Paul McGowan: “If your going to sell high end cars like a Corvette, you need to drive it, shift it, corner it, to appreciate it. The thrill of whipping around in a Corvette is pretty righteous and just ignites passion inside of one when experienced.” Brad Paulson writes a terrific and insightful article about passion […]
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Paul McGowan We love smooth and perfect and shy away from irregularities. When I find a smooth surface, like a kitchen countertop, I feel compelled to rub my hand on its face to appreciate its perfection. Bumps and blits underhand are noticed immediately and I want to get a wet rag and scrub them clean. […]
Paul McGowan: So let’s imagine you’ve taken my suggestions, done all you can to fix a ground loop hum issue at its source and you still have hum. What then? Then you have to take a different path: break the ground loop. To do this you will need to ‘unground’ the offending piece of equipment. […]
Paul McGowan writes: Last night we’re walking by a hotel and through an open window I hear the sound of a live piano. The folks I am with hear the same thing and comment on the fact it’s live. How is it we can tell something is live vs. recorded and reproduced from a distance […]
Paul McGowan writes: A while back I mentioned John Atkinson’s name and several of my readers were horrified–said they could not trust him–because he had heard a difference on a process that intellectually offended them. Rubbish. Let’s examine this notion. The offending item is the demagnetizing of CDs. I may be thrown out of the […]
Paul McGowan: When I meet new people I am often asked how is it we even dare to compete against the giants in our industry like Sony or Harman? There’s a simple answer and then a more complex one. The simple answer is we’re not – never have been. Our market is the high-end, Sony […]
Paul McGowan: I am always fascinated by macro views – those all encompassing views of complex interactions we tend to think of as simple and explainable when in reality they are terribly complicated and intertwined. Let me give you some examples. Ever stop and wonder what the rules and mechanisms of automobile traffic patterns might […]
Funny thing is, there’s really no good answer any more. I used to advocate RPG diffusors and personally I use a combination of RPG and DAAD Diffusors but it seems RPG has gone away from high-end accessibility and DAAD is not something you can afford. Where does one go now and what the heck happend […]
Paul McGowan writes: Have you ever noticed how much better your car runs after you wash it? Or how about how much better your audio system sounds after you’ve cleaned, dusted, and taken some time to groom the room? Maybe I am the only one on this planet that feels this, but I suspect not. […]
And continuing our thought from a recent post, only this time in reverse, isn’t it obvious that just because something has all the right stuff it doesn’t necessarily qualify as great itself? And doesn’t this observation help explain one of the age old mysteries in audio about how something can measure great and sound poor? […]
Generalities While reading through the comments section of a blog I stopped at one standout. “I prefer the sound of speakers from across the pond.” Generalities. We tend to group our opinions into neat little boxes: British speakers are bass deficient, American speakers are big and brash, silver conductors are brighter than copper, tubes are […]
For most people, amplification of the musical signal means just that. Taking the original signal as generated by the source and making that signal bigger. Only, that’s not what happens. In the same way the energy from your leg pressing a gas pedal is not actually amplified in the movement of an automobile, it would be more […]
PAUL MCGOWAN / PS AUDIO Conventional wisdom would have us believe best results are obtained via simple solutions. The simpler the solution the better and cleaner the outcome. I find simple solutions are often the most difficult to accept and inevitably the hardest to find. How many times have you gone round and round in […]
It’s more than just camaraderie. To non-engineering folk, our conversations might sound like a different language what with all the terminology bandied about. But more than terminology is the implied understanding of bigger concepts. Terms like -3dB, half power, slew rate, open loop, rise times, wave shapes, carry with them major implications. If our depth […]
I wince when people equate op-amps with chips. An op-amp describes a topology, not a chip. Yes, the op-amp topology is often built onto a silicon wafer, but we should be careful not to forever bind the two together unless we’re clear about the difference. (If you’re technically minded there’s a great paper describing in […]
PAUL MCGOWAN … For those with a clear understanding, this is a good post to skip. For those still unclear about what it means when we speak of high and low impedances, this might be right up your alley. The simplest way to think about impedance is to consider it an opposer. The higher the impedance […]
50 years ago in the dark ages of my past, I was determined to learn how circuits worked and what made amplifiers tick. Working full time as a disc jockey for the US Army in Germany at that time I had no practical means of attending school. Enter Herr Rudy Stroebel, chief engineer of the […]
Paul McGowan writes: There’s increasing evidence that rhymes, poems, meter and cadence in stories were created not because they are beautiful but because they helped us keep the words straight before the advent of written language. It is how our civilization kept important lessons, histories, messages and stories intact without writing anything down. Imagine any […]
A growing trend in media servers is to employ the use of a NAS rather than rely upon the built in HD inside of a music server. It’s probably not a bad idea. NAS is an acronym for Network Attached Storage—a hard drive accessible over a home network. For years, NAS were shunned by most […]
Paul McGowan writes: Have you ever stopped to notice that your high-end audio system has a personality? Mine sure does. Just about everything we interact with has a story or a personality that describes the way we relate to it. Your hi-fi system’s no different. I have two listening systems, the first is my big […]
In yesterday’s post about the fluidity of my stereo system, I mentioned upgrading from the amazing BHK300 monoblock amplifiers to the newer BHK600s. More than a few people emailed me asking why. Why would I upgrade what is already an overkill amplifier to one with even more wattage? It’s a good question. Let’s look at some of […]
Paul McGowan: Just for grins I pulled out a 30 year old preamplifier from PS Audio and gave it a listen. I was stunned at just how good it sounded. At first I was depressed because it immediately said to me that we can’t have made much progress over the last three decades. But then […]
PAUL McGOWAN … We work so hard to build a perfect audio equipment chain. It pains us to think about breaking that chain. I am often asked about the best means of interconnecting a chain of equipment. My answer rarely varies. Balanced. Yup, I am a big proponent of balanced audio. I’ve many times sung […]
When I hear someone suggest that as humans we’re all the same I cringe. Thankfully, we are not all the same. Each of us is wired differently than the others. Sure, we have much in common (thank goodness), but what works for me might not work for you. The differences in our wiring can often […]