Paul McGowan writes Recently I gave an example of how the addition of two one cent resistors turned a fatiguing solid state preamp into a warm tube-like device. Two resistors! That’s not much but to figure out where/how these would do the trick took nearly a year of work. Granted that year of work was […]
Paul McGowan
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Paul McGowan writes: I’ve been answering a lot of great customer questions on Ask Paul. One of them was a simple misunderstanding, but it sparks good dialog. On the DIY forums, a poster suggested he was converting digital audio to analog without the benefit of a DAC and the question posed to me was, “Is […]
Paul McGowan writes ….. Continuing on the subject of separation and vinyl, I have been working diligently on voicing and polishing our new phono preamplifier, the NuWave Phono Converter. I don’t want this blog to turn into a sales thing so I am not going to go into any detail about the new product – […]
The question came up why some amplifiers seem to sound better despite their higher levels of THD and IM distortions than others. In fact, if you were around in the 1970′s when we had the “distortion wars” in consumer electronics, you’d probably remember how these battles created some of the worst sounding audio equipment ever […]
Paul McGowan: Larry Borden sent me a link to my old friend Peter Moncreif’s musings on CD quality and what affects it. Peter and I go way, way back to his early Berkley days and few writers I have met have Peter’s ability to really hear and identify causes of what is going on in […]
Originally published 2015 Paul McGowan I was up late two nights ago, as you may have read, dialing in the speakers in Music Room 2. The speakers are a pair of Thiel 2-ways, using their coaxial driver arrangement. These are simple, well designed loudspeakers which are a perfect contrast to the giant Infinity IRS in […]
In the more than 40 years I have been building audio products my enthusiasm for what we do has never waned. In fact, quite the opposite. I wake up excited about each new day and another opportunity to spend time with our community and team at PS. I am one lucky guy. And sometimes I […]
Paul McGowan: Reviewer Keith Howard sent me an interesting note a while back that really was an eye opener for me when it comes to understanding how loud music actually gets. I am going to reprint it here. I would like to preface this note by pointing out that a lot depends on the type […]
Paul McGowan: Magazine reviewers work hard at writing a review – many thousands of words written to make sure you understand a product and really get what the reviewer feels about that product. It’s a long time tradition of a thorough piece of work. Yet I only read the first few paragraphs of a review […]
Paul McGowan: How many of you remember back when every receiver, preamp and integrated had a loudness button? I remember with great fondness my first Kenwood integrated amplifier in the early 1970′s and right on the front panel was a magical button labeled loudness. Funny thing was whenever I pushed it on nothing got louder. […]
Paul McGowan: Not to be on a nostalgia kick here but a recent 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 […]
Paul McGowan writes: We’re working on adding the magic of a subwoofer, properly implemented and setup; a magic that if you don’t have a pair setup properly you’ll just never understand what it’s about until you do. I can write and wax about it endlessly but until you actually get it right in your system, […]
Paul McGowan writes: 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 […]
Paul McGowan writes: I was thinking about these Audiophile terms we use this morning and it occurred to me that perhaps one of the more frustrating and misused terms is Low Frequency Extension. Frustrating because the group of people who believe if it doesn’t show up on their meters it doesn’t exist must be driven […]
Life is often a series of trade-offs. We gain here, lose there, creating tough choices because gains and losses are rarely black and white. Such is the case with headphones for me. On the one hand, they are wonderfully focused sonic microscopes. They offer privacy and intimacy, and their output seamlessly covers the entire range […]
There are many great mysteries in the world: how the pyramids were built, the Easter Island Moai, why whatever hair I lose on my head seems to pop up somewhere else, and I am sure there are plenty more. There are two great mysteries in audio that are currently bugging me and, if I thought […]
I think it was Einstein that said “Everything that can be counted doesn’t necessarily count. Everything that counts cannot necessarily be counted.” There are so many variables in our stereo systems it’s hard to know which of them matter and which are just there to drive us nuts. For example, every electronic piece we own […]
Paul McGowan … I was showing Carl, one of our sales reps, our sound room and talking about the prospect of increasing the availability of the in-home demo. I suggested I have always loved the idea of people taking equipment home and trying it out – we used to have a slogan “your living room […]
I try and run each morning before work because it helps my energy levels stay up during the busy day. Sometimes it’s a real struggle to get moving and stick with it, but music helps keep my mind somewhere other than with the effort of the run. I tried using my phone and a pair […]
In 1974, PS co-founder, Stan Warren, and I launched a phono preamplifier for $59.95 that challenged the status quo. The ridicule we were subjected to really stung at first, and then it became somewhat a badge of honor. We were pushing people out of their comfort zones to consider whether a product so dramatically lower […]
In yesterday’s post, we posed the question of what might happen if we were to lower or even eliminate the impedance inherent in the AC power wires feeding our home. The answer is simple. Dramatically better sound. Something we all want! But, how best to eliminate or significantly lower the impedance of hundreds (often thousands) of […]
Labels are necessary for communication yet offered without thought of consequences they can be destructive. There’s no harm in labeling sodium chloride as table salt. In fact, labeling a shaker of white crystals as “salt” is extremely helpful at the dinner table. But what happens when we label audio equipment with opinions? For example, labeling […]
The end goal for both audiophiles and recording engineers is the same. A perfect capture of a musical event. How each arrives at their goal is very different. As audiophiles, we struggle to wring every last nuance out of the music. Recording engineers are less concerned with nuance, focusing instead on broad strokes: which microphone […]
The simple explanation of how this works is the AP generates a remarkably clean sinewave. It’s pure to many zeros (you check by running a distortion analysis of the signal itself without inserting the device under test). The idea is that whatever the amplifier under test does to the pure input signal is called distortion […]