Experience the next generation of transparent audio control
Transform your audio experience with innovative solutions from the inventor of the Ariane audio leveler.
About David Reaves Audio
Our Mission
Our Expertise
Our Expertise
At David Reaves Audio, our mission is to provide high-quality audio tools and services that enhance the audio experiences of our clients' content. We are committed to providing exceptional value and exceeding our clients' expectations.
Our Expertise
Our Expertise
Our Expertise
Our team of audio experts has years of experience in the industry and is dedicated to staying up-to-date with the latest trends and technologies.
Our Products
Our Expertise
Our Products
We offer a wide range of audio processing that provides transparent and natural control with out annoying artifacts Our products are carefully designed to ensure the highest quality and reliability.
Meet David Reaves
Where we came from and where we are going
My Childhood
I was born in Florida, and grew up in a small college town (Gainesville). I was exposed to all kinds of music by my parents. My father liked jazz and big band and played a little bit of clarinet; my Mom played our piano and introduced me to classical music. Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade still sends chills up my spine! I was eight years old when my father set the five Reaves kids before our TV set, to see the Beatles debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.
My Grandfather had given me a crystal radio kit when I was about six or seven years old, and he helped me assemble it and hang a wire antenna in our front yard. I was fascinated by the idea that there were electrical signals in the air, and how simple it was to pick them up!
I learned to solder when I was about 12. Mostly, I took things apart, old TV’s, etc., collecting parts with little hope of reassembling them. In Junior High, I met a few friends who were also curious about electronics, and of course we all listened to the local Top 40 radio stations, and everyone our age followed the music scene. I gravitated more to professional broadcast than to amateur radio. You couldn’t play music on “Ham” radio stations!
My Broadcasting Career Begins
I passed my FCC First Class Radiotelephone License exam when I was 16, just out of the 11th grade. Legally, you had to have this license to be an engineer in broadcasting, and I was determined to do something about that. I had been hanging out at local radio stations in town, where I’d befriended a few of the DJs (Thank you Steve Cannon, Pete Sautter and Boomer!), and eventually got to run a few “God Squad” Sunday morning tape playback shows on WGGG, for just above minimum wage. Sometimes, I could actually talk on the air. I was a professional!
Audio Processing and the Audimax AGC
Inspired by my friend Greg Strickland who had also been bitten by the broadcast audio bug, I started focusing on the sound-controlling apparatuses every station had: level controllers and peak limiters. Greg instilled in me his awe for the CBS Audimax automatic gain control (AGC) and the Volumax peak limiter, which were then the state-of-the-art of the genre. By the time I was in my late teens, I had conjured up my own audio compressor using an amplifier, light bulb and photo-resistor, which I used for a project while I was enrolled at Santa Fe Community college. It didn’t have the sophisticated ‘intelligent’ control system of an Audimax, but it really popped the audio! I was hooked. Audio processing became an intense, lifelong hobby of mine.
Briefly, what made the Audimax unique was the recognition that, although audio levels often need to be adjusted for loudness consistency, there are frequently times when the incoming audio level is already just right. In those circumstances, the processing control should step out of the way. The CBS Laboratories engineers developed a way to do an ongoing analysis and apply it; their Audimax AGC analyzed not only the the audio’s present level, but also compared the present level to its history over the past few seconds, injecting the element of time into its level control system. Because there was a certain amount of automated, program and user-guided decision-making involved, this approach is referred to as “intelligent” audio processing. No processing manufacturer had done this before.
Working My Way Up the East Coast
Over the years I was involved in quite a few aspects of broadcasting: I was a DJ who worked every possible time slot, a commercial copywriter, a Production Manager, a Program Director, Radio Operations Manager, Assistant Engineer and eventually Chief Engineer for multiple stations. I worked in Florida, then North Carolina, Maryland and Washington DC. In 1988 I landed the job as CE for the ratings-dominant CHR radio station in New York City: Z100.
Z100
It was at Z100 that I really honed my chops with processing. I had to. The radio market in New York City is a very competitive situation, and my two predecessors (Frank Foti and Jim Somich) had set a very high bar. I learned a LOT from that experience, and I’d like to think I did a pretty good job with the station’s sound for the eight years I was there. My philosophy became to strive to keep the audio as pristine as humanly possible up to the point where it had to be processed for transmission, and then do only what was absolutely necessary.
My own Audimax
The modern (at that time) version of the CBS Audimax, was the Texar Prism, a kind of a four-band Audimax. Frankl Foti had installed a pair of Prisms on Z100 when they were brand-new. One of my experimental projects while at Z100 was to create my own implementation of the Audimax processor system but apply it to TEN bands, via modifications to a processor that was new at the time, the Tailor, designed by Jim Trapani. I built an outboard printed circuit board, connected by an umbilical to the Tailor, that took each of the ten audio signals and analyzed them for their dynamics, following as closely to the Audimax theory as I could, and applied the new control signal.
The Ariane is born
In 1997, I joined NBC News as a technician, focusing on maintenance. In my spare time, I decided to use my audio processing experience to help other radio stations.
In 1998, together with an old friend and fellow engineer Jim Huste, we formed TransLanTech Sound, LLC, (“TLT”) to use our skills as broadcast consultants. Jim spent the next year in Berlin, Germany at the top CHR station, RTL.
