The Rega Nd7: Moving Magnet, Fundamentally Reconsidered

Ten years of development is a long time to spend on a moving magnet cartridge—particularly when your company already makes some of the world's most respected moving coil designs. That Rega invested that time anyway tells you something about their conviction that the moving magnet format had more to offer than conventional thinking allowed.

The Rega Nd7 is the result. And it arrives with a rather compelling argument.

The Problem It Solves

The accepted hierarchy in cartridge design has been stable for decades: moving magnets offer reliability, easy setup, and user-replaceable styli; moving coils offer ultimate resolution, speed, and detail. The trade-offs seemed fixed. Rega disagreed.

The breakthrough was the magnet itself. Every moving magnet cartridge in existence—until the Nd range—used conventional bar magnets. Rega instead reached for Neodymium N55, the most powerful commercially available magnet in the world, previously the preserve of high-end moving coil designs. That single change made an entirely new generator architecture possible, and the Nd7 was built around it.

What Makes It Tick

The fine line nude diamond stylus sits at the heart of the Nd7's performance. It's the same profile used in Rega's Apheta 3 and Aphelion 2 moving coil cartridges—not a compromise version of it. The contact area is remarkably small: 3µm at the minor radius as viewed from above, 30µm vertically. This allows the diamond to respond to groove variations that a broader stylus profile would simply miss, retrieving detail that was pressed into the vinyl but never previously audible.

The aluminium cantilever transmits that information to a generator that has been redesigned from scratch. Miniaturised parallel coils wound in-house using 38-micron wire with 1,275 turns produce lower inductance and lower impedance than previous designs—the practical result being a measurably improved high-frequency response and a wider, more precisely defined stereo picture. The optimised pole gap further improves channel separation and linearity.

All of this sits inside a glass-filled PPS body derived from Rega's MC range: rigid, low-mass, and designed to minimise stress on tonearm bearings. The physics of accurate vinyl replay demand freedom of movement at the headshell, and the Nd7's body contributes to that rather than working against it.

A Cartridge That Fits Into Your System

The Nd7 uses Rega's three-point mounting system and is available factory-fitted on the Planar 6 and Planar 8 turntables at a combined price advantage—worth discussing if you're considering a turntable upgrade at the same time. For those already running a compatible Rega deck, retrofitting is straightforward, and our team can handle setup, alignment, and tracking force calibration to the specified 1.75g.

Getting that setup right matters. A fine line stylus profile rewards precision alignment in ways that broader profiles are more forgiving of—which is partly why the detail retrieval is so much greater, and partly why having someone experienced manage the installation pays dividends.

Should the stylus eventually wear, Rega's rebuild scheme offers a sensible long-term solution: return the cartridge to us, receive a replacement fitted with a fresh cantilever, stylus, and pivot pad at a reduced price. Each rebuilt unit is fully tested before leaving Rega. It's a practical approach to ownership that suits a cartridge at this level.

Living with the Nd7

What becomes apparent over time is how the Nd7 changes your relationship with your record collection. Familiar albums reveal textural detail and spatial information that simply wasn't accessible before. The wider soundstage isn't a hi-fi party trick—it's a genuine improvement in how musicians and instruments are placed within a recording. Low-level detail surfaces naturally rather than being obscured by the noise floor of a less capable stylus tracking the groove.

This is a cartridge that earns its place in a system by making everything downstream sound better, not by adding its own signature to the music.

Our Support and Trade-In Programme

After installation, we stay in contact to ensure performance is where it should be. If you have an existing cartridge—regardless of brand or age—bring it into the conversation when you enquire. Our trade-in programme offers straightforward valuations, and upgrading your cartridge needn't mean discarding what you've invested in before. Five decades of handling exactly these conversations means we can usually find a sensible route forward.

Private demonstrations in our acoustically treated listening rooms are available by appointment. Hearing the Nd7 against what you're currently running—or what you're considering stepping up from—is almost always the most useful way to make this decision.

Making Your Decision

The Rega Nd7 sits at a compelling position in the market: a cartridge that benefits from a decade of engineering effort, technology borrowed from reference moving coil designs, and a price point that makes it accessible to anyone serious about their vinyl replay. It's the kind of upgrade that tends to make customers wonder what took them so long.

We'd encourage an audition. The measurements are impressive; the listening experience rather more so.

Contact Us

To arrange a demonstration or discuss the Rega Nd7 in the context of your system, telephone us on 01603 627010 or email info@martinshifi.co.uk. We're happy to talk through cartridge matching, compatibility with your existing tonearm, and the best path to hearing what your records are genuinely capable of.

Sometimes the right upgrade arrives before you were expecting it. The Nd7 has a way of feeling inevitable once you've heard it.