Waving The Wand

Riva WAND Wireless Music System

- Rob Sabin

I FIRST MET RIVA AUDIO founder Rikki Farr and chief engineer (now also president) Don North in the fall of 2014 when they marched into Sound & Vision’s New York City conference room to demo their first product, a Bluetooth speaker called the Turbo X. North was a youthful, glasses-wearing geek who had just enough of the right credentials and tech swagger to suggest he really knew what he was doing. And Farr was a bigger-than-life, avuncular Brit who claimed to have rubbed shoulders with or produced concerts for pretty much every one of my ’70s-era rock heroes, including some of the biggest names in music: Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Who, John Lennon, yada yada yada. Farr was ridiculously likable, though I figured he might be full of it—a modern-day P.T. Barnum, more showman than substance. Boy, was I wrong. He was indeed heavily involved in those very heady times in British rock, and had even helped organize the famous 1970 Isle of Wight Festival, which, with 600,000 attendees, was bigger than Woodstock. On Riva’s website, you can see a clip of the young Farr angrily chastising the festival’s unruly crowd.