enthusiastic about it and not have rumours circulating about you ‘going to the wall’ or having to borrow money to stay afloat, which is a fate that’s befallen many companies started by enthusiasts. You seem to have struck a happy balance in creating a business that’s viewed as a fun place to work while being stable and successful.
RG: Yes, it’s always a problem – and one we struggle with constantly – keeping the business’ operations viable while maintaining that enthusiasm. I’ll give you an example: we currently have a big demand for a moving coil cartridge and, for the last year or so, we’ve been investigating the concept of buying a generator (in which we had design input) from another manufacturer because we can’t – in a business sense – justify the time spent developing a moving coil in-house for the number of sales we know we’ll achieve. Nonetheless, we’ve taken a decision to start a development program ourselves, even though it’s not a good business proposition, certainly in the short term.

Viewed from a different perspective, it might appear a more business-like decision because the analogue market is currently very buoyant – it’s on the increase. Even though if we managed to sell optimum numbers of those cartridges in the next year or two it wouldn’t pay back the cost of their development we may be able to do something as good or better than someone else at a lower price, which is what Rega likes doing. What’s more, it’s where are roots are and where our future is, so it’s a bit of an emotional decision as well as a business decision. There’s a conflict there but we face those all the time.
MS: Do you base such decisions on what’s happening currently in established markets or consider and speculate about what might happen in growing markets such as Russia and China?
RG: We’ve learned to do different things. When we started we were completely naïve. We felt we had to learn and Rega’s been through working in various different ways – initially in a very autocratic way.
However, we’ve always had very stable and strong accounts. We’ve always felt that it’s very important to know how much money we’re making, who isn’t paying us, and so on. There’s no point in being in business just to go out of business; and we’ve always wanted to stay in business because we enjoy what we do. So, although I hate money and accounts, I did that myself for the first two years until I was lucky enough to find someone who was a near perfect book-keeper who kept the accounts straight and made sure that no-one owed us any money. During the time he was with the company, which was around ten years, we had absolutely no bad debts at all. So again we’re talking about this conflict between enthusiasm and business. We’ve been lucky enough to realise that the enthusiasm is the important bit to keep the business running but it also needs to be based on sound financial footings.
Another thing we’ve always felt, which I think comes from my working at Ford, is that efficiency is highly important: we were always told that anyone could make an expensive car such as a Rolls Royce but it took a lot of care, effort and intelligence to make a Ford. There’s a lot of truth in that. As with all such statements it’s not wholly valid but it is very difficult – while being interesting – to make products efficiently. It’s easy just to accept your suppliers’ prices and set the price of your product accordingly. It’s far more difficult to know what that product really can be made for efficiently before your supplier quotes come in, and then work with your suppliers to use a different method, or give them different tooling. That way, if you put in the required effort, you can produce a product that might be of even higher quality at a lower price. And, as I said earlier, that’s what we enjoy.

Even then there’s contention. Some people say that we screw our suppliers down too much, but we pay them – always and on time. It’s rewarding that in return a lot of them feel they can give us extraordinary cooperation and – in many instances – work closely with us right from the beginning of a project: they will be in our company or we will be in their company working together.

MS: I think it was Ross Walker who said to me many years ago that any idiot could build a superb amplifier for £4000 but that it was a far greater achievement to build a good one that cost £400.
RG: There’s another quote, I believe from an American manufacturer who produced a pre-amplifier with fully symmetrical circuitry for around $3000 and said that this was the lowest price at which you could produce such an amplifier. Had he done a little more research he would have found that we had produced an 80W integrated amplifier with fully symmetrical circuitry all the way through for £700. We didn’t make a lot of money on it: it was definitely a ‘learning curve’ but I still use one and it’s a good product with a very pleasant, musical sound. We should have sold it for twice the price, I guess, but even then it would have been cheap compared to what it was ‘supposed’ to cost.

