Rega’s Phil Freeman interviewed

By Michael Jones

March 2010

Rega's Phil Freeman
Rega Isis CD player
Rega Osiris amplifier

Rega Research’s Phil Freeman was a recent visitor to New Zealand. I took the opportunity to chat to Phil at Christchurch’s Rega stockist, Purehifi. Usually the people I interview are involved in marketing and I often fear that the interview subject is about to inflict upon me a Powerpoint presentation. So it was a delight to speak to a straight-up engineer for a change.

So what do you do at Rega?

A number of things, actually. On the enjoyment side I work with design teams designing some product groups. I have a mechanical engineering background and that can be useful. I very much enjoy negotiating and working with other companies. I also enjoy helping the guys in the factory if they have any issues.

Because one of the things that Roy [Gandy, the owner] and I both enjoy is making stuff. We want to make stuff.

Rega has always been known for their very high performance and very low cost products. Sitting before us are some products (the Isis CD player and Osiris amplifier) that don’t fit the latter part of that.

I can see on face value why you think that. We do have some characteristics we look for in every product we design. Obviously sound quality is something that’s always very high on the list. We look for longevity in a product. We don’t like designing things every year. We design a product to have a decent lifetime. We look for it to be ergonomically simple and easy to use, as we don’t like to overcomplicate the use of a product.

Reliability is very important to us. That comes from engineering and how you designed the products. A philosophical direction you can see from us on reliability is the reason we have the type of CD lids we have. They basically can’t go wrong.

And then value for money. We have a very specific way of trading with all of our partners. We don’t give credit. We don’t market the products. We don’t advertise. We don’t have a marketing budget. We only barely have what you could call an in-house sales team. With all that money we save we use that as a way of making the products competitive.

This is why, if you take the lid off a Rega product, the quality of components, the engineering used, the materials used are usually better than in a competitor. Plus we are all engineers and we do pride ourselves in clever engineering solutions. We work very hard with partner companies to achieve pieces of engineering that are considered impossible at the price. That’s the buzz. That’s the challenge.

Although over the years we’ve had products that have eclipsed our turntable sales volumes, over the past two years our turntable sales have been growing again and currently are the largest part of Rega. We manufactured a thousand last November. So we’re very happy with that.

If you look at Isis and Osiris, I think they have all the characteristics that a Brio or a P3 would have. If you look at them in context of what else could you buy for that money, they constitute good value. The material, the performance, the technical specification. And they have to stand up for themselves in demonstration. People have to listen to them and think that they’re something special.

Take the Isis CD player. What’s the difference between that and the Apollo?

Things that held true thirty or forty years ago – it’s concentrating on the quality of power supplies, the separation of power supplies for individual parts of circuits.

Rega have a unique digital player. It’s very modern and very capable, with 100 times the buffering capability of a normal CD player. You’re better off thinking of the digital part of the Isis as a ‘digital player’ that happens to be programmed to currently run with an optical mechanism that reads CDs. It could easily run with other digital formats.

Clocking has been taken very seriously. Terry Bateman, our designer, has designed in 14 separate power supplies for both analog and digital stages. The digital part of the player is on one circuit board, which is completely isolated from the analogue part of the player. The signal path has been kept as short, simple and clean as possible.

With the D/A conversion Terry’s used very high performance DACs – in this case from Burr Brown. But he’s used a DAC where he can gain access inside the DAC and actually bring part of the circuitry outside and on to the circuit board to be performed discretely. So thus he can have more control over the circuit.

The output amplification is using discrete components. Again, a circuit that Terry’s created that gives us quite a unique sound quality.

The build quality and mechanisms – because it’s a Rega digital player, our engineers in production can see every aspect of how the player is running. For the Isis we take the pick of the crop of laser mechanisms. Say Rega has 100 laser mechanisms that we use at the Apollo level, only four or five will make it to the Isis level.

We’ve spent about five years in development with these products. I first listened to the CD player as a pile of wires in early 2008, which gives you an idea of the length of gestation.

And the amplifier?

The Osiris is an extreme evolution of an amplifier circuit that again our Terry Bateman first produced around 15 years ago in the Exon power amplifier. We always felt that it is an extremely capable amplifier from the sound quality perspective and is incredibly stable.

There’s a lot of very modern technology in there to miniaturise the product, because there are two fully symmetrical monoblocks inside – two separate power amps. It will comfortably run at around 160 watts, which gives a lot of control with music.

That’s a lot of power for a UK amplifier.

Yes, and it has a lot of current as well. It will drive – well, I can’t think of a loudspeaker it wouldn’t comfortably drive with a great deal of control. If you can accelerate a drive unit fast and stop it fast then little nuances in the music reappear.

The display is very bright red.

Yes, it’s a colour we started using right back at the start of the electronics. Your products develop a character and all through the development and design of products someone says “why don’t we use blue LEDs?” as they’re fashionable. Red has by default become our colour.

AudioEnz hopes to review the Rega Isis and Osiris shortly.