Unity Audio's Super Rock is a near or mid-field monitor with a sealed cabinet design and no bass reflex port. Called an acoustic suspension design, the air inside the cabinet provides linear movement control of the bass cone for better transient response and tighter bass reproduction. The cabinet measures 16 H x 10.5 W x 13.9-inches D and is made from 18-mm birch plywood with its front (baffle) bonded to a 30-mm thick layer of Corian.
The Super Rock monitor starts with an 8-inch SEAS custom woofer that has a black-anodized aluminum cone and waveguide in the center. A German-made Mundorf Air Motion Transformer (AMT) tweeter is used for the high frequencies. A 75-watt low frequency amp and a 25-watt HF amplifier power the woofer and tweeter. I put the Super Rock monitors up in my studio for a week of listening and comparing my mixes on them and several other monitors. The Super Rock monitors have no rear panel adjustments or controls apart from an overall gain control. Unity fixes the crossover frequency and the level of the tweeter relative to the woofer and, based on what I was hearing, I found no specific need to change that.
I found the Unity Audio Super Rock monitors to sound “forward” with the slight lift in the midrange as compared to other monitors. I could easily hear what needed fixing in the mix and that is (if nothing else) the primary purpose of any good monitor as a mixing tool. The Super Rock monitors work well for mid to lower listening volumes and that would be the way I would use them if I owned a pair. Unity Audio’s Super Rock monitors sell for $2,625 MSRP each.
U.S. distributor: stcgear.com/Unity_SuperRock.htm
unityaudioproducts.co.uk/super-rock.php
BARRY RUDOLPH is a recording engineer/mixer who has worked on over 30 gold and platinum records. He has recorded and/or mixed Lynyrd Skynyrd, Hall & Oates, Pat Benatar, Rod Stewart, the Corrs and more. Barry has his own futuristic music mixing facility and loves teaching audio engineering at Musician’s Institute, Hollywood, CA. He is a lifetime Grammy-voting member of NARAS and a contributing editor for Mix Magazine. barryrudolph.com