If you looked at the bits in it and the quality of assembly compared to, I would say, any other electronic product, the value was obvious. People used to scratch their heads and ask how we could manage to produce something of that quality. We did it by using our own testing procedures, our own jigs and fixtures, by buying all the components we wanted and supplying them to our assembly people with jigs to enable them to build the amplifier quickly. In short, I think what Rega is good at is engineering at a fairly extreme level.
MS: I would think that one of your products is an exemplar of that ability, the RB300 tone-arm, which even companies who specialised in aluminium casting said was impossible to produce. What drove you to build that?
RG: As a designer, I think that people view those in my profession as people with flowery shirts who get waves of inspiration and then come up with things that look exotic but which can’t always be made. The reality is that industrial designers are people who identify problems and then find relevant solutions. Our ‘theoretically impossible’ arm-tube came about through applying that process.
It took a couple of years experimenting with all sorts of materials, knowing the direction that was ideal while knowing that in theory we couldn’t achieve what we wanted. And then there was a serendipitous happening: we met a visionary managing director of a large die-casting company who could see that all his rivals in the UK were competing to make products in their hundreds of thousands, costing them to 0.001 of a penny, and often failing to get jobs because they were fractions of a penny too expensive. He didn’t want his company to be in this situation and he wanted to take it up the ladder technologically. He’d bought a lot of sophisticated equipment that had been talked about in the die-casting industry but which nobody ever used. It was sitting there and no-one in the company knew what to do with it – and we’re talking about over a million pounds’ worth of equipment. It was serious stuff, including a triple-stage high vacuum pump to extract air from a mould before the molten aluminium was injected into it, and computer timing mechanisms that no-one had bothered fitting to the machines. I came along with the idea for the arm-tube and he saw it as a reason to get a development program going that would necessitate employing all this equipment. He desperately wanted to get the program going, which was fortunate because we couldn’t afford to pay for it. The timing was ideal and we were very lucky. I spent two or three days a week for 18 months working in that factory with his development engineers and they eventually devised a system that produced the arm-tube we wanted.
MS: Hopefully there was a payback for your supplier eventually?

RG: Yes, because after installing all the equipment he’d bought he then had the ability to produce all sorts of things that other die-casting companies couldn’t. One such was turbocharger casings, which are technologically the exact opposite of a tone-arm. They have thick-wall sections and big hard lumps of aluminium but they have the same casting problems as with a thin-wall section and, like a tone-arm, need great structural integrity. So there was a payback for the company that had effectively given us a large amount of money. People like that are wonderful. There are so few of them but they make the world go round – and I’ve spent my life trying to find them.
MS: Continuing the designer theme, you have designed a lot more than just hi-fi over the years, haven’t you?
RG: Yes, we designed and built our own factories, for instance. And I was once involved with a company that was going to make a high price motorcycle for a market we predicted would emerge, which subsequently did – the older guy buying an expensive, fast motorbike. We were offered a fairly special engine made in France but, unfortunately, it was never produced so the bike company never got off the ground. We’ve also sponsored a student to design a sports wheelchair.
MS: So would it be fair to say that while hi-fi is close to your heart you derive most enjoyment simply from problem-solving and coming up with ideas?

RG: Absolutely.
MS: Why do I never find you at Rega’s office? I always seem to have to call you at your home.
RG: I was at the Rega factory all day yesterday. Even so, I don’t have an office. I don’t even have a desk.
MS: That’s rather unusual for the head of a company.
RG: Maybe. I don’t have a secretary – I’ve never had one. The way the company is run now is as groups or teams of people. I’m just part of some of those teams. I don’t do any administration at all because that isn’t something I’m good at or like doing, which is why there’s no need for me to have an office. If I need to make phone calls then I can just as easily do that from home. When I’m working with people from Rega they often come here if it’s something that requires a listening room or a room in which to hold a meeting. Yesterday we were doing tests on magnet coil structures so I had to go to one of the factories to play around with oscilloscopes and bits of loudspeakers.
MS: That’s a very different management structure to most companies. So who is effectively in charge when you’re not at Rega?
RG: There’s no-one in charge – even when I’m there. There’s no boss at Rega. There is no-one with any authority. We’ve purposely structured the company that way over the last twelve years or so.
MS: I’m sorry but did you just say that even when you are at Rega, there’s no-one in authority?
RG: That’s right. I don’t have any more authority in the company than anyone else in actual and practical terms. There is the theoretical final situation in that I own the company and so if there were some major decision being made that threatened to ruin the company, I could legally say “No!” and prevent it. But that has never occurred. Very often people disagree with me and if the majority do then I go along with them. Obviously, if I feel strongly about something it’s my job to try to convince them that I’m right, but that’s the same for everybody else in the company. It happens all the time at Rega: I often come up with ideas and other people modify them.

