Rega Planar 6 RS Review

Here’s our review of the new Rega Planar 6 RS turntable:

Rega have done it again and they’ve come out with another RS package — if the name’s new to you, RS just stands for Rega Special. It’s basically Rega’s way of taking some of their best-known decks and building them into one package that makes the choice a bit of a no-brainer. We saw it with the Planar 3, which is now the Planar 3RS, and now it’s the Planar 6’s turn.

So, what’s actually in the package? Well, to keep it simple, you’re getting a Planar 6 platform, in a new finish that looks superb, and then it’s fitted with the tonearm from the Planar 8 and a choice of cartridges that you’d normally only find on Rega’s higher-end decks. And the clever bit is that it all comes in at a fraction of what you’d pay if you went and bought all the components separetely.

The way we are going to break it down is by going through it piece by piece — what’s come up from the deck below, what’s come down from the deck above, and, of course, what each of those swaps actually does to the sound. So let’s start with what it shares with the more affordable deck, because that’s most of it.

Buy Rega Planar 6 RS at Premium Sound — £2,000

What is the Rega Planar 6 RS?

So the plinth, the platter, the bearing, the motor and the power supply – all of that is straight off the standard Planar 6 – unchanged.

At first glance, you might wonder whether you’re really paying two grand for a dressed-up Planar 6. But that misses the point. The shared platform is actually one of the best things about it. Rega have spent years refining that foundation, so it’s worth taking a closer look at why using the same platform is good news — and not the catch it might initially seem.

At around five kilos, the whole deck is surprisingly light. That might sound like a drawback, especially when you consider that, at the £2,000 mark, most turntables are designed to be as heavy and substantial as possible. The conventional thinking is straightforward: vibration is the enemy, so adding mass is the best way to suppress it.

Rega takes a very different view. It’s an approach that goes all the way back to founder Roy Gandy, who argues that mass doesn’t actually eliminate unwanted energy — it simply stores it, before releasing it again a fraction of a second later as distortion. In other words, the solution can end up reintroducing the very problem it was supposed to solve.

Rega’s answer is to go light, but exceptionally stiff. The idea is that if the structure can’t store that energy in the first place, there’s nothing for it to give back later. The low weight of this turntable, then, isn’t a compromise or a cost-saving measure. It’s fundamental to the way it has been designed.

Plinth

At the heart of the plinth is Tancast 8, a closed-cell polyurethane foam originally developed for aerospace applications. Rega sandwiches that lightweight core between skins of high-pressure laminate, creating a structure that is remarkably rigid while adding very little mass.

On the RS, the outer skin is finished in brushed aluminium — a look first introduced with the Planar 3 RS. It’s also the only finish available for this particular model, giving the turntable a distinctive appearance that reflects the engineering philosophy underneath: minimal mass, maximum rigidity.

Now, besides looking great, that metal skin actually stiffens the plinth up a little bit more, so the finish is doing a structural job as well as catching the light. Although it does catch the light — it’s one of those things that photos never quite do justice to, so it really is worth coming and seeing in person.

Then you’ve got the bracing, and this is a phenolic resin brace above the plinth and another one below it, and both of them run from the tonearm mount across to the main hub bearing – which are basically the two points in a turntable that really have to stay locked together, so tying them up top and bottom keeps everything still while the record does the moving.

Platter, Sub-Platter and Neo Mk2 Power Supply

On top of all that sits the platter, and this is a 16mm, dual-layer Optiwhite float-glass design. In practical terms, Optiwhite means the glass is properly clear, without the green tint you typically see in standard glass. But the more important detail here is the dual-layer construction.

This is one of the genuine upgrades over Rega’s cheaper decks. Further down the range, you get a single sheet of glass; here, two layers are bonded together to create a thicker platter, with more of its mass concentrated towards the outer edge. That’s important because the weight around the rim creates the flywheel effect.

It sounds like a fancy term, but the principle is pretty simple: once the platter is up to speed, that mass gives it the momentum to keep turning at a constant rate. So when the stylus drops into the groove and introduces that tiny amount of drag, the platter doesn’t suddenly start slowing down.

Underneath the platter is the sub-platter, machined from a single piece of aluminium. This is worth slowing down for, because it’s an easy part of the design to misunderstand. The RS is still a belt-drive turntable, so there’s a belt and a motor positioned off to one side. But rather than having the belt run around the outer edge of the main platter, as you’ll find on many belt-drive designs, it loops around the smaller sub-platter hub closer to the centre. Driving the platter from this point has a couple of advantages. For one, it preserves more of that flywheel effect we just talked about. More importantly, because the belt is driving closer to the centre, small imperfections in the motor have less influence on the platter’s rotational stability than they would if the belt were pulling from the very edge.

