io in inglese sono una schiappa ,purtroppo sono un inglesolifo solo per prodotto,per prima la mia tbird e poi per la musica,
a tal proposito vorrei capire cosa scrivono delle casse da libreria appena acquistate
ringrazio i professori di madrelingua

I’ve always had the deepest respect for Rega. They have,
since their inception, never lost sight of their ideals:
making affordable components that truly deliver the
music. Their refreshing attitude towards marketing (no
advertising/no hype, reliance on word of mouth to earn
their reputation,) company structure (non-hierarchical
and without the militaristic pyramid structure of
authority) further endear them to me, but it is the way
they create products that marks them as special. They
actually listen to their products and base their design
decisions on whether the product truly satisfies their
musical ‘jones.’ Making the demands of music their prime
design consideration strikes me as the proper
relationship between technology and music. That Rega’s
products get the music so right and at prices the
average music lover might actually be willing to spend
makes me seriously question the existential
justification for High End items that can’t even get
basic rhythms right. “It’s got a bad beat, and even
James Brown couldn’t dance to it” in the old American
Bandstand record-rating terminology.

Rega is, of course, best known for their turntables and
tonearms, products that have so dominated the market
that the Rega tonearm geometry has become the default
geometry for most other tables and arms. In some ways
this success is unfortunate, as it overshadows Rega’s
other outstanding products and their larger goal of
creating complete music systems, each component of which
is designed to work harmoniously with the others to
achieve the same direct and satisfying musical result. I
reviewed a complete Rega complete system (Rega system)
and found that to truly appreciate what Rega is doing
musically you really must hear all their components
playing together. As good as the individual components
are, they are even better when heard in the organic and
holistic context of like-minded Rega products. The
musical result is so direct and so satisfying that music
lovers can easily avoid the darker aspects of the High
End/Audiophile obsession.

Much of Rega’s time recently has been spent in the
design and development of their new “R” series of
loudspeakers, of which the bookshelf/stand-mount R1, at
$495 a pair, is the least expensive. There are 5
speakers in the line, the other 4 being floor standers,
priced at $795, $1195, $2495, and topping out with their
flagship R9 at $3995 a pair. All the speakers were
designed in-house and are manufactured in England. Rega
designed and manufactures the individual drivers, a
unique departure from the current speaker manufacturer
norm, where a company buys OEM drivers, slaps them in a
box, and uses sweatshop Chinese labor to manufacture
them for pennies. The “R” series is no run-of-the-mill
speaker line. The time, care, and attention paid to the
demands of producing music right have paid off: the R1
hits the musical nail squarely on the head.

At the heart of the R series is Rega’s new RR125
mid/bass driver, a 125 mm paper cone unit of superb
transient speed, timing accuracy, clarity and
resolution. The R1 uses the RR125 in a small, genuine
wood veneered box of mini-monitor (12.5” Hx10”Dx6” W)
dimensions. The woofer is reflex-loaded at the back of
the R1’s cabinet and is mounted at the top of the
cabinet, above the Rega tweeter. Speaker load is benign;
Rega quotes a sensitivity of 90 dB. Any good, musically
competent solid-state amplifier of 30 watts per channel
(for starters Rega’s own Brio comes to mind) should be
able to drive the R1’s in the smaller-room applications
for which it was designed.

Speaker break-in was typical, with bass response and
subtle dynamic tracking being the last aspects of
performance to flower, these last fully occurring at
about 40 hours of play. Rega’s owner manual doesn’t make
any specific recommendations as far as speaker placement
and set-up goes. This may strike one as cavalier until
one realizes that the goal of the speaker – musical
involvement – occurs with even casual set-up. Fully
optimizing its performance is up to the user, should
they require it, and the speaker fully responds. The R1
is small enough to be actually used on a bookshelf
(remember when monsters like the Large Advent and AR 3a
were called bookshelf speakers?) as well as on speaker
stands. Toe-in doesn’t seem critical, nor does speaker
stand type. This was especially true since I use the
Stillpoints to isolate all my speakers from their
stands: the stand then becomes immaterial. Speaker
height is critical however, as the R1’s tweeter is
located below the woofer: too high a placement will keep
the tweeter from integrating with the mid/bass driver. I
tried the R1 in 3 different rooms, with 3 different
grades of equipment resolution, and with set-ups ranging
from the slothfully maladroit to the classic
mini-monitor small room set-up. The R1 was truly
musically involving in all these configurations;
perfectionist small-room mini-monitor set-up allowed the
speaker to project truly hallucinatory stereo illusions
in addition to its music making abilities.

Immediate impressions are a clear and transparent
portrayal with very high detail retrieval, fast and
controlled transient response, and superb musical
timing, both in articulating rhythms and tempi, and in
placing instruments within the temporal flow and context
of the performance. The RR125 is an outstanding mid/bass
driver, sonically and musically right in line with the
midrange performance of Rega’s amplifiers and phono
cartridges. Get the midrange right and everything else
will fall into place. Get it wrong, and all the king’s
horses…

When auditioned with the R1’s woofer at ear height or
lower, the R1’s tweeter has a slight time delay to the
ear compared to the RR125. The sonic effect of this is
an integration of the tweeter with the RR125 mid/bass
unit so well done that it sounds like the R1 is using a
single driver. Higher frequency harmonics emanate from
the position of the instrument rather than from a
detached artificial space above it, yet high frequency
percussion placed high in the sound field is perceived
as such. The tweeter itself is as exceptional a
performer as the RR125, its speed and transient
resolution allowing one not only to hear the signatures
of cymbals and other high frequency percussion, but also
to hear how they are being played, and most crucial of
all, to hear their rhythmic patterns. Rega quotes no
crossover point for the R1. I was unable to identify it
by ear: the sonic and musical coherence of the 2 drivers
is exceptional.