So, we all do our own jobs and try to communicate. That’s the biggest problem but we’re getting better and better at it… but we don’t have authority in the company.
MS: So how do you avoid ‘A camel is a horse designed by a committee’ situations?
RG: There’s a huge difference between a team and a committee, and we’re very aware of that. If people do their job and have full responsibility for that job then they can make decisions on their own if they feel comfortable and are confident that they’ll make the right one. However, if I wanted to make a difficult decision about where the company was going, or anything that had serious implications, the last thing I would do is make that decision on my own: I would ask other people inside the company… and maybe people outside the company. I’ve always done that and always will. I think that’s the attitude of everyone in the company. We all make individual decisions if we feel comfortable doing that, and we always communicate and make group decisions if we don’t feel comfortable individually.

Ours is not a committee system or a communist system at all – although it might be hard to see the distinction.

MS: Forgive me looking bemused but I’m used to companies organised along more traditional lines with bosses and workers – and I’m sorry if those terms upset any bleeding-heart liberal’s, politically correct sensitivities but I dislike all this mealy-mouthed, patronising co-worker/stakeholder/colleague nonsense. It honestly amazes me that no- one ‘runs’ a company that has survived and, indeed, prospered for 30 years. It all seems rather too Borg-like.
RG: I don’t ‘run’ this company: I’m part of a team of, currently, four people that set the direction for the company – and that team is open to anyone who feels that they want to be involved. At the moment there are, as I said, four people who feel comfortable doing that. Sometimes, depending upon the decision, other people might join that team. I’m also part of the export sales team and the UK sales team and a big part of the design team – although I’m not the co-ordinator of the design team; I just contribute the skills that I have.
I’m not saying we don’t have problems: we do, just as any system has problems. One problem at the moment is that I think people are trying to show their independence of me and not use the simple bits that I’m good at, which I find… interesting. It’s fun. [Laughs] It may work, it may not. I might view that as them not respecting me as a team member but what they’re actually doing is trying to be independent of a boss. So there’s still a degree of people trying to put authority onto people where it doesn’t really exist. But, overall, we all find the atmosphere that we’ve generated after 12 years of working this way is so much better than that in an autocratically run company. I think that for the last two years it’s been running very well. Prior to that we had a large number of problems that were very different to the normal hierarchical company problems.
It’s not a scenario to solve every company’s problems, nor is it one to make a better commercial success… but it certainly is a scenario for better commercial success should the all-powerful owner be run over by a bus, which is something that every company has to consider. If a company has value – and Rega certainly does because it has wonderful people producing lots of lovely things in a great atmosphere – it would be a terrible shame if the owner walked under a bus and everything just stopped. And that’s something that has happened in other companies. I think it would be great if Rega were able to continue after I’d ‘walked under a bus’ for the benefit of the people within the company. So, taking away the authority of the owner and trying to engineer a company that works organically in a certain direction is, in my opinion, an important thing to do.
MS: Is this a scheme that you concocted yourself or are there precedents in the form of other companies that have similarly eschewed traditional management structures?
RG: We came up with it ourselves because we had a lot of problems with not enough people taking enough responsibility, and the people with responsibility not delegating it enough. We came up with the original concept but then we started to ask friends and consultants, and did some reading and found that it’s not at all a unique idea. There’s a guy, Charles Handy, for instance, who has written a number of books about the concept of federalism, which is putting the power at the outer periphery of a company, and taking it way from the middle; stripping away levels of hierarchy. And there’s a famous company in Brazil called Semco… a guy called Ricardo Semler wrote a book about it called Maverick. This is a £300 million company, I think, that makes things like washing machines and paint-mixing equipment. His all-powerful father ran the company originally and he (Ricardo) wasn’t interested in the business but his father insisted that he took over running it. Well… go and read the book, but Ricardo ended up sacking all the directors when he took charge and renegotiating the way in which the whole company was run, which made it hugely successful.  

