My Rega Planet has slowly developed a reluctance to play certain CDs. It barfs over the first track on The Best Of Van Morrison, for example, and refuses to cope with the last track on Legend by Bob Marley; these are both mass produced commercial discs that should play fine in any old machine. Feed the Rega a home made CD-R or a commercial disc stuffed with almost 80 minutes of music on board, and you’ll be lucky to hear it all. All of these discs play perfectly on the decent TEAC CD deck in my office, I might add.

So I sent it off to Rega for a ‘service’, via a local well-respected hi-fi shop. They charged me £106, which apparently is the cost for Rega to “clean and lubricate” the mechanism that allows the laser to track the disc surface. I picked it back up yesterday.

It still behaves in exactly the same way as described above. I am devastate. I am £106 poorer. I am NOT F*CKING IMPRESSED. I am pissed off to the max.

On the phone, the hi-fi shop unhesitatingly said, “bring it back, that’s not good enough, we’ll send it back to Rega » Continue Reading.