Measuring Vibrations: Rega's founder and Turntable Guru wins a What Hi-fi?'s 2025 Outstanding Contribution Award

The announcement of Roy Gandy’s 2025 Outstanding Contribution Award from What Hi-Fi? arrives with a sense of inevitability. Vinyl culture has been reshaped by many trends, but the foundations still rest on a handful of people who treated audio as a craft rather than a market.

Gandy belongs to that group. His work has influenced how several generations discover music at home, and the recognition lands at a moment when listeners are paying closer attention to the origins of the products they live with.

Gandy built his first turntable as a teenager – eventually building Rega Research in 1973. The early years were small and disciplined; experiments with rigidity, low-mass structures, and clean mechanical paths. The Planar 3 emerged from this period and changed the expectations around affordable Hi Fi.

Before Rega, Gandy worked in roles that strengthened his instinct for practical engineering. He spent his early years repairing bicycles, building a motorcycle from spare parts, and taking on mechanical tasks that required close attention to tolerances and failure points. He held a day job while assembling Rega’s first turntables in the evenings, and his time in those environments gave him a clear understanding of how materials behave under stress and how simple structures can outperform more elaborate ones.

The 2025 award recognises this long arc; and comes soon after Gandy transferred his ownership to Rega’s employees, prioritised employee job security and preserving the brand’s unique culture.

TRC and Rega share a special relationship. In 2019, we hosted Roy Gandy at our Mahim store, where he set up a Rega P8 with Jude; and later spent time exploring the city with our team.

Earlier this year, TRC visited the Rega factory in the South East of England. Walking through the production floor and observing the assembly process added a layer of clarity to how the company works and why its products feel the way they do. You can sense the accumulated experience in the room, and it becomes obvious why Rega’s reputation holds up in a market defined by rapid shifts.