So he came from his own perspective and we came from ours but the concepts we’ve learned in retrospect are not unique. What we have seen, however, is that we’ve taken them a little bit farther than anyone we can read about. That means that there’s nothing to teach us: we have to learn from our own experiences and problems. We have to develop organically; we have to make mistakes and see if we can figure out a way to solve them. If our solution doesn’t work then we have to invent another.
Regardless, we are wholly committed to the system. It’s wonderful and I’d recommend that any company should try working this way.
MS: At a more fundamental level, more than one manufacturer has of late expressed concern about retailing standards in the UK. What’s your opinion?
RG: For any manufacturer who has an interest in quality, that interest naturally extends to the people who are selling your products. Just as in any profession, a small percentage will be experts, while most people will be average and occupy the middle ground, and a few will be very poor: that’s true of hi-fi retailing. For the vast majority of retailers their shop is an extension of their personality: and it’s often very much a garden shed mentality; it’s a men’s thing – somewhere they can get away from their family or whatever and create an atmosphere in which they feel comfortable. Very few of them think about their customers.

The few that do – people, for instance, like Simon Byles at Infidelity in Kingston, and Julian at Audio T in Brighton (who probably remembers every customer he’s ever served, knows what his system is and what he needs next) – are the extreme. I used to think that everyone should be like that but as I’ve grown older I’ve realised that you have to work with what you have.  It’s certainly true that if all our dealers did as well as our best, our UK turnover would increase in the order of eight to ten times. The same is true for our export distributors: if they were all as good as our best then our export trade would increase eight-fold, and I know because we’ve done accurate calculations that substantiate that assertion. We just try to find the best people that we can work with and, as in any business, there are people who are extremely good, people who aren’t so good, and those that fall in between. You have to accept that that’s the best you can do. I spent maybe ten years of my life wandering all over the world – I’d clocked up over 2000 stores at the last count – trying to change sales techniques, the way they cared for customers, the way they demonstrated equipment, or whatever seemed to be the problem at that time, and I have to say that I failed completely. [Laughs]
Whether it was my attitude; whether people didn’t like being told, investigated… I don’t know. But, in general, people do what they want to do: if a guy wants to run a shop that’s dusty and has wires all over the place and you tell him that customers will buy more if he tidies up and gets the vacuum cleaner out, he’ll just think ‘I don’t want to do that.’  That’s life.

We’ve allowed our dealer base to decrease slightly while other companies seem to keep on increasing theirs in an effort to get more sales. In general, though, our dealer base has been fairly stable for many years. Usually, when we appoint one or two new dealers who have quality ways of operating someone drops off the other end.
MS: Do they drop off or are they pushed?
RG: One or the other. [Laughs]  We’re tending to do the same with distributors now. Again this harks back to your previous question about business versus enthusiasm. When I was autocratically running every bit of the business, all our distributors were people I regarded as friends and who I could go and have a good time with in their country. When more people within the company started making decisions, they came to me and said “This guy’s your mate but he’s not selling anything in what is a major territory. He ought to go.” And so things started to change. Nowadays we are making more of those types of decisions.

It becomes very obvious when you have an overview: when you’re a manufacturer you’ve learned from thirty years experience with hundreds of distributors what’s wrong and what’s right. You see people doing things that are so patently incorrect that it’s not a matter of opinion, and you try to inform them… Now we’re realising that all you can do ultimately is to get a different distributor. You can give the guy who’s making the mistake a chance… you can tell him what you want or what’s necessary, which means that you take the responsibility if something goes wrong. Perhaps the better ones have a degree of interest where you can work in a communicative way. If not then the manufacturer’s only recourse is to appoint someone else, which is sad. I’ve lost a number of friends that way over the years; and retained a few whose businesses have gone but I lost a lot of good friends because we’ve had to stop doing business with them. You have to realise that our business is more than just me, it’s about many people’s lives: there are fifty or sixty working directly in the company and something like 200 working for our local suppliers, whose lives are closely tied to Rega. It would be completely unfair to allow one person to threaten their security.

MS: What do you think you would you have done if you hadn’t started Rega? Or what would you most like to be doing… by choice? I’m hoping you won’t say that you’d simply have stayed at Ford.

