Paul McGowan writes: I’ll get back to analog output stages soon enough but I got waylaid on our Community Forums area by an article posted by one of our Community Leaders, Gordon. The article is about how the ear works and, if you’re interested, you can read it here. I find all this interesting because […]
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Paul McGowan writes …. Most real world home stereo systems are placed in rooms where circumstances permit, not necessarily where they sound best. The last system I had in a home the speakers were on either side of a long couch, their distance determined by the length of the furniture rather than achieving perfect tonal balance. […]
Paul McGowan writes …. Many of today’s audio equipment designers are getting on in years. I am a good example as I creep towards 70. Hard to imagine because in my mind I am still about in my mid-30s. Only the occasional look in the mirror proves that thought incorrect. As we age our hearing […]
MQA has everyone talking but what exactly is it? What’s its goals and how does it sound? Some suggest it’s the devil incarnate while others believe it’s a gift from heaven. What’s the truth? Watch Now Paul McGowan
Paul McGowan writes …. My very first pair of high-performance loudspeakers were Magneplanars but the marriage didn’t last long. I soon found myself enamored with a different kind of panel speaker, an electrostat which was so much more revealing than the planar that I made the switch. This added window-like clarity was a result of […]
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 […]
When we set our sights far in the future the world looks nice and rosy. Imagine that new pair of speakers gracing your living room, the new amplifier, the rebuilt room. According to Mark Twain imagining the future takes a combination of things. “Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind […]
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 […]
Paul McGowan …… AGB’s latest column has been uploaded and for those of you interested to see what the Audio Hitman has to say about EQ’ing your system and frequency response in general, go here to read the article. For the faint of heart, I recommend abstaining. As I worked through the setup of the […]
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 […]
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 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 writes: Dipoles are unique. Sound comes out of both sides of the speaker. How close to the rear wall should the dipole be placed? Watch Now
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 writes: Audio equipment used to be hand wired in a process known as point to point wiring, but now most everything is without wires using thin strips of copper clad to fiberglass instead. What’s better, point-to-point or PC boards when it comes to sound quality? Watch Now
Originally published 2016 Paul McGowan ….. In a recent post I apparently gave out a bad link to this fellow’s video so here’s another. In the video, when you get a chance to watch it, you’ll probably pickup quite a few valuable tidbits of information and get a good view of how an engineer might […]
Paul McGowan writes: Printed circuit boards, those thin copper strips laminated to fiberglass, paper, or ceramic plates routing complex electrical signals are common today. It wasn’t always so. PCBs, as they are known, poked their collective heads out of infancy in the late 1950s after being invented by an Australian engineer, Paul Eisler, in 1936. […]
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: 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 […]
Some of the best bookshelf speakers on the market tell you not to place them on bookshelves! Absurd! Why is that and are there any truly good 2-0way bookshelf speakers to be had? Find out the whys and wherefores from PS Audio CEO Paul McGowan. Watch Now
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 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 […]
Paul McGowan writes: Our brains edit what we see and hear like a film director’s viewfinder. You’re probably familiar with this concept every time you take a picture of a distant mountain, seascape, or harvest moon and are disappointed with the outcome. What your vision records is entirely different than what the camera sees. Our brains […]
Paul McGowan writes: We’ve all heard of S/PDIF and AES/EBU but not many realize how those formats work and why they are inferior to what’s at their core, I2S. Paul explains this somewhat complex subject in simple terms anyone can understand and its knowledge worth absorbing. Watch Now