LABORATORY TEST REPORT

measured the wow and flutter of the Rega Planar 8 at both speeds and it was identical for both speeds: 0.07% CCIR weighted and 0.018% DIN weighted. These are excellent results. Speed measured the Rega Apheta 2 cartridge using a pink noise test signal, which is a particularly difficult test, as the cartridge is required to produce all frequencies within the audio band simultaneously, whereas the measurements manufacturers use to derive their specifications are made by measuring only a single frequency at a time, and then ‘joining the dots’, which is hardly a real-world test. Tested using this signal, the Rega Apheta 2 returned a measured frequency response of 25Hz to 20kHz ±3dB. You can see from Graph 1 that although this is an excellent result, it would have been even better without that ‘bump’ around 50Hz, which I suspect may have been some mains-frequency hum creeping into the measurement—something that is fairly difficult to avoid when measuring low-output moving coil cartridges in a laboratory environment. If you look at the section of the graph from 70Hz upward, response linearity is better than ±2dB. On the same graph you can see that channel separation of the Apheta 2 cartridge is 21dB at 1kHz, rather less than the 29dB specified by Rega, but a fair result nonetheless. More importantly, channel separation is maintained at around 20dB from 200Hz right up to 8kHz, which is an excellent result. Channel balance was 0.9dB, very close to specification.