Paul McGowan: Thanks for all the great feedback on our new video series on Jitter. Click the link to our YouTube channel so you can view what you want. We’ll be adding a new video or two on the subject of digital audio and jitter each week, so hopefully we can all share a lot […]
Paul McGowan
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Paul McGowan: One of our readers commented on my post Ripping it up with a very insightful observation I found particularly stimulating this morning. “Perception ignores anything that is constant (like neighbors ignoring the roar of Niagara Falls) and focuses on minute changes. We can even hear echoes and noises that are 10dB or more […]
Paul McGowan writes: There are very few servo controlled woofer systems on the market today. They have long been touted as the best woofer performance in the world. Is it true or hokum? And, if true, why don’t more woofer systems employ servos? Paul explains how they work and why they perform the way they […]
Paul McGowan: In the previous post I told the story of receiving 14 tickets in a row for the same heinous crime: no brake or tail lights on my little red sports car. I promptly threw away all the tickets and went about my business until a cop showed up at the door with a […]
Paul McGowan writes: Good memories sweeten with time. My first experience with a pair of exceptional loudspeakers was in the home of radio station engineer Jim Mussel in 1973. He and I worked for the same FM rock and roll radio station, KXFM in Santa Maria, California. We were both interested in good sound but […]
Paul McGowan: I’ve posted about this before: there simply aren’t any good places to go to find pre-packaged entry or mid level high-end audio products. That’s a mistake. If we’ve gone to all the trouble to create a brand for the high-end, then certified products as true high-end audio products that live up to the […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. We’ve briefly discussed getting the digital audio stream into the DAC and then decoding those bits back into a form of analog that gets us a lot closer to being able to play it on our systems. At the output of the DAC chip we have a series of current steps […]
Paul McGowan: I just finished reading a great and insightful book, Dogfight, by Fred Vogelstein. The book chronicles the fight for dominance in the mobile computing market between Apple and Google. It’s extremely well written and a good page turner. What interested me most about this book was the level of chaos the two companies […]
Paul McGowan writes …. If we mentally step back from focusing on just the reproduction chain (your stereo system) and look at the entire process of capturing and playing back the sound of live musicians playing in a room, we can see it as pipe with an input and and output. On the one end […]
Have you ever noticed that sometimes you’re focusing so hard on a minute details that you miss the elephant in the room? Happens to me all the time. A commenter to these posts mentioned an AB test he witnessed between two amps and after multiple A/B back and forth tests someone suggested the channels between […]
Paul McGowan writes: When we talk about sound, what do adjectives like, dark, wooly, bright, spacious, or edgy sound like on our stereo systems? Hard to say, because words build pictures in our heads that have no literal equivalent in sound. “Wooly” forms an image of “thick”, but how can sound be thick? Just today I was trying to describe the […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. Every device type we might choose to design an output stage or an amplifier of any kind has inherent distortion products. These distortions are different in a current amplifying device (like a bipolar transistor) than they are in a voltage amplifying device (like a FET or tube). The differences are in […]
First published November 2015 Paul McGowan writes: There appears to be an increasing customer frustration level in all sectors of business towards errors in products and services, reported through customer feedback, and the company’s response time to fix those errors. Customer expectation levels for faster error correction, perhaps even elimination of errors, appear to be […]
Paul McGowan writes: I am trying to remember the system at the time I made the switch from long speaker cables. I believe at that time Music Room One consisted of a pair of Maggie 3.7, a pair of Descent subwoofers, and powered by a Classic 250 amplifier. It was a hell of a good […]
Paul McGowan writes …. My very first pair of high-performance loudspeakers were Magneplanars but the marriage didn’t last long. I soon found myself enamored with a different kind of panel speaker, an electrostat which was so much more revealing than the planar that I made the switch. This added window-like clarity was a result of […]
Paul McGowan writes: it still baffles me why long balanced interconnects seemed to sound better than long speaker cables. I previously shared with you my experience at HP’s home with an Audio Research preamp. That demonstrated just the opposite. So one conclusion we can make is the equipment you’re using has a lot to do […]
Paul McGowan writes …. Many of today’s audio equipment designers are getting on in years. I am a good example as I creep towards 70. Hard to imagine because in my mind I am still about in my mid-30s. Only the occasional look in the mirror proves that thought incorrect. As we age our hearing […]
Paul McGowan writes …. Most real world home stereo systems are placed in rooms where circumstances permit, not necessarily where they sound best. The last system I had in a home the speakers were on either side of a long couch, their distance determined by the length of the furniture rather than achieving perfect tonal balance. […]
Not to be on a nostalgia kick here but yesterday’s post about Direct to Disc recordings got a few of you to ask me why a Direct to Disc was so much more dynamic than a standard recording and the answer is simple: one less layer and vinyl has more dynamic range than does tape. […]
Audiophile terminology helps the initiated communicate what they’re hearing: a means of describing with words sounds that we hear. One of my favorites is transparency—see through sound. I love this term because it makes no sense until you’ve actually heard it. Sound is the movement of air at wave frequencies too low for our eyes […]
How can you get more information by simply upsampling? Paul explains how digital audio works, what sample rate and bit depth means, and how computers count in binary in this simple short video. Watch Now
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 had mentioned on our forums that there were several companies I did not believe aspired to produce high end audio products: McIntosh and B&O among them. Ok, ok, I can see the fur flying already. Take a deep breath. This is not a put down. For the record, I admire both of […]
As part of my promised occasional setup tips, I thought it might be good to go to step two in system setup, where we focus on the phantom center image. Remembering that the goal for proper stereo imaging is two fold: the loudspeakers should disappear and the phantom stage is always behind the loudspeakers, we should then get started […]