Paul McGowan writes: Buying decisions are tough enough even if money’s no object, but when you’re on a limited budget—as many of us are—how do you make the tough choices of where to put your hard earned funds? The side of our personalities that want immediate gratification looks for the biggest bang for the buck. […]
Month: February 2020
Found 106 results
Hi chaps, I am planning on treating my room after hearing the control that Guildford audio gained with a lot of bass traps. Anyway. Where do I start with all this? Was thinking about writing to GIK acoustics for advice. What manufacturers should I consider – who makes decent (room friendly) treatments? I can’t have […]
Paul McGowan writes: We have two channel systems with dedicated left and right speakers, yet often we’re told it’s just fine to use a single subwoofer in mono. I’d like to suggest this attitude is wrong. The single-sub advocate’s logic goes something like this. “Low frequencies are essentially non-directional so it shouldn’t matter if the […]
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 […]
In my opinion, the speaker is by far the most important part of the audio system. After all, it is the only part you hear. OK, the other stuff really matters a lot, but without a great speaker… No go. I am a bit ‘speaker-obsessed’ I guess, and now I am wondering: What are the […]
Paul McGowan: There are two sides to many things: stories, paper, listening rooms. On one side are speakers and on the other, you. Where you sit in relation to the system: nearness to walls and speakers, height relative to the tweeters, in or out of bass nulls, can often make more difference than the components themselves. […]
Paul McGowan writes: Whatever happened to the format wars? We lost sleep over FLAC vs. ALAC, DSD vs. PCM, MQA in competition with everything else. Did our playback equipment suddenly get so good that these various formats now perform with varying degrees of excellence rather than acceptability? I can tell you that playback of 44.1kHz […]
Paul McGowan writes: Alan Sircom suggests that the problem with getting newcomers into the high-end is they already find their means of reproducing music “good enough” – so why spend more time and money getting something better? There’s some truth to what he writes. I would put forth the argument, however, that it is in […]
Paul McGowan writes Recently I mentioned I added a single sub to the setup in Music Room 2 and got great results. Several of you asked me why I didn’t add two, which is always my stand on subs, and where I got the sub. I wanted to also touch on how I connected the […]
Hi there. I heard this phrase before and was wondering, what does it mean and how do you do it? Any specifics would be appreciated. Thanks in advance! 38 responses so far
Paul McGowan writes: A friend came by and visited our sound room and was duly impressed with what he heard. He noticed that I use lifts to get the loudspeaker cables off of the floor. Much to my surprise, he went home and did the same thing to his system and emailed me that while […]
Paul McGowan: There are two sides to many things: stories, paper, listening rooms. On one side are speakers and on the other, you. Where you sit in relation to the system: nearness to walls and speakers, height relative to the tweeters, in or out of bass nulls, can often make more difference than the components themselves. […]
The thread starts: I am currently pretty satisfied with my system the way it is right now. I am not in the market for any new purchases right now, mainly because I don’t have the discretionary income to make big changes. However, sometimes I get the urge to want to go into a hifi store […]
Paul McGowan writes: It’s probably going to take me a long time to get used to the idea of playing my LP’s through a DAC – I mean it’s just really weird to put the needle down on the LP and hear the ticks and surface noise of that LP coming out of the PWD […]
Limit of about £200. What should I look for? Dip in and out HERE
“The term neutrality is pervasive in the world of audio. We often use the word when describing a component or a system, and most audiophiles agree on the definition: A neutral component or system neither adds nor subtracts from the music it seeks to convey, allowing the signal to flow through unencumbered, faithfully reproducing whatever […]
Paul McGowan writes: Head amps are devices used to separately amplify moving coil cartridges to the same level as moving magnets. They can be built from active electronics with power supplies or simple step-up transformers. They are needed because moving coil cartridges typically have outputs thirty times lower than their moving magnet brethren. Why they […]
From the archives ….. A highly sensitive magnetic material that could transform computer hard drives and energy storage devices has been discovered. The metal bilayer needs only a small shift in temperature to dramatically alter its magnetism – a tremendously useful property in electronic engineering. “No other material known to man can do this. It’s […]
Paul McGowan writes ……… Not that long ago in the scope of our evolution did we question if there were life forms smaller than could be seen by the human eye. Our collective answer was “no”. Yet enough people asked an even simpler question “how do we know that?” One questioner invented the microscope and […]
Just wondering, is there something in the design, materials, or fabrication that makes old tubes sound better than those being currently produced? it seems nearly universally held that old tubes are superior sounding to those made today – is there something specific about the old tubes that make then sound better?” Dip in and out […]
Paul McGowan writes: We just released some new software that changed the sound of our PerfectWave DAC. As is normal there’s debate on whether or not those changes are better or worse. For me there’s no question they are better in every respect – but only after I retuned my system to take advantage of […]