Running through the centre of the whole assembly is the brass hub bearing, which is effectively the point around which everything rotates. It’s another component Rega has been steadily refining across the Planar range for years, and it’s a good example of the company’s approach: take a relatively simple mechanical idea and keep improving the execution.

The motor itself is a 24-volt, low-noise synchronous unit, but there’s a particularly nice detail in how Rega pairs it with the electronics. Each motor is hand-matched at the factory to the specific power supply it ships with, so the two are effectively treated as a matched pair from the moment they leave the factory.

That power supply is the Neo Mk2, and it brings a useful amount of control to the equation. You get electronic speed switching between 33 and 45 rpm at the touch of a button, so there’s no need to lift the platter and manually move the belt between pulleys.

It also incorporates an anti-vibration circuit for the motor, while giving you the ability to fine-tune the platter speed in increments of 0.01 rpm. So if you’ve ever put a strobe disc on your platter and thought the speed looked just a little bit off, you can correct it directly from the front panel.

The Big Upgrade: The Planar 8’s RB880 Tonearm

So all of the above – is on the standard Planar 6 too. Now let’s get to the bit that’s come down from the deck above, because this is really what makes the RS badge mean something.

The tonearm is the RB880, the same arm you’ll find on the Planar 8, which sits one step above this model in Rega’s range. When Rega gave the Planar 3 the RS treatment, the tonearm itself stayed unchanged. You got the upgraded finish and a better cartridge, but underneath it was still the same arm as the standard Planar 3. With the Planar 6 RS, Rega has gone further, bringing across the RB880 from the Planar 8.

There’s an important catch, though: you can’t simply spec an RB880 on a standard Planar 6. There’s no upgrade option at checkout and no official path to add the arm later. This package is the only way to get the RB880 on this particular platform.

Visually, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Put it next to the tonearm normally fitted to a Planar 6 and you’d struggle to spot much difference. The changes are mostly hidden beneath the surface. The armtube, for example, is cast as a single piece of aluminium, with no joints or bonded sections. That matters because every joint creates an opportunity for energy to behave differently across the structure, potentially introducing unwanted resonance. But the really important changes are in the bearings. The RB880 uses preloaded, zero-tolerance bearings, adjusted to less than a thousandth of a millimetre. They sit in an aluminium housing with a stainless-steel sleeve, rather than the plastic used around the main bearing in the less expensive arm.

So what does all that precision actually buy you?

Think about what the tonearm is being asked to do. The stylus is sitting in a microscopic groove, trying to trace all that information while the arm itself remains as stable as possible. Any play in the bearing or flex in the housing gives the arm somewhere to move — and some of the information that should be turning into music instead gets lost in the movement of the arm itself. A stiffer, more precisely controlled bearing means less unwanted movement and, ultimately, more of what’s actually cut into the record making its way through to your speakers. That’s really the whole trick: keep the arm still, let the stylus do its job, and lose as little of the information as possible along the way.

And you also get a custom stainless steel balance weight, which is thinner than the old one so it balances a wider range of cartridges properly, plus Rega’s own low-capacitance cable, hard-wired all the way through to locking plugs.

Rega Nd9 Cartridge: Flagship Moving-Magnet Performance

At the end of the RB880 tonearm sits the Nd9, Rega’s reference moving-magnet cartridge, and once again, it’s a component that has been brought down from the Planar 8. It comes factory-fitted and aligned, so the turntable is ready to play straight out of the box. Rega’s three-point mounting system makes things even easier: any of the company’s cartridges can be fitted directly into the arm with the alignment effectively taken care of. It’s a refreshingly painless approach to something that can otherwise be a fiddly part of setting up a turntable.

Inside the Nd9 is a neodymium magnet system paired with a boron cantilever, topped with a fine-line nude diamond stylus. That boron cantilever is particularly interesting because it’s derived from the one used in Rega’s Aphelion 2, the company’s flagship moving-coil cartridge — a cartridge that costs more on its own than plenty of complete turntables.

Boron is used for a very good reason: it’s both extremely stiff and very light. That means it can respond quickly to the stylus’s movements without flexing excessively, helping to preserve the fine detail being extracted from the record groove rather than smearing it along the way. The Nd9 produces around 5–6mV, so it’s comfortably within the range of a standard moving-magnet phono input, and it tracks at 1.75 grams.

