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Rives Audio will demonstrate 2 rooms at HE 2006. Both identical equipment, but one will be acoustically treated and professionally calibrated, the other will not. Come hear the difference.

Along with our dealer Ultimate AV out of Chicago, we will be demonstrating Gryphon electronics with Rockport speakers on both rooms. But come hear what a difference in a well treated room!! This is not to be missed.

June 1 - 4
Sheraton Gateway Hotel, Los Angeles

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Are you thinking about designing a dedicated, or even semi-dedicated (family and theater) room? Here are two articles we highly recommend. One is a new way to think about designing the room, the other is on the design process:

We Hope you enjoy these articles and find them useful.

What do you listen to?

Part 8
various recordings and engineering

This is a complete digression from our previous topic of vocals. I started thinking about all the music types we've discussed, and quickly realized we haven't, nor are rock albums often discussed in audiophile circles. I thought about why this might be--and came to a few possibly surprising conclusions.

1. Older rock albums were often times captured extremely well. Look at Led Zeppelin early albums, Queen, Pink Floyd, the Beatles, and the Who. All from many remasters we know captured the original material very well. There are many others--too numerous to mention here. So the capturing process is clearly not the reason they are often overlooked by audiophiles.
   
2. Rock material usually has various amounts of compression. It is virtually impossible to get the guitars to match the drums without using compression. Compression can often sound unnatural and it's a very difficult balance as to what is too much or too little.
   
3. In particular I've found many re-issues of Queen albums to have significantly different compression. Some, which are touted as being excellent, have far too much compression for me to feel like the music is natural at all. Thus, a potentially great album can fall short (very short) in terms of any kind of reference material for me.
   

I will point out that there are a few companies that I have found to re-master and deliver rock albums which I have found to be excellent on a consistent basis. The last part of that phrase is very important. I've found almost all companies have produced at least some well done rock remasters, but very few do it consistently. Of those Classic Records stands out. I have not yet heard the new Led Zeppelin box set, but I expect based on the 33 rpm re-issues, it will be a gem.

If you are Pink Floyd fan, the best CDs I've come across are the Harvest CDs. The best vinyl is probably the Mo-Fi, though there are some Japanese pressings that are excellent though the bottom octaves are sometimes a little shy on the Japanese pressings.

Well, that's enough of my musings for now. Enjoy, and as always, please let me know what you listen to or if there are areas you would like to have me discuss as well.

Richard Rives Bird
President, Rives Audio