According to Rega, the RP8 features a new plinth, platter and tonearm (the RB808), and is partnered with a 24V, low-voltage motor. The hub bearing assembly is a custom version of the older Planar 9′s hub bearing assembly.

The RP8 is what Rega calls it’s first generation of ‘skeletal’ design turntables.

The RP8 uses their dual brace technology to increase rigidity between tonearm mount and main hub bearing, also featured on the RP-6, is taken a to the next level on the RP8. Two different materials are used for the stressed beam – the top layer is magnesium and the bottom layer is phenolic, which Rega touts as two of the lightest and stiffest materials available. This lowers any tendency to pick up airborne vibrations.

Rega’s plinths have traditionally featured a stressed skin structure, and on the RP8, a new material is used for this, produced from thin phenolic skins sandwiching a featherweight nitrogen-expanded, closed-cell, polyolefin foam core. The material was developed exclusively for Rega over a three-year period. The RP8 plinth is seven times lighter than the original Planar 3 plinth, and much stiffer in the crucial area between the arm and main bearing.

The three-layer glass platter is a “super-flywheel effect” design, made in collaboration with an emerging British glass engineering outfit. What this means is that three precision-engineered glass rings of different sizes are laminated together, keeping much of the mass along the outer rim and the inner rim light. Rega has eschewed high-mass platters and this method, it says, allows constant rotational speed without stressing the main bearing.

The RB808 tonearm, which uses Rega’s latest arm tube, has improved bearings and a tighter spindle fit tolerance than its predecessors. There’s a brand new vertical bearing assembly and the tube has been designed to redistribute mass, and further reduce stress and resonance. The arm also comes with Rega’s proprietary low-capacitance phono cable, which has an advanced phono plug assembly to enhance connectivity and keep the signal path as clean as possible.

The TT-PSU power supply included in the package uses a high-stability, crystal-locked, low distortion sine-wave generator. This, working with an efficient drive amplifier fed from a stabilized DC power supply, generates a 24V AC-balanced signal of less than 0.05% distortion. The unit is unaffected by any changes in the mains/line voltage and conditions.

The all new RP8 will be priced at $2995 without a cartridge, or $3995 if you buy it as a package with Rega’s top of the line Apheta moving coil cartridge, which Rega says is a perfect match for the RP8. The cartridge alone retails for $1800, so you save $800 buying them together.

The Rega RP8 is scheduled for release in the late November, early December time frame.

It’s now available for pre-order from Needle Doctor and Audio Advisor.

Howard H. Scott, right, with the composer Aaron Copland in 1974, also had a significant career as a classical music producer

Howard H. Scott, who was part of the team at Columbia Records that introduced the long-playing vinyl record in 1948 before going on to produce albums with the New York Philharmonic, Glenn Gould, Isaac Stern and many other giants of classical music, died on Sept. 22 in Reading, Pa. He was 92.

The cause was cancer, said his daughter, Andrea K. Scott.

In 1946, Mr. Scott was 26 and just discharged from the Army when he got a job at Columbia Masterworks, the label’s classical division. He was soon assigned to Columbia’s top-secret project: developing a long-playing record to replace the 78 r.p.m. disc, which could hold only about four minutes of music on each brittle shellac side.

The project had begun in 1940 and was nearing completion. But its engineers needed someone with musical training — particularly the ability to read orchestral scores — to help transfer recordings from 78s to the new discs, which played at 331/3 r.p.m., could hold about 22 minutes a side and were made of more durable vinyl.

Click here to read the full story at the New York Times.

More information on the LP record format

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From the VPI Industries website:

The only entry level, high end turntable made in America!!

VPI Industries is set to introduce the all new Traveler turntable, aimed at the entry level audiophile market. Featuring an ultra low friction sapphire Gimbaled bearing assembly showing friction levels almost as low as our unipivot arms. This table was inspired by and in memory of Sheila Weisfeld, co-founder of VPI Industries and an integral part of the company for 35 years.

The Traveler is the focus of VPI’s refined engineering providing the customer quality sound and easy usability at a more affordable price.

Available June 1 in VPI Black
Available July 4 in made in America Red, White, and Blue!

Features:

• 10” Gimbaled tonearm
• Low friction spring loaded sapphire Gimbaled bearings
• Aluminum platter
• Aluminum plinth top plate
• Belt drive 600 rpm low noise motor
• RCA jack connections
• Tip toe feet
• Changeable arm assemblies for fast cartridge changing

Specifications:

Wow and Flutter — Less than .02%
Rumble — Greater than 80db down.
Speed Accuracy — Within .1%
Total Weight — 24 pounds.
Platter Run-Out — Within .003 inch.

Videos:

Photos:

Available from Elusivedisc.com (pre-order) for $1499 and includes a Grado Prestige 1 Gold cartridge.
Also available from MusicDirect.com for $1299 without a cartridge.

Read the review on Stereophile.com.

Is Now Open!

After weeks of testing, the new Media Gallery is ready. The Media Gallery is a major new feature that will allow all members to create their own albums where they can upload and share photos, documents, embedded audio and video links – and more!

