It may sound funny, the headline of this post. I love the sound of tubes, have owned tons of tube equipment and yet – I have never designed a tube piece ever. And add to that mystery the fact that when I design a piece of equipment I design for myself. I don’t ever […]
Month: December 2020
Found 32 results
Small rooms can easily overload with bass so does it make sense to add a subwoofer within smaller confines? Continues HERe
Paul McGowan: In my post Climbing the ladder I pointed out that something fundamental changed between the introduction of digital audio and today with respect to DAC architecture. DACs of old (we’re only talking 25 years or so) used a fixed architecture to handle the PCM signal. That architecture relied on a string of 16 […]
How boring if you’re biased right in the middle eh? You don’t lean to the left or the right, you’re just middle of the road for everything – as if you don’t actually have an opinion. Well, in audio amplifier designs that’s exactly what you want – a totally neutral middle-of-the-road stance when it comes […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. Few things in life are as satisfying as an aha! moment: the solving of a tough problem, the solution to a puzzle, getting your stereo system dialed in. One of the more common aha! moments for people is when they try easing up on speaker toe in. Most speakers don’t want […]
Paul McGowan writes: I have always found it curious when someone says to me “I am 100% vinyl in my system. No use for digital audio whatsoever.” Or, “I never listen to vinyl, too dated, sounds bad.” Or, “I have sold all my CD’s and gone just to SACD.” It’s curious because these extremes many […]
Paul McGowan ….. No power amplifier is more sensitive to the incoming AC power as a class D and that makes it critical to run it off the best power you can manage whether that’s from a Power Plant or perhaps you’re lucky enough to live out in the country with out any neighbors mucking […]
Reader Tom Richard writes “As a long-time bass player, I’ve always used cymbals to judge music reproduction. The worst systems give you white noise; the best present so much information. Can you hear the difference between standard wood tip drumsticks and nylon-tipped? The amazing differences between cymbals struck near their edge, in the middle and […]
In our ongoing series on class D amps and listener fatigue I made the point (hopefully) that the input stage is a critical path element in the chain – because if you can’t get this part right then everything else that follows only contributes to making things worse. It’s like putting bad gas in […]
Paul McGowan writes: I have now officially been accused of “defending digital” in the face of overwhelming evidence that analog sounds better. How dare I? Let me suggest that there are three things I will passionately defend in audio – and digital isn’t one of them. The truth. We may not like to look at […]
Paul McGowan: My friend Robert sent me a link to a great article on how music affects the brain in the New York Times. It’s well worth the read should you be as interested in the subject as I am. What it shows is the same mechanisms at work we use for figuring out all […]
Everything we appreciate about a high-end system is, of course, a sensory perception: mostly hearing but certainly feeling the sound as its vibrations move you as well. We spend a lot of time enhancing the sonic performance aspects of our systems with hardware tweaks, but if we also recognize there are benefits to enhancing our […]
Paul McGowan writes: If a preamplifier or phono stage uses only one power supply voltage to feed the circuit, as is typical in many classic tube designs, a blocking capacitor smack dab in the middle of the musical signal is required to interface to other kit. The reason this is true is that 1/2 the […]
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I am mindlessly working out at the gym on the elliptical trainer, watching the many TV’s and there it appeared. Out of nowhere. I nearly fell off the machine. It was an ad for The Wolf Of Wall Street, proclaiming it’s been nominated for Best Picture. This in the face of actually having watched the […]
Our quick response to these questions would be to treat the cause rather than the symptoms – we’ve seen many examples of this in our lives and intuitively the answer seems obvious – but does it apply to our rooms? Should we be running digital correction, processors, equalizers to force our systems to work within […]
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2017/apr/18/70s-album-cover-art-hipgnosis-in-pictures
We absolutely love it when audiophiles and music lovers drop by to visit us in Boulder. Folks are treated to the nickel tour of the factory, engineering labs, admin areas, even the ping pong room, and then the grand prize. Music Room One. Just after January’s Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, Stereophile Editor John Atkinson […]
A lot of people love the sound of horns. I am not one of them.I do love some of the qualities they present: high efficiency, terrific dynamic range, dynamic contrasts and great transient speed. I do not love their tonal characteristics. Cup your hands around your mouth and speak – this is what horns do […]
Paul McGowan: Our Hi Fi systems depend on power to operate and the power they need is DC – yet we feed them AC. Most of us are familiar with battery powered stereo products as they were all the rage for quite some time, but interest in them fizzled out and we plug our equipment […]
We’re discussing audio blocking capacitors; elements in the signal path that our music has to run through to get to our ears. These capacitors block DC and let AC pass through – AC being the essential element of music – DC is needed for things to work but we do not want it in our […]
In a comment on my posting about voicing high end electronics the question was asked “Is there only one ideal voicing?” Great question and here’s the entire quote. “And then it also depends on the venue and seat in the venue what is the sound you are looking for. I recall Gordon Holt’s review of […]
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Paul McGowan writes: A visitor to our facilities the other day stared at the giant Infinity IRS monoliths in Music Room number Two in amazement. Not because they were so wonderful, but just because of their sheer size and the amount of space dedicated to them. “Don’t you think this is way over the […]