Rega has always excelled at coaxing surprising amounts
of clear bass from their small bass drivers. The R1’s
bass response is very clearly articulated and is as fast
and rhythmically coherent as the rest of the bandwidth.
Users can expect flat response in-room to at least 80 Hz
(in my small room ‘classic’ mini-monitor set-up, the
–3dB point was 63 Hz) with some additional reinforcement
available by room size, building construction rigidity,
and speaker positioning. Bass lines are extremely easy
to follow: the R1 passed my acid test of The Ron Carter
Quartet’s Piccolo, clearly separating Carter’s piccolo
bass from Buster Williams’ lower pitched standard
acoustic bass AND articulating what they were doing
musically and rhythmically. Considering that I’ve heard
$7,000 to $10,000 speakers flub this recording, the R1’s
performance is stellar. Low bass rolls off steeply due
to the reflex-loading of the RR125 of course, but in
small rooms in particular, articulate and detailed bass
is far more musically communicative than opaque boom and
thud. Quality trumps quantity every time. Like some
other truly excellent small speakers, some of the lower
bass is “phantom” bass; the R1’s speed and transient
control reproduces the 2nd and 3rd harmonics of a bass
note so well that one can both identify and place the
instrument in the sound field, even though the 30 to 60
Hz range where the fundamental note is placed might be
down in absolute level.

One could of course try to augment the R1’s bass
response by adding a subwoofer. To be successful the
subwoofer would have to match the R1’s fleetness of foot
and would have to have a steep crossover roll-off so
that the subwoofer’s mid-bass response would not
interfere with that of the R1. Particularly in small
rooms, this is unlikely to succeed. It makes more sense
to move up to the Rega R3 or R5 speakers with their
larger cabinets and additional bass drivers ($795 and
$1195) if one’s room is too big to allow the R1’s bass
response to convince.

Unlike many inexpensive speakers, the R1 is a very
high-resolution device. It is not “dumbed-down” to
flatter less able partners or mediocre recordings, nor
does it partake of the old British stereotype of too
stiff an upper lip reticence. It handles nuance and
exuberance equally well. It is capable of revealing
differences in electronics and sources that less capable
and opaque designs simply cannot resolve. In this aspect
of performance, the R1 can become ‘analytical.’ The
solution is to audition the R1 in the context of a
complete Rega system whose overall nature is integrative
and organic. Still, even with my humblest auditioning
system (a 1970’s Connoisseur BD2a turntable and Marantz
1060 integrated amp surely qualify as humble enough) the
R1’s extracted the musical message unambiguously,
relayed the acoustic in which instruments originated,
and created a 3-dimensional sound field that eliminated
any perceptual effort at orientation. It was clear,
however, that R1 was capable of more than this system
was producing, and further auditioning at 3 higher
resolution levels showed the R1 to be completely at
ease.

Not surprisingly given Rega’s strong turntable
background, the R1’s really shine with LP playback,
creating that deep sense of rhythmic and musical flow
that is the LP’s forte. I used the R1’s in my recent
review of the Graham Slee Elevator EXP and Era Gold V
phono preamps and found it able to reveal sonic and
musical differences in phono sections, arms, cartridges
and turntables. Not to the degree of my Sound Lab
Dynastat big room reference speakers, of course, but
remember that this is a $500 “entry-level” product.
There is something deeply satisfying about a reasonably
priced speaker able to make such fine discriminations.

High resolution, detail, and fleetness of foot do not
always guarantee musical communication however. It is
the ability to organize the sound into comprehensible
and meaningful patterns that is the gist of successful
music making, both in actual live performance and in
audio reproduction. Punctuation, emphasis and
de-emphasis, and the organization of time are crucial
here. This area has been the province of British
products in general, and Rega products in particular,
almost exclusively for most of the last 30 years: the R1
continues Rega’s noble tradition. It makes musical sense
of a wide variety of types of music, leading quickly to
an immersion into the music rather than to a distracting
awareness of the sound of the speaker. This is as it
should be, and is part of Rega’s long-standing design
philosophy: Listen to the music. Quit obsessing about
the sound!

I have always been more impressed by inexpensive
speakers that deliver the music than I have by
cost-no-object designs. It takes far more design
intelligence and a deeper awareness of the demands of
music to produce a coherent budget design. It seems, in
fact, that the more expensive the dynamic-driver
speaker, the less likely it is get the basics of music
right. Forget rubato, forget revealing “in the pocket’’
drumming, or articulating polyrhythms: most of the
over-priced dynamic-driver speaker monstrosities can’t
even lay out a simple 4/4 beat. They too often play as
if they were musical illiterates. That inexpensive
speakers can get the basics of timing, phrasing and
punctuation right creates a difficult existential crisis
for mega-buck speakers that can’t. For this reason I
have always kept a budget reference speaker around.

The Rega R1 becomes my new budget reference speaker. In
addition of its ability to get the fundamentals of music
right, it adds clarity and resolution, and an ability to
lay out a vivid and coherent 3-dimensional stereo image.
In small room applications, what more could you want?

Paul Szabady




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