There’s also a nice detail about the cartridge that’s easy to overlook. Rega doesn’t simply buy these cartridges from an outside manufacturer and put its badge on them. They’re designed and hand-built in-house at the company’s factory in Essex. At this sort of price, that level of in-house manufacturing is far from something you can take for granted.

Planar 6 RS Cartridge Options

There’s one more thing worth knowing about the cartridge, because Rega has changed the options since the RS was originally launched.

When the Planar 6 RS first arrived, it was available in just one configuration: the Nd9 moving-magnet cartridge fitted to the RB880 tonearm. Since then, Rega has expanded the range, adding a moving-coil version built around the Ania MC, along with a third package that combines the Ania MC with Rega’s Fono MC phono stage.

The turntable we have set up in the showroom is the Nd9 version, but it’s worth knowing that the choice isn’t quite as limited as it was at launch. If moving-coil cartridges are more your thing, there are now two options that take the Planar 6 RS in that direction — including a package with the dedicated phono stage to match.

Rega Planar 6 RS vs Planar 8: What Don’t You Get?

So that’s what the Planar 6 RS borrows from the Planar 8, but there are a couple of things it doesn’t get — and they’re worth pointing out.

The most obvious is the plinth. The Planar 8 uses what Rega calls a skeletal plinth, with material cut away to reduce the mass even further. The RS, by comparison, keeps the more conventional full rectangular plinth. So if you’re completely committed to Rega’s low-mass philosophy and want to take that idea as far as possible, the skeletal construction further up the range is still the next step.

But there’s an advantage to the RS going the other way, and it’s one that’s much more practical: it keeps a proper, full hinged dust cover. Once you move up to Rega’s skeletal decks, that disappears. And if your turntable lives in a room with dust, children or cats, a hinged lid isn’t so much a feature as it is a force field.

The Planar 6 RS is the last model in the range to give you one, and it’s something that comes up in the showroom far more often than you might expect. Sometimes the cleverest feature on a turntable is simply the one that stops the cat from turning it into a climbing frame.

Tips & Tricks

There’s one more thing I’d flag, and it’s the sort of advice we’d give you in the shop anyway, so it would be a bit odd not to mention it here.

Because the deck is both so light and so rigid, it’s surprisingly revealing of what you put it on. A poor-quality stand can undermine the very qualities the turntable has been designed to deliver, while a solid, stable support gives it the best chance to do its job properly.

So the Planar 6 RS is happiest on a good, solid equipment rack or a properly mounted wall shelf.

Wall-mounting a turntable probably isn’t the first thing that springs to mind, but it actually makes a lot of sense with a deck this light. It gets the turntable away from the floor and, more importantly, can provide an exceptionally stable platform with very little unwanted vibration.

Rega even makes its own wall bracket specifically for this kind of setup, so if you do want to go down that route, you don’t have to improvise.

It’s a small part of the overall picture, but with a turntable this sensitive to its surroundings, getting the support right is every bit as important as getting the deck itself right.

So is the Rega Planar 6 RS Worth £2,000?

So, let’s talk about the money, because this is really where the whole thing comes together.

A standard Planar 6, without a cartridge, is £1,280. The Planar 6 RS, with the cartridge already fitted, is £2,000. So yes, you’re spending roughly £700 more than you would on the standard deck — but that extra money isn’t simply paying for the RS finish. There’s some serious hardware in the package, and there’s a genuine saving compared with buying those components separately.

Break it down and the numbers get particularly interesting. The RB880 tonearm costs £765 on its own, while the Nd9 cartridge is £695. Against a standard Planar 6, you’re effectively getting both of those components as part of the RS package for considerably less than they would cost individually.

And if you step up to a Planar 8 and spec it with the same arm and cartridge, you’re looking at roughly another £550 on top of the RS.

That makes the positioning of the Planar 6 RS much clearer.

With the standard Planar 6, you’re getting an excellent platform, but the tonearm and cartridge are the areas where the compromises start to show — and the tonearm in particular isn’t something you can simply swap out later if you decide you want to move up.

Go for the Planar 8 and you get the more extreme skeletal-plinth design and its lower-mass construction, but you also lose the hinged lid.

The RS sits right between the two, but I don’t think it’s best described as a compromise. In a lot of ways, it’s the sweet spot of the three. Rega has taken the areas where upgrading actually makes a meaningful difference — particularly the tonearm and cartridge — and put the money there, while retaining the solid platform and practical features of the Planar 6.

And you can hear that philosophy in the way it performs. It’s composed, stable and quick. It doesn’t try to put on a show or add drama where there isn’t any. Instead, it gets on with timing, texture and detail, and then largely gets out of the way.

That’s a pretty compelling combination.