RG: Now that’s an interesting question. And no, I would not still be at Ford. I was already fed up with the lack of opportunity to have any input there and the big company politics long before I started Rega.

One of the things I fancied doing was making guitars: in hindsight I doubt that would have proved financially worthwhile. But, who knows, there are some successful small companies making nice guitars.
As it turned out, I do make guitars. I’m lucky enough to play with some rather good musicians and I’m sure the only reason that they let me play with them is that I keep their instruments in good shape.
I love working with my hands and I’ve done a lot of building work. In fact, the only money I’ve made out of my existence is as a result of that: my pension is in my buildings. I did a lot of renovation on my house and I designed and built or refurbished the factories.
As you know, running a successful, efficient company rarely produces great wealth: you may enjoy compensation over and above that of someone doing an average nine-to-five job but you have to work very hard for that additional small reward. I’m not even the highest-paid person at Rega… and we don’t pay very well. [Laughs]

But the buildings that I’ve worked on have appreciated a large amount, and if I wanted to make money now I’d probably look at property development. I could certainly make a lot more money from renovating and building properties than I will from working at Rega.

MS: That suggests that what you would most enjoy doing has to be working at Rega, because you’re still doing it when you could be off raking in money from property development.
RG: Yes, I’m definitely doing what I like doing best. My girlfriend doesn’t think that I work at all: obviously when I spend time with her I’m not at work, and when she does see me working I’m often with wonderful people, chatting and drinking a bottle of wine. On average I would think I spend ten to twelve hours a day over a week working for Rega. As you see at this moment I’m in the middle of doing some recording for an album that Rega might produce. Yes, it’s the middle of the day and it’s also a hobby but my whole private life is inextricably linked with my work and hobbies. A lot of my friends are in the hi-fi business but I do have friends and interests outside this industry. I play table tennis, for instance, and the music stuff can be outside work, though it’s often mixed up with it.

