Fluance vs Rega Planar 1 and Planar 2

This comparison is unusual because the two makers do not agree on what a turntable specification is for.

Fluance publishes a full table on every product page: platter material, mass and thickness; tonearm effective length and effective mass; headshell weight; wow and flutter; a weighted signal-to-noise figure; the cartridge and its stylus geometry. You can put an RT82 and an RT85 side by side and see exactly what changed.

Rega publishes the components. The Planar 1 page names a hand-assembled RB110 arm, a brass main bearing, a 23 mm phenolic platter, a 24 V low-noise motor and an EBLT Advanced belt — and gives you no wow and flutter figure, no signal-to-noise figure, no platter mass and no tonearm effective mass. The Planar 2 page is the same shape.

The question that decides it: do you want a deck you can measure and adjust, or a deck you cannot get wrong?

The short answer

• Buy a Fluanceif you want the better cartridge for the money, an arm you can set to any cartridge’s spec, a removable headshell, auto-stop, and a maker whose claims you can check. The RT82 if the budget is tight, the RT85 if you want the 2M Blue and the acrylic platter.
• Buy a Rega Planar 1if you want a hi-fi deck with literally nothing to adjust, and you value hand assembly and Rega’s arm design over a spec sheet.
• Buy a Rega Planar 2if you want the Rega approach but intend to fit a better cartridge later — the RB220 is the first arm in the range that lets you set tracking force and bias yourself.

The tonearm is where Rega spends the money

Rega’s reputation rests on its arms, and it is deserved. The RB110 on the Planar 1 and the RB220 on the Planar 2 are hand-assembled, with what Rega describes as patented ultra-low friction bearings on the RB220, housed in a stiffer, lighter bearing housing. Bearing friction is the thing that stops an arm following a warped record faithfully, and it is genuinely hard to get right at this price.

What matters practically, though, is what each arm lets you do.

The Planar 1 manual is explicit on both counts: “Bias is automatically set on the RB110, no setting is required”, and the balance weight is pushed onto the rear of the arm “until it reaches the stop point”. There is no tracking-force dial. That is a design decision, not an omission: it is why Rega can claim set-up in under 30 seconds, and it is why a Planar 1 cannot be set up wrong.

The RB220 manual describes the opposite arrangement: “The RB220 has adjustable bias” with a slider, and tracking force applied “by rotating the balance weight… turning the weight 360 degrees will apply 2 grams”. That single difference is why the Planar 2 is a deck you can grow into and the Planar 1 is not.

Both Fluance decks give you an adjustable counterweight and an adjustable anti-skate control as standard, and a removable H-4 bayonet headshell on top — so a cartridge change is a pre-aligned assembly swap. Rega mounts its cartridges with two screws directly to a fixed headshell, so every change is a full alignment job. Our cartridge setup guide covers what that involves.

The cartridge gap is the widest single difference

Both Planars ship the Rega Carbon: a moving magnet with a conicalstylus, 2.5 mV output, tracking at 2–3 g. Rega sells a Carbon Pro elliptical stylus as an upgrade for the same body.

The RT82 ships the Ortofon OM 10: elliptical, r/R 8/18 um, 4 mV. The RT85 ships the Ortofon 2M Blue: nude elliptical, same tip geometry, 5.5 mV, 25 dB channel separation.

A conical tip is a sphere. It sits higher in the groove and cannot follow the finest modulation cut into the walls, which is most of the high-frequency information. An elliptical tip is narrower across the groove and wider along it, so it sits deeper and traces more. A nude elliptical adds lower moving mass on top of that. This is the largest audible difference on this page, and it is not close — see the stylus and needle guide for the full ladder.

The counter-argument, which Rega owners make and which has merit: the arm and bearing are the parts you cannot upgrade, and the cartridge is the part you can. Buy the better chassis, fit a better cartridge later. That reasoning works perfectly on the Planar 2. On the Planar 1 it runs into the arm, which gives you no way to set the tracking force a new cartridge asks for.

The platters are three different answers

Four decks, three approaches, and they are worth understanding as engineering rather than as a ranking.

• Aluminum (RT82, 553 g). Light and stiff. Cheap to make well, and the servo motor is doing most of the speed-stability work.
• Acrylic (RT85, 1.56 kg).Nearly three times the mass, so far more rotational inertia — and a material whose resonant behaviour is close to vinyl’s, so it damps the record rather than ringing under it.
• Phenolic (Planar 1, 23 mm). A dense resin laminate. Rega describes it as a higher-mass platter with an improved flywheel effect, and does not publish what it weighs.
• Optiwhite float glass (Planar 2, 10 mm).Rega’s long-standing choice: very consistent thickness, high mass at the rim where inertia counts most.

All four are legitimate. Only Fluance tells you what its platters weigh, and only Fluance tells you what the resulting wow and flutter is.

What the empty cells actually mean

Ten cells in the matrix above are blank on the Rega side. It would be unfair to read those as failures — Rega has argued for decades that the standard turntable measurements do not capture what makes a deck sound good, and it sells the design instead. That is a coherent position held by a company with a real engineering record.

It is also, from a buyer’s chair, an unverifiable one. If you want to know whether a deck holds speed, Fluance says 0.07% and Rega says nothing. You can take Rega’s reputation as the substitute for a number — plenty of people reasonably do — but you should know that is the trade you are making.

The reverse point is worth making too. A published figure is not a promise about how something sounds, and a 0.5 dB difference in signal-to-noise between two Fluance decks tells you nothing you would ever hear. Numbers are useful for comparing, not for predicting.

The small conveniences, which only one side has

Fluance publishes auto-stop and a cueing lever on both the RT82 and the RT85. Auto-stop means the deck stops at the end of a side instead of leaving the stylus riding the run-out groove until someone notices — on a fall-asleep evening that is hours of avoidable wear. Rega does not list either feature for the Planar 1 or Planar 2, so the matrix leaves those cells empty rather than guess.

Both Fluance decks also list gold-plated RCA outputs and a tinted dust cover; Rega supplies a dust cover with both Planars, smoked on the walnut-effect finishes and clear on the gloss ones.

Buying them is not the same experience

One practical point that never shows up on a spec sheet. Rega is not sold on Amazon.A live product search on 2026-09-03 returned Rega cartridges, drive belts and power supplies, but no Planar turntable — which matches Rega’s authorized-dealer-only distribution.

That means Rega buying involves finding a dealer, and it means our Rega links go to Rega’s own product pages and earn us nothing. We would rather say that than quietly steer you toward the decks that pay us. Fluance sells direct and through Amazon, with the live prices in the cards above.

The decision, in one paragraph

If you want the most cartridge and the most adjustability per dollar, and you want to be able to check what you are told, buy Fluance — the RT82 if the phono stage and speakers still need funding, the RT85 if they do not. If you want a deck assembled by hand around an arm that is genuinely the best thing at the price, and you would rather not think about tracking force at all, buy the Planar 1 and put the Carbon Pro stylus on it when the conical wears. If you want Rega’s engineering andthe ability to fit a proper cartridge, the Planar 2 is the real answer — and it is the deck the Planar 1 quietly pushes you toward the moment you want to change anything.