PS Audio

Paul McGowan: Thanks to reader John McRee for suggesting the title of today’s post.  Yesterday we learned we need 8 times more power to reproduce speech than we do sine waves – which may then surprise people that loudspeaker manufacturers continue to use sine waves as a basis for their efficiency measurements.  It certainly surprises […]

Paul McGowan writes: I promised yesterday we’d start to learn what Crest Factor is and how it applies to headroom in an amplifier. While understanding this concept isn’t all that important to making your amplifier power decision, getting a basic understanding of how it all works and why is probably useful for most of us […]

Paul McGowan writes: Have you ever wondered why there are so many different sample rates and why? The compact disc samples at 44.1kHz/16 bits. But then there’s these other rates like 48kHz, 88.2kHz, 96kHz, 176.4kHz, 192kHz. Wow, that’s a lot and the spacing doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. How did we get […]

Paul McGowan writes: Getting the midbass right in a system is something many of us overlook in loudspeaker setup, focusing instead on the low bass. I have seen this time and time again and the reason we do this is two fold: rooms are tough on the low bass levels requiring a lot of speaker […]

Paul McGowan writes: Now here’s an interesting term. Congested would normally apply to a health issue one might have but in audio terms it describes the way something might sound when it gets bunched up. It’s funny how we use some health terms like congested or constipated to describe the way something sounds. Stiff, unmoving, […]

Paul McGowan writes: The word passion has a number of definitions but the one I like the best comes from the Urban Dictionary: “Passion is when you put more energy into something than is required to do it. It is more than just enthusiasm or excitement, passion is ambition that is materialized into action to […]

Paul McGowan writes: A good friend of many years is in town for a few days and we’ve been discussing high-end audio, products, the marketplace, etc. He’s been spending time in our facilities and sees the extraordinary effort that goes into designing some of our products: the months of hard work it takes to get […]

Paul McGowan writes: I was set to move onward in our explanation of the output analog stage of a DAC or preamp but one of my readers asked me to explain output impedance which I mentioned a few days ago.  This is a subject that folks should understand at least at some level because so […]

Paul McGowan writes: I suppose the term “headroom” must have come about in response to tall people trying to make sure there’s enough room for their heads to go through a doorway or fit into a carriage.  Makes sense anyway. In audio, headroom means that there’s enough space to amplify music without running into the […]

Paul McGowan writes: Several of you asked me why I was so interested in a 20+ year old pair of loudspeakers that I would sell everything in the listening room to get it and what makes this speaker so special? This giant loudspeaker has a number of charms but perhaps the biggest for me is […]

Paul McGowan writes: I would imagine the canon shots on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 might sound more like the banging of pots on a B&W Zepplin, or a pair of bookshelf speakers. Big music should be honored by full range gear. Conversely, Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, or Red Norvo sound right at home on small kit. If […]

Paul McGowan writes ….. I have never understood the purpose of speaker stands for small two-way loudspeakers. If you’re not going to use them on a shelf, as intended, what sense do they make? A small speaker box struggles with bass—it’s just physics. Sacrificing music’s full range for a small box only makes sense in […]

Paul McGowan writes ….. Visiting audio clubs, dealers, trade shows and people’s homes is illuminating to me.  I am always learning.  Recently I sat in front of a dealer’s high-end demo system and was amazed at how wrong the image was. The entire presentation of the music was between my seating position and the loudspeakers: […]

Paul McGowan writes ….. Recently I explained the real problem in using a direct coupled product like a power amp or preamp is not the DC they produce, which is minimal at best, but how these products handle DC from OTHER products.  If the designer has built the classic “DC to light” amplifier,  you risk […]

Paul McGowan writes ….. Change can be tough for me, especially when the means to an end make no sense. Like green pens on CD edges, demagnetizers, magic stones, voodoo dots, resonators aligning the earth to my stereo system. Ideas presented to me that I cannot make sense of get put on hold. Sometimes indefinitely. […]

Paul McGowan writes ….. When upsampling programs add bits to digital audio our machines are happier, but there’s no new information to hear, no increase in dynamics to be had. It’s tempting to think otherwise. When you read that an analog tape or vinyl album has been recorded with 24 bits rather than 16, you’re […]

Paul McGowan writes …… For many years I let logic override my listening abilities. Instead of making every decision in the stereo system by careful A/B testing, some decisions were made with logic, others common sense. There are frankly too many variables to listen to them all. Engineering logic suggests power amplifiers have the easiest […]