Paul McGowan writes: There are very few pieces of hifi kit that won’t benefit from a great deal of care and attention. But one benefits far more than anything else I can think of. The turntable. Vinyl’s playback is almost entirely dependent on proper setup. Getting the arm and cartridge combination playing nice together is […]
Month: September 2020
Found 41 results
Paul McGowan: In our comments section, in response to my post FOMO, there is a good and healthy debate going on about the differences in sound quality between DSD and PCM. In one of the comments a fellow manufacturer’s online rant “proving” that PCM is as good as DSD is cited. The article includes a […]
Paul McGowan writes: Most loudspeakers are trapped inside sealed boxes where the woofer’s rear wave cannot interfere with its front wave. But, there is another type of speaker called an open baffle that has no box. Find out what Paul thinks of open baffle loudspeakers. Watch Now
Paul McGowan: In 1980 there was no internet as we know it today. The PC was introduced in 1981 and in that same year, we listened to our music on turntables and tape decks. Vinyl, tape and the inherent limitations of their mediums came to be known as analog and were all we had to […]
Paul McGowan: I wrote about a product that appeared to work but unfortunately had an explanation that was so riddled with BS that it was a turn off. That story reminded me of the opposite: a product that worked like magic and had a great explanation. The Owen Bennet Magic Box. In the 1970′s Stan […]
Paul McGowan writes: The transition from one format to another, say vinyl to CD, CD to streaming audio, PCM to DSD, embodies the future directions music reproduction is taking. Inevitably the first transition period has both major benefits and drawbacks as well. We should not judge a format at the time of its transition. The […]
Paul McGowan writes: Daniel von Recklinghausen, the renowned audio engineer at EAD and KLH is famous for this old chestnut: “If it measures good and sounds bad, — it is bad. If it sounds good and measures bad, — you’ve measured the wrong thing.” Hard to argue with the man’s logic. One of the ways […]
Paul McGowan: Thanks for all the great feedback on our new video series on Jitter. Click the link to our YouTube channel so you can view what you want. We’ll be adding a new video or two on the subject of digital audio and jitter each week, so hopefully we can all share a lot […]
Paul McGowan: One of our readers commented on my post Ripping it up with a very insightful observation I found particularly stimulating this morning. “Perception ignores anything that is constant (like neighbors ignoring the roar of Niagara Falls) and focuses on minute changes. We can even hear echoes and noises that are 10dB or more […]
Paul McGowan writes: There are very few servo controlled woofer systems on the market today. They have long been touted as the best woofer performance in the world. Is it true or hokum? And, if true, why don’t more woofer systems employ servos? Paul explains how they work and why they perform the way they […]
Paul McGowan: In the previous post I told the story of receiving 14 tickets in a row for the same heinous crime: no brake or tail lights on my little red sports car. I promptly threw away all the tickets and went about my business until a cop showed up at the door with a […]
STEVE GUTTENBERG: Let’s face it: our “indulgences” can get expensive, so whether we go to sports events or concerts, buy flashy clothes or jewelry, gamble, drink, or take lots of vacations, those things can add up to a lot of money. Smoke a $6 pack of cigarettes every day, and you’ll see close to […]
Paul McGowan writes: Good memories sweeten with time. My first experience with a pair of exceptional loudspeakers was in the home of radio station engineer Jim Mussel in 1973. He and I worked for the same FM rock and roll radio station, KXFM in Santa Maria, California. We were both interested in good sound but […]
Paul McGowan: I’ve posted about this before: there simply aren’t any good places to go to find pre-packaged entry or mid level high-end audio products. That’s a mistake. If we’ve gone to all the trouble to create a brand for the high-end, then certified products as true high-end audio products that live up to the […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. We’ve briefly discussed getting the digital audio stream into the DAC and then decoding those bits back into a form of analog that gets us a lot closer to being able to play it on our systems. At the output of the DAC chip we have a series of current steps […]
Paul McGowan: I just finished reading a great and insightful book, Dogfight, by Fred Vogelstein. The book chronicles the fight for dominance in the mobile computing market between Apple and Google. It’s extremely well written and a good page turner. What interested me most about this book was the level of chaos the two companies […]
Paul McGowan writes …. If we mentally step back from focusing on just the reproduction chain (your stereo system) and look at the entire process of capturing and playing back the sound of live musicians playing in a room, we can see it as pipe with an input and and output. On the one end […]
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you’re focusing so hard on a minute details that you miss the elephant in the room? Happens to me all the time. A commenter to these posts mentioned an AB test he witnessed between two amps and after multiple A/B back and forth tests someone suggested the channels between […]
Paul McGowan writes: When we talk about sound, what do adjectives like, dark, wooly, bright, spacious, or edgy sound like on our stereo systems? Hard to say, because words build pictures in our heads that have no literal equivalent in sound. “Wooly” forms an image of “thick”, but how can sound be thick? Just today I was trying to describe the […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. Every device type we might choose to design an output stage or an amplifier of any kind has inherent distortion products. These distortions are different in a current amplifying device (like a bipolar transistor) than they are in a voltage amplifying device (like a FET or tube). The differences are in […]
“I’ve just set up my daughter’s old Dell laptop to run through the Young DAC as a way of playing the odd HD file I have, or a few bits that are on the hard disc. Just by chance, I put a CD in and let it play rather than rip. It sounded rather […]
First published November 2015 Paul McGowan writes: There appears to be an increasing customer frustration level in all sectors of business towards errors in products and services, reported through customer feedback, and the company’s response time to fix those errors. Customer expectation levels for faster error correction, perhaps even elimination of errors, appear to be […]
Q1: So Neil ….. does size matter? By and large and in my direct personal experience, the answer’s yes. Moreover size matters greatly. Q2: A practical example, perhaps? So, If you have a couple of 8″ drivers in a box you’re calling a subwoofer, you’re going to be disappointed if you follow the setup steps […]
Paul McGowan writes: I am trying to remember the system at the time I made the switch from long speaker cables. I believe at that time Music Room One consisted of a pair of Maggie 3.7, a pair of Descent subwoofers, and powered by a Classic 250 amplifier. It was a hell of a good […]