So long, farewell
I certainly hope not. The figures are certainly alarming, though. Around the globe, sales of compact discs continue to drop. This does not bode well for the future of compact discs. I have a considerable CD collection of my own, dating back to the 1980s, and I fear the day when this music format goes the way of cassette and Betamax tapes, laser discs and the VHS. The problem is, if CDs finally fade out of the music scene, so will the equipment that plays them. We would be stuck with our CD collections with no means to hear them play the way they used to.
Roy Gandy, the venerable top honcho of UK-based Rega Research Ltd. — one of the world’s best known audio equipment maker — offers some comforting words: “We’d continue to produce CD players as long as there is still demand for them.” He affirms that Rega will not just abandon customers who bought its Apollo, Saturn and Isis CD players.
A recent visitor to the country who touched base with Rega’s local dealer Stephen Gan, Roy notes that their company is selling more turntables than CD players now, with a ratio of 10 to one. He confirms what many in the music industry have known all along: the analog market remains unperturbed by the sales war between digital musical downloads versus CDs.
With LP sales going up 14 percent this year despite the drop in overall album sales worldwide, Roy believes that analog audio can thrive on its own, no matter which digital format ends up as the winner. “Analog audio is here to stay,” he says, explaining that it has carved its unique niche in the music market. He added that the analog renaissance is not a fluke at all.
While CD sales remain the biggest moneymaker for the music industry, digital music sales are expected to nudge out CD sales for the first time in 2012, according to the study released by Strategy Analytics. It predicts physical CD sales are expected to drop another 40 percent next year to $2.7 billion, while digital music — mostly sold through iTunes — will rake in an estimated $2.8 billion. However, the entire music industry is expected to nosedive to $5.5 billion from 2010’s $6.2 billion overall. The pencil-pushing came about as HMV (world’s largest CD vendor) announced that 60 of its UK stores will close shop because of “challenging conditions.”
Roy believes that mounting numbers of illegal downloads continue to put the industry under severe stress, with legal downloads unable to cash in on the decline in CD sales simply because they are undermined by pirated downloaded music.
But Roy is not worried at all because his company has a firm grip on the growing analog market. In fact, Rega’s engineers are busy putting together the pieces of what could be Rega’s most ambitious turntable project yet, one that is expected to surpass Rega P9, the company’s current flagship turntable model.
“We’d like it to be affordable, while meeting the demands of discriminating music lovers. We’re doing the math as well as all the necessary analog ingredients to make this project another bestseller,” Roy says.
Roy has always strove for excellence in pursuing his passion for music. At an early age, while most boys would prefer to play outdoors, Roy was busy building electric guitars and playing the clarinet. At age 14, when his mother asked him to choose between a television and record player as a gift, he chose the latter.
At 18, he built his own loudspeakers.
Roy had a day job at Ford as a technical editor, but he spent most of his time installing friends’ high fidelity systems and building speakers. Realizing that his passion could be profitable, he and his partner Tony Relph registered Rega (RElph and GAndy) in 1973. Their first turntable, the Planer, was born out of frustration on spending a silly amount of time repairing new turntables, knowing all too well that they could do better. Roy stayed for a couple of years at Ford and made turntables in the evening.
He finally left Ford, got a redundancy check and wisely spent it on a factory in Rochford. Relph left the partnership, and Roy tapped Terry Davies as Rega’s financial administrator. After Planar 2, Planar 3, RB300, the P1 and several other winning audio products, Rega has established itself as an industry icon with unparalleled reputation for affordable, yet distinctly superior, products
Without doubt, Roy remains unaffected by the music format tempests. He is ever confident that Rega can always re-direct and redesign its priority to keep up with what the market really wants.
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