Media Gallery Features:

• Create albums and sub-albums with unlimited levels.
• Decide who can upload to them (per user or per membergroup), choose who can view your items, or browse your albums. Allow or ban specific users.
• Supports Images, Audio and Video files, and embedding videos from Youtube, Dailymotion etc.
• Track which items you haven’t viewed yet – displays the number of new items in the menu bar.
• Search, preview, rate, comment and embed items!
• Approval/Unapproval system for comments, items and user albums
• Powerful permission and security features, including password protection
• Supports Exif data for photos
• Highslide lightbox animations when opening items
• Mass Upload, Profile areas, video thumbnails…
• Embed tag, allows you to post items into your messages
• Per-album permissions – let’s you control who can view your albums
• Per-album or gallery-wide custom fields
• Can upload any file type, including documents and custom extensions
• Mass downloads (zip file with selected files from any album)
• User Playlists: Give member groups the permission to create user playlists.
• Create playlists by simply visiting any item page and clicking the Playlists drop menu and then select “Add to Playlist”.
• Organize your favorites easily and browse them like an album!
• JavaScript + Flash Playlists: Show nice little Flash-powered playlists in these topics, or pretty much anywhere else, based on user playlists or anything you want (one or more items, one or more albums…)
• Linked topics: Create (or not) a linked notification topic automatically when adding/editing an album.
• You can use this to close per-item comments and have everyone comment on albums instead, or subscribe to topic notifications, or harness the power of other topic-related mods.
• Post button: Add a button to the post area, which opens a popup that will allow you to upload an item and insert it into your message in as few clicks as possible.
• Embedding of remotely hosted pictures: Picasa, Photobucket, Imageshack, anything you can think of.
• Thumbnails and previews will be created as needed, but the main files themselves will always stay hosted remotely.
• RSS feeds: All albums and items now offer RSS feeds to keep you updated for:
• Latest items – user profiles, albums, album with children, or the entire gallery.
• Latest comments – items, user profiles, albums, album with children, or the entire gallery.
• And much, much more… Why spoil the fun?

Improved Auto-Embedding features:

You can now automatically embed video and audio clips by posting the clip’s URL into your forum posts from over 200 sites (hundreds if you count the supported networks), including YouTube, DailyMotion, Google Video, Google Maps, MetaCafe, MySpace, Facebook, Veoh…

No need for BBCode or messy embed HTML. And if you posts the embed html code for a site, it’ll be turned automatically into a nice little furry, harmless link.

Just copy the URL from your address bar into a post (like http://youtube.com/watch?v=B8XC7idFyvE), and the website will do the rest. It’s the ultimate user-friendly way of posting clips. YouTube videos will automatically appear in HD and Widescreen if available and enabled.

File limitations: currently 50MB per file (contact me to add larger files), photos: 1600×1200 max; larger images will be automatically re-sized.

Allowed File types:

• Image files: bmp, png, gif, jpg, jpe, jpeg
• Audio files: mp2, mp3, mpga, ram, ra, wax, wma, m4p, m4a, a-latm, ogg, rpm, mka, wav
• Video files: 3gp, 3g2, avi, mpg, mpeg, mpe, wmv, mxu, m4u, movie, qt, mov, rm, rmvb, rv, flv, f4v, mp4, m4v, mkv
• Documents: txt, rtf, pdf, xls, doc, ppt, docx, xlsx, pptx, xml, html, htm, php, css, js, zip, rar, ace, arj, 7z, gz, tar, tgz, bz, bzip2, sit
• Multimedia archives: zipm

For more information, click here!

Two new features have been added:

•  Knowledge Base – A repository of ‘how to’ articles, reviews and other interesting topics
•  Link Exchange – View, share and rate links to other audio or vinyl related websites

The Link Exchange is open to forum members to add, edit and manage their own links they share in the exchange. If you have an idea for a category you would like added, send me a PM or an email to: admin@vinylaudio.net.

The Knowledge Base will serve as a library of articles and resources for the VinylAudio.net community. Members can write and submit articles, reviews, helpful hints and tips, or ‘how to’ manuals (with pictures, attachments and embedded videos!) to share with the members of the forum. The categories will evolve and change to reflect the variety of content and article topics. If you have suggestions for categories, send me a PM or an email to: admin@vinylaudio.net. Your first article will need approval before it is published. However, once you become a trusted author, you will have full control to publish and manage new articles with auto approval! Here’s your chance to share your ideas, opinions, reviews and how-to articles and have them published for everyone to see!

After your first article is approved and published, you can submit a request to join the Knowledge Base contributor group by clicking here.

If you have any questions or need help with the new features, let us know.

The original idea for Record Store Day was conceived by Chris Brown, and was founded in 2007 by Eric Levin, Michael Kurtz, Carrie Colliton, Amy Dorfman, Don Van Cleave and Brian Poehner as a celebration of the unique culture surrounding over 700 independently owned record stores in the USA, and hundreds of similar stores internationally.

