We wouldn’t need laws if everyone did the right thing. Unfortunately, people justify all kinds of behavior that’s socially unacceptable: greed, selfishness, every-man-for-himself, self-aggrandizing at the expense of others. We make laws and rules to even the playing field—then those same people spend their days figuring out how to work around them. An endless circular battle that benefits […]
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Paul McGowan writes: We all love live music recordings and work hard to get our high-performance audio systems to sound like the real deal. But how can modern music recorded on multitrack machines and studios ever be considered high end or even close to live? Watch Now
Several of you have asked me how you can tell if the output capacitor of your preamp (if it has one) is adequate for the input impedance of your amplifier. If you’ll recall, I suggested in this post that a mismatch, while rare these days, will result in a loss of low bass or unwanted […]
When Alon Sagee was a wet behind the ears audiophile he spent his days hanging around stereo shops. Today he is the president of the San Francisco Audiophile Society. “At 20, I bought my first audiophile gear at HiFi Haven, a high-end audio dealer in my college neighborhood in New Jersey. This was definitely not a […]
Happy first day of winter. What better subject to warm the heart on a cold winter’s day than ground loops. Keeps us grounded and humming along. Ok, I couldn’t resist. I mentioned in yesterday’s post if we had hum with only a power amp and speaker connected it could not be a ground loop. How […]
We get a new piece of audio gear and it sounds “stiff” unyielding and “new”. So we run it in and wait for a few weeks before passing final judgment. The question is asked all the time: what is breaking in, the equipment or me? The analytical side of us wants to scoff at this […]
Paul McGowan writes: With yesterday’s announcement of the P20 Power Plant’s launch, inevitable questions fly. One that piqued my interest is “how could any device improve upon the pure output of a power generator?” It’s a great question and one that requires a bit of explanation. In yesterday’s post, I had offered a bit of history when […]
In a recent post I relayed the story of being banned from playing the kind of music I liked on the family stereo. Not to be deterred, I set out to build my own stereo system so I could close the door to my room and play whatever I wanted. I figured all I would […]
Paul McGowan writes: When we first started PS Audio back in the dark ages of the early 1970′s there was no such things as email, the World Wide Web or, for that matter, personal computers either. The IBM PC was launched a decade after PS Audio was founded and the computers of the day were […]
Paul McGowan writes: This will be the first of a few posts on room treatment, so big is this subject I will be writing about. When we first started this series of posts on the setup of your system I made the point that the room is a critical component in the chain we call […]
Paul McGowan writes: Yesterday’s Paul’s Post got a few of you thinking and commenting. In it, I suggested we’re not at the end of the discovery line in audio, but rather standing on the precipice of the next big innovation. I truly believe that. Stereo is great but way past its prime. Like the gasoline […]
Paul McGowan On a recent pilgrimage to Arnie Nudell’s home (founder of Infinity and Genesis) to have a power amplifier shootout, I was struck by a comment he made to me about the way the system sounded (which was nothing short of magnificent). He correctly pointed out that the sound was so real you could […]
Paul McGowan writes: We discussed the effects of depth of soundstage, characterized by some as “layered depth” to describe the spacing in the horizontal plane that we hear in our high end audio systems. I mentioned that there is yet another dimension to the depth aspect of our systems, that of height. The height of […]
We judge our stereo system’s performance by a long list of criteria. There’s tonal balance, imaging, dynamics (both micro and macro), soundstaging, top end, bottom end, midrange bloom, noise levels, and of course pacing and rhythm. When I was first got involved in high-end audio no one spoke of pacing and rhythm as a measure of quality, […]
Paul McGowan writes: An integrated amplifier is certainly convenient. A group of hifi separates packaged into a single chassis sharing a power supply. But integrateds are compromises with the advantages of separate supplies and chassis. Can PS Audio design and build a state of the art integrated people can afford? Watch Now
How different are the reproduction systems of musicians and studios versus those from high-end audio systems and audiophiles? Watch Now
Paul McGowan writes ….. A previous post on the Golden Age of Recordings sparked a fair number of emails and one them asked me “what is live”? Is it sticking your head into the piano? After all, that’s live if you were so inclined. Another complained of too much detail being focused on by Audiophiles […]
The secret to getting a perfect copy of an analog recording is found in the converter that takes in the analog and spits out the digital. This converter is called an Analog to Digital Converter, or ADC, and is the exact opposite of what you’re no doubt familiar with a DAC or Digital to Analog […]
Paul McGowan: In the early days of the magazine TAS (The Absolute Sound) there were, as there are today, many great writers. One of the most outspoken and, coincidently, one of my favorites was AGB. Go back and look through your copies of the 80′s and 90′s editions and you’ll see many a great article […]
Originally published in 2015 Paul McGowan: No, this post isn’t about some lame track about ‘dat bass‘, but it is about ‘dat bass’. Over dinner last night with Infinity founder Arnie Nudell and PS Audio’s Bill Leebens, the discussion turned to bass. Better put, the lack of it in today’s speakers, something I constantly harp […]
Paul McGowan: When it comes to wire sizes, numbers are confusing. Take for example our power cords. Our lowest cost power cable is based on 12 gauge wire, the next up 10 gauge, then 8. And from these numbers you’d imagine the size of each power cord is getting smaller, corresponding to the smaller number, […]
Paul McGowan: The main listening room at PS Audio is approximately 16 feet wide by 35 feet long – not a huge room but not too small either. Left bare and with nothing more than just the loudspeakers and equipment to power them in place, the room is an OK venue for sound reproduction. Add […]
Writes Paul McGowan ….. One of my readers, Mark S, asks the question of why we manufacturers seem to work so hard at building kit that serves all music and all tastes equally well. I think it’s a good question and one worth thinking about. In most fields a “one size fits all” mentality […]
We perceive sound with our ears. We listen with our minds. What’s interesting about this observation is that no two people hear or listen in the same way yet we can each agree an oboe is an oboe, a guitar a guitar, Beethoven’s 5th rather than another symphony. Our senses may be similar in function but […]