Paul McGowan writes ….. Just about everything Google does is free. Google search, Docs, Gmail, maps, Earth, and so on. In fact, one of the coolest apps I have ever used is Google Translate. And it’s free. Dining at an Italian, French, or Chinese restaurant and can’t read the menu? Open the app, click on […]
Paul McGowan
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Raul Montilla from Puerto Rico sent me a kind note about an interesting experiment from years past. In it, Jack Renner and the engineers from Telarc are said to have recorded the Cleveland Orchestra on both an analog tape recorder and a Soundstream Digital recorder. They then compared the output of the two and all selected the […]
Paul McGowan writes: Now you’ve gotten your main speaker system in order and imaging properly, according to yesterday’s post, it’s time to think about adding our subwoofer. Let’s start with a fairly broad overview and then later we can dig down deep. Your subwoofers are going to be placed behind and to the outside of […]
Paul McGowan: One of our readers made an interesting observation. He writes: “selecting a record, cleaning that record, clamping the record, starting the motor, cleaning the stylus, cueing up the cartridge and sitting down to listen prepared me to listen in a way that a few mouse clicks or screen taps doesn’t. I’d made a […]
Paul McGowan writes: Reviewer Eric Neff wrote a bold comment in his recent review of the BHK 250 in HiFi Plus Magazine. As audiophiles, we sometimes fall into the ‘price equals performance’ trap. We fear being the emperor with no clothes when our friends ask how much we paid and it was, gasp! LESS than […]
My friend, Gordon, sent me a link to a great YouTube video worth watching. It’s about how music has changed and, in the opinion of the presenter, not for the better. You can watch it by clicking here. The program goes into great detail how most of today’s pop music has been reduced from creative […]
My office door was open last night just before quitting time. I hardly noticed that James from customer service was grinning at me. “So, you still rock out,” he said with a touch of incredulity. And he was right. I had turned up the volume on my little recording studio monitors as the fingers of keyboardist […]
Paul McGowan writes: One of my readers asked a very legitimate question: one that is asked on an ongoing basis and it refers to my post about cables. “Help me here. I do believe a roadblock to a broader appreciation of our hobby is the perception that the high-end audio industry is lubricated with snake […]
Paul McGowan: Here’s an interesting piece of history for you. Before the cable companies existed, no one paid any attention to the wires or cables used to connect our systems. Speakers were connected to power amps through lamp cord purchased at the local electrical store without any fanfare. We knew heavier sounded better, but that […]
Paul McGowan ……… In my new found quest to figure out why power cables made a difference in my preamplifier circuit I began to suspect that I wasn’t adding fullness or, for that matter, anything to the preamp’s sound but rather guessed that what must be happening is one of degrading in the first place. […]
Paul McGowan writes: When we compare sound quality between a set of Mogami XLR cables and Audioquest WEL silver XLR cables is there a difference to be heard in Music Room One? Watch Now
Paul McGowan: We’re on vacation to celebrate my birthday but my mind’s never far from audio. When I am considering a problem I often imagine the impossible in order to explore the possible. This process helps free my mind from rehashing prior art. My impossible thought was to create a speaker where one set of […]
Paul McGowan writes: There must not be enough worms crawling around so I figure I’ll just go ahead and open a fresh can. Keeps it fun that way. Why is it we’re convinced we can hear changes in polarity, or MQA vs. non MQA, or the difference between CD and vinyl—but find it hard to accept […]
We can say with some confidence 10% distortion is audible, but is 0.1%? And, compared to what? Can we hear the difference between 0.1% THD and 0.0001% THD? There comes a point in measurements where one must decide what matters and what does not. It probably doesn’t matter, for example, that one wheel of your […]
Paul McGowan: The lower the AC impedance feeding high-end audio equipment the better each piece sounds. And when the entire system is fed with low impedance power the results can often be breathtakingly better. But, how do engineers lower impedance? That question’s not simple to answer but I am going to try. Basically, we need a […]
From as far back as 1974 (which to me doesn’t seem that long ago) I have felt part of a community. The community of people like you and me. Out of the ordinary folks who know what good sound is and are willing to invest their time, passion, and available funds into achieving great sound. […]
Paul McGowan: One objection many of us harbor towards DSP (Digital Signal Processing) is the necessity to convert analog to digital then back again. While I have nothing against digital—my system is pretty much all digital—I am still a purist at heart. The idea of working as hard as we do to get perfect analog out […]
When we listen to music we’re hoping for a connection. Does it touch our soul? We all have experienced that connection to music. Sometimes it happens at a concert, other times it’s totally random: in the car, somebody whistling a tune, or on your high-end audio system. The better my system sounds the closer I […]
Paul McGowan: Remember when we thought the best way to get pure live sound from our hi-fi systems was to artificially make them better? Dynamic range expanders, click and pop eliminators, aural exciters, holographic generators, stereo dimensional arrays. Even something as unexciting as an external active crossover was crafted to better serve up music. It wasn’t […]
In one of my Ask Paul video questions, I was asked how far back subwoofers go in 2-channel audio. The community member had only become aware of subs as they related to home theater. Of course, many readers of Paul’s Post know subs date back much further than home theater. From Wikipedia: In September 1964, […]
Paul McGowan: What we hope for in any piece of hi-fi equipment is sonic transparency. We get there by practicing the Hippocratic oath, “First, do no harm.” And while this is all well and good the facts are unfortunately not in our favor. All electronics affect the signal in some way: robbing or adding. There’s […]
For a small handful, it is possible to build temples of sound—a dedicated purpose-built room. They are rare. More of us convert existing space into dedicated listening areas that we revere as our sound temples, but the vast majority simply plop down our systems in the living room or den and do what we can […]