This is the one day that all of the independently owned record stores come together with artists to celebrate the art of music. Special vinyl and CD releases and various promotional products are made exclusively for the day and hundreds of artists in the United States and in various countries across the globe make special appearances and performances. Festivities include performances, cook-outs, body painting, meet & greets with artists, parades, djs spinning records and on and on. Metallica officially kicked off Record Store Day at Rasputin Music in San Francisco on April 19, 2008 and Record Store Day is now celebrated the third Saturday every April.

So much for that theory.

Either way, using a 60hz strobe and a timing pattern template on my Rega P25, you can see the pattern does not stand still as it should, it wanders and advances ever so slightly as the platter spins. Even after replacing the factory molded sub platter with a machined aluminum sub platter (in my case, the Isokinetic Isosub GT) – measured to be exactly round with a diameter of 4 inches, the speed is still not exactly 33 1/3 rpm.

But how far off is my Rega P25 to begin with?

To find the answer to this question, I thought I’d try a different approach. I pulled out my copy of Realistic’s ‘Stereo Test Record’ (catalog # 50-1971A, 33rpm, available on eBay.com), featuring the Virtuoso Symphony of London – ‘Produced exclusively for Radio Shack’. The album was basically a repackaged Audio Fidelity Records FCS 50000 LP, originally produced in 1959/1960. (Note: If you find a copy, you will hear distortion on some of the musical passages on side 2. It’s master tape overload, not your turntable mistracking.)

Side one is unique; it has ten discontinuous (each track or ‘band’ does not lead into the next) test bands and five music selections on side two. Each discontinuous band has an introduction by a guy who sounds like he’d be the perfect voice to declare Nuclear War on Russia, circa 1969. Band 8 is what interested me the most, it’s a one minute sequence of ‘Musicians A, 440 cycles, US government standard’, as written on the back cover. If you play this track and use a chromatic tuner, such as the Korg CA-30 (available on Amazon.com for $15), you can get a visual representation of just how far off the speed really is. My results were a bit surprising.

After letting my turntable warm up, I recorded the 440 cycle, musicians A band using Reaper v2.5. Reaper has an easy to use feature where you can specify the exact playback speed of a track; speeding up or slowing it down to within 1/1000th of a second. Here is the file as it was recorded:
Musicians A – Original  (right click and click ‘Save Link As…’)

http://www.vinylaudio.net/forum/music/Speed/MusiciansA440.mp3

Once the file was recorded, I played it back and measured the note’s accuracy using my Korg CA-30 tuner. The tuner showed the note was 20 cents sharper (faster) then it should be. But what does 20 cents translate into?

The units of tuning accuracy are cents. A cent is one hundredth of a semitone. Since there are 12 semitones in an octave, there are 1200 cents in an octave. It is commonly agreed that the human ear can notice a pitch change of about five cents; no guitar or other musical instrument will ever be perfectly in tune, but less inaccuracy in the tuner allows tuning near enough to perfect that no listener will be able to hear the difference. Normal adults are able to recognize pitch differences of as small as 25 cents very reliably, so the speed difference on a Rega turntable of +20 cents (roughly two semitones higher) can be very noticeable.

Compensating for the speed difference

So, now we know the extent of the speed shift on my turntable and most people at this point would consider mechanical methods to correct the speed, but is there another way? Since the recording was made in Reaper, we can easily experiment with the playback speed and make small adjustments until the playback is as close to 440 cycles as possible. After fine tuning the playback speed, I found my turntable recording, played back at .988 speed produces almost perfect pitch. Here’s the corrected audio file:
Musicians A – speed corrected in Reaper  (right click and click ‘Save Link As…’)

http://www.vinylaudio.net/forum/music/Speed/MusiciansA440_Corrected.mp3

Experiment Results

So, how far off is my Rega P25? Well, according to my experiment, it’s roughly 1.2% faster than 33 1/3 rpm, which translates into a platter speed of 33.73 rpm, which is .39996 rpm faster then it should be.

Of course, my experiment isn’t very scientific, but I was able to calculate a rough estimate of how far off the speed is. Is 1.2% noticeable? For most people, maybe not, but I have received a few messages from viewers of my Youtube channel (mainly musicians) who notice the speed difference, so it may be more obvious if you are a musician with sensitive ears.

On a side note, before I sold my VPI Scoutmaster, I did test the speed using the same test record and Korg tuner. The result was absolute, unwavering, perfect pitch. The needle on the tuner pointed straight up and never moved.

Future upgrades

My next experiment will be to replace the motor pulley with an aftermarket, machined steel pulley. Once I receive the new pulley, I will run the same test and post a follow up with the results.

UPDATE 3/17/2012:

I received the steel pulley, but I’m running into problems installing it. It’s too tall and will need to be cut to fit properly. Since I’m using an Isokinetic Isosub GT sub platter, which sits slightly lower than the stock plastic sub platter, the new pulley is taller which makes it impossible to install the belt. I will have to cut down the new pulley to make it work.

More updates and pictures were posted in the forum link below.
Click here to join the discussion and post your comments in the forum.