Meanwhile, I was finalizing my multiband, matrix-processing “Audimax” design in my basement in New Jersey. On a short consulting job at SkyRock, an FM station in Paris, and I brought along my invention to demo for the station’s engineering manager, Marc Augis. He loved it. I had planned on taking it home with me, but Marc insisted upon buying it and at he put it on the air at once. This prototype model stayed in active on-air service for more than two decades!
Jim and I went into production of the new processor, and I called it “Ariane”, after my new girlfriend, Ariane Bayerlein. I had met in her New York, when she was on vacation after with her brother Dave, who I had worked with at RTL. Ari and I got married in 2000, and I sold my home in New Jersey and moved to Germany to live with her.
Enter the Sequel,the Digital Ariane
By 2004, Jim and I had built and sold nearly 200 analog Arianes before concluding that we needed to create a digital version. Our British analog manufacturers, Pyers Easton and Markus Bekker, helped us locate someone who could do it for us: Scott Incz at Broadcast Warehouse (“BW”), in Croydon, England. We made an agreement with Scott in December 2004 and he had a working prototype digital Ariane to show at April’s Las Vegas NAB show.
The Ariane “Sequel” hit the floor running, claiming a 2005 BE Radio “Pick Hit” award.
Time to Take A Break
Jim and I sold hundreds of Sequels over the next 5 years, but because we were only marketing and re-selling the BW-designed and manufactured product, profits only occasionally met our business costs. It was pretty stressful. I wanted to increase profits by bringing production in-house, but after a failed attempt at building my own digital processor (the never-finished “Ariane A+”), I decided that neither Jim nor I were good enough businessmen to keep going for the long term. So I left TransLanTech Sound, also leaving behind the Ariane product name. I went into semi-retirement, finding comfort living with the human Ariane.
Making a Fresh Start
Over the next decade-and-a-half, I continued to study DSP theory and slowly worked on teaching myself the math that is required to do the job properly. Ultimately, I decided to go back to the basics, to study the original Audimax patents, re-discovering just why that clever system was so useful and sounded so good. And using modern DSP, how I might be able to implement - and maybe even improve upon - the unique Audimax AGC concepts .
But I still didn’t have any confidence in my abilities as a businessman. So I started looking around for a good partner, someone with knowledge and success in the broadcast equipment industry. That’s when I made a casual remark about building a new AGC processor on the Facebook “I Love Broadcast Audio Processing” group page (yes, that’s a thing!). To my surprise, I received multiple private inquiries from interested people telling me how they’d like to help me get back in the processing business. After some back-and-forth among some very talented broadcasters and manufacturing managers, I determined that the best-fit candidate was Rich Redmond. I’d had known Rich since the early 1990s when I was at Z100 and he was National Sales Manager at Northeast Broadcast Labs, a popular broadcast equipment vendor.
After we exchanged emails regarding our interests, Rich and I met at the September, 2022 IBC convention in Amsterdam where we decided to work together. Over the next few months we put together a plan on how to proceed, resulting in Rich setting up “David Reaves Audio, LLC” to put an official name on our project. From there it was a question of what the market would like and who might work best to help us produce new products.
And here we are. David Reaves Audio, LLC
Zen Level - Zen 10 Stereo AGC
Elevate Your Audio - Time to get Zen
The Zen Level Zen 10 audio level controller by David Reaves Audio offers advanced, customizable Automatic Gain Control (AGC) for consistent and sonically pleasing audio levels. Developed by David Reaves, whose fascination with AGC began in his youth, the Zen 10 refines AGC principles to create a seamless, unobtrusive audio experience.
The Zen 10 is the ideal solution for precision audio level control in various applications, including:
- Radio broadcast pre-processing
- Audio production
- TV loudness control
- Streaming
- Podcasting
If you’re good at creating content that uses audio, you know that the people listening to you are going to want your sound levels to be consistent. The thing that does this for you is an “Automatic Gain Control,” or AGC.
What sets the Zen 10 apart is its unique "Zen" approach—knowing when not to adjust audio. If the audio level is already correct, no change is made, preserving the integrity of your sound. This philosophy helps prepare audio for the next stages of a broadcast chain, making any processor sound better while maintaining consistent, high-quality output.
In a world of multi-platform delivery—streaming, podcasts, network contribution—consistent, great-sounding audio is essential. The Zen 10 excels across all these platforms, ensuring your content always sounds its best.
Key features include a ratio control, release timing, platform control, peak protection, and a configurable "return-to-zero" function. Processing can use an ITU-R BS.1770 loudness-standardized side-chain, and output can be referenced to an LUFS target. The onboard “Perfect De-Clipper,” designed by DSP expert Hans Van Zutphen, restores missing peaks for enhanced sound quality.
With support for analog, AES3 digital, and Dante AES-67 digital audio I/O, and monitoring via a front-panel headphone jack, the Zen 10 can be controlled through its front panel or a web interface with dual color LCD displays.
Offering presets for quick setup and customizable settings, the Zen 10 features ten customizable control systems and up to five adjustable frequency bands, providing precise, dynamic control for any audio environment.
Experience the power of Zen Level—elevate your audio while maintaining its natural integrity.
Zen 10 is manufactured for David ReavesAudio by Aqua Broadcast