Nonetheless, despite what some people might imagine, I don’t lead a perfect life. There are lots of stresses: I’ve even had stress-related illnesses but, in that respect, I’m lucky in being a designer. Being a designer means you analyse things so you ask yourself what’s wrong, what’s causing the problem, and then you sort it out. And that’s one of the reasons the company changed when it did because I didn’t like the way it was: I didn’t like everyone asking me what they should do. When things are wrong I like to try to change them. I like change. I’m one of those unusual people that feels uncomfortable if things don’t change.  I think that things have to change all the time to improve.
I’m always trying to do things that I enjoy doing. Music is one of them and over the last ten years I’ve been more and more involved with playing and recording with musicians. It used to be a half-day each week, usually in the evenings, but I’ve made a conscious decision to do more and over the last three weeks I’ve taken a whole day off in the middle of each week to pursue that interest. That, of course, has meant that I end up working through the weekend but that doesn’t bother me. I’m lucky enough and privileged to be able to that. I think a lot of “bosses” wouldn’t do things like that during company hours: they see themselves as too important and required at the office all the time.
I don’t see things that way. I think that the happier I am, and the more my brain is being exercised and challenged, the more use I am to the company. To me that means going away for a long weekend every couple of months – and that might be to see a distributor or it might be with a friend outside the business –, or playing music, going to concerts, or enjoying sport. I play table tennis, ski and I like sailing. I do them all occasionally, but none terribly seriously. I do, however, play table tennis competitively every week during the season and the only reason I’ve stayed with that is that it’s a democratic sport. I really like the fact that you get together with people from all walks of life: the last team we played consisted of a solicitor, an optometrist and a mushroom grower’s assistant. You get retired people to young footballers ... I like seeing all walks of life rather than doing the golf thing where everyone’s a bank manager or an aspiring estate agent.
MS: Will Rega be producing any products to celebrate its thirtieth anniversary?
RG: There isn’t anything specific but we will be updating the Planar 25, which commemorated our twenty-fifth anniversary, and calling it the P30. There’s also a new turntable, the P7 and a new very expensive – in our terms – loudspeaker, the R9.
What’s interesting about all this, however, is that the bulk of our development work is currently in analogue products where five to ten years ago it was in digital and electronics products. We’re still doing a small amount of work on programming and trying to improve the digital area but the area that’s most interesting to us, and the area in which most people seem interested, is analogue, two-channel audio. Again business and emotions mixing: it’s nice when the business side meets the emotional side and you’re able to do what you really want to do. When we produced our CD player that was much more a business consideration: we did it because we had to. The only emotional aspect of that was trying to produce something that was good value for money and made a nicer sound than most others. But it’s a lot more enjoyable when you can follow your heart and have a business, which is what seems to be happening at the moment.
These are difficult times because the audio business is decreasing, and has been for the past ten years or so, but turntable figures are up. Most of that is probably £59 turntables that you buy from a mail-order catalogue but there’s still an appreciable increase in more expensive players. Our top-of-the-range £2,500 Planar 9 is selling twice our target figure at the moment, which is encouraging when we’re about to launch a similarly priced loudspeaker. There does seem to be a strong demand for higher two-channel quality… and not many people catering for it.
MS: Are you talking about the domestic market or world-wide?
RG: All over the world. We have a distributor in Denmark who’s seen a 111 per cent increase; our distributor in Australia is 40 per cent up; Norway saw a 70 per cent increase last year. There are some decreases as well, of course, but there are some interesting situations in the world of hi-fi – interesting and, in many instances, comforting.
The disturbing side is that you can’t, at the moment, predict what’s going to happen. We had five-year plans at Rega, and we had two of them that we carried out and more or less fulfilled. But, two years ago when we finished the second plan, we found that we couldn’t make another. Even now we can’t: we can only look about six months ahead. We are restructuring to develop products in a very small time schedule now. Making what the market needs seems to be necessary – and who knows what’s going to happen with SACD and DVD-A and CD and what have you? Nobody appears to know.
MS: So might we be seeing a key-ring-sized Rega MP3 player? 
RG: It’s funny that you now have people like Tony Faulkner, who’s maybe the greatest protagonist of digital recording, back recording in analogue and saying how wonderful it is. A number of popular albums are being recorded using analogue equipment and I’m currently trying to buy an analogue tape recorder and I’m having to scour the world literally – getting hold of one is a real problem because the demand for them is huge. This is a small market, of course, but there’s a massive increase in demand within it, which is heartening.
It must be the first time ever… I mean I can’t think of any parallels where technology has moved ‘forward’ and then gone backwards… Actually, I can think of one – digital watches.
MS: Yes, but there’s a snobbish element where watches are involved.
RG: I think it’s simpler than that. I just think it’s that watches with hands are easier to read. You don’t have to read numbers; you just register the angle of the hands and instantly you know what time it is.
MS: Sorry, I missed the point. I thought that by digital you meant quartz movement watches as opposed to the clockwork variety.

RG: I’m talking about digital read-outs as opposed to hands. Years ago, for a period, most watches had digital read-outs and everyone thought that that was how watches were going to be from then on. Then Swatch went back to making cheap watches with hands and nowadays most watches have gone back to having hands: it’s very difficult to find a digital watch apart from novelty types and kids’ watches.
And I think that in hi-fi when digital recording and processing began a lot of the more mathematically oriented people said that that was the end of analogue. A few people who were more interested in listening than in maths said “Hang on! It’s not the end. Maybe it could be… but not yet.” And time has shown that there isn’t yet any digital technology that has the potential of good analogue technology. (And I’m choosing my words carefully here.)  The world has gone backwards a bit, which is interesting.
MS: So we won’t be seeing a Rega AV processor in the near future, I guess?
RG: No, we’ve kept a very close eye on the home cinema market. We have all the samples and chipsets, and we keep in touch with manufacturers who produce AV equipment that we can either work with or buy stuff from should we decide to do it, but all the information we get and have been getting over the last five years or so is that there’s no point – commercially or emotionally – for us. Rega is not really a hi-fi company – we’re an engineering company that’s proud of its ability to make high quality products at a good price: they happen to be audio products because that’s what a number of the people in the company are interested in. We can’t see that the AV market has anything at all to do with producing high quality sound or anything whatsoever to do with music, which is the area we’re involved in at the moment. We’ve always been a little bewildered when people say that moving from hi-fi to home cinema is a logical side step. To us it’s as different as, say, making a vacuum cleaner, doing something in a completely different field.