People / Paul McGowan > guru

Paul McGowan writes: Solar energy is clean power uncontaminated by neighbors and industry as are our powerlines. So, would using solar energy to power our high-end audio systems be a good idea? How does it work? All will be answered in this short video by PS Audio CEO Paul McGowan. Watch Now  

Sometimes subwoofers are so intrusive it feels like we should be adjusting them for each and every track of music. How do we get around that desire and achieve a proper setup in our home audio systems? Watch Now Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan writes: Turning a good idea into a company is not easy. The devil, they say, is in the details; something Stan and I found to be true. In this video, Part II of the History of PS Audio, we learn how two wild-eyed hippie audiophiles turned a phono preamplifier into a business that today […]

Paul McGowan writes: There must not be enough worms crawling around so I figure I’ll just go ahead and open a fresh can. Keeps it fun that way. Why is it we’re convinced we can hear changes in polarity, or MQA vs. non MQA, or the difference between CD and vinyl—but find it hard to accept […]

Paul McGowan writes: Most of us like the sound of vacuum tubes on an amplifier’s input: sweet, rich, full-bodied, musical. An equal number aren’t too happy about their downsides: heat, microphonics, size, and the 300-pound gorilla—their ephemeral lifespan. Which is why most customers rejoiced when we began to leverage a solid state equivalent, the FET. […]

Paul McGowan writes: It’s easy to ignore–often criticize–the hard won victories of creative people designing leading edge technology. In fact, it’s one of the double edged swords of our abundantly-connected society that empowers readers with just enough information to miss the bigger picture. And this is part of the problem I find in helping unravel the […]

Paul McGowan writes: Satisfaction? Don’t feel badly, the Stones apparently couldn’t either. But is satisfaction the end game? And what happens after you achieve it? Are you ready for more? Something better? I don’t know about you, but I tend to categorize my achievements into three groups. The first is short, repetitive tasks with known outcomes, […]

Paul McGowan writes: My friend Andy sent me this link to the new Samsung 2TB solid state drive that’s smaller than a business card, launched this morning at CES. That’s amazing. A sold state drive capable of storing well over 2000 complete albums–and it’s smaller than a business card. Bit banging. It’s a term used […]

Paul McGowan writes: Sometimes it’s the little things that make something special. A smile, just at the right moment, or perhaps a helping hand when one wasn’t expected. When I think about what makes a piece of audio equipment special it’s often the little unnoticed touches that, together, make a product worth owning. Take for […]

Paul McGowan writes: Stan Warren and I started PS Audio more than 40 years ago. Two enterprising young guys hell-bent to change the world. Stan moved on to other pastures. I’ve been at it ever since. I think what has always driven the PS team remains the same: using technology in clever ways to move […]

Paul McGowan writes: Most people refer to their physical copies of music as collections, for that is what they typically are. Very few large collections of music are well organized. Take my own, for example. In Music Room One I have 6 shelves of vinyl and 30 of CDs and SACDs. Vinyl is organized by the […]

Paul McGowan writes: All DACs are not equal yet many of today’s most popular digital to analog converters are based on the same off-the-shelf chipset like those from ESS, Cirrus Logic, or Analog Devices. Yet those DACs using identical chips often sound as if cut from very different cloth. What makes them different? We might get […]

Paul McGowan writes: it still baffles me why long balanced interconnects seemed to sound better than long speaker cables. I previously shared with you my experience at HP’s home with an Audio Research preamp. That demonstrated just the opposite. So one conclusion we can make is the equipment you’re using has a lot to do […]

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: Computer audio can be hard to understand. I know this because I get so many questions from our customers. The (seemingly) most misunderstood terms are lossy and lossless, compressed and uncompressed. For starters, how many of us get an uncomfortable feeling when we hear our music’s been compressed? It’s like hearing your food was […]

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: 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 […]

Originally published 2015 Paul McGowan I was up late two nights ago, as you may have read, dialing in the speakers in Music Room 2. The speakers are a pair of Thiel 2-ways, using their coaxial driver arrangement. These are simple, well designed loudspeakers which are a perfect contrast to the giant Infinity IRS in […]

Paul McGowan writes: There are many great mysteries in the world: how the pyramids were built, the Easter Island Moai, why whatever hair I lose on my head seems to pop up somewhere else, and I am sure there are plenty more. There are two great mysteries in audio that are currently bugging me and, […]

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:  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 […]