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Paul McGowan
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In yesterday’s post, I riffed on the subject of panel speakers and their lack of bass and dynamics. We all love thin-film drivers like ribbons, planars, and electrostats because of what they do right—effortlessly reproduce sound. That benefit of speed, transparency, and effortlessness can extend down in frequency all the way to 20Hz. Amazing if […]
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It’s nice to build systems and equipment with hand-wave theories of the perfect this and that but turning that hand wave into something of value is where reality sets in. Take for example loudspeakers. I constantly get notes about why there should be no such thing as the need to voice a speaker because they […]
Here is a wonderful aphorism I am fond of: “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” This can have multiple meanings but the one that rings true for me concerns our age old debate about measurements and the fact that not everyone hears the same things. If you don’t hear any difference between two […]
In a recent post, I wrote about balanced audio cables and how they work. Unlike simple RCA cables with their single signal conductor and ground wire, a balanced cable has two signal conductors with opposite polarity signals. The receiving equipment amplifies only the difference between the two opposing signals and ignores anything in common, such as […]
Both methods have their good and bad points. The quick method works well for me because it’s something I’ve trained to do over the years. Using a tried and true set of reference materials with a broad enough range of musical diversity, I can make a pretty accurate rapid assessment on a consistent basis. This […]
To be clear, I am not picking on Martin Logan. I am picking on all panel types of speakers with limited dynamic range. Electrostats are simply the best example among many. Over the years I have owned multiple types of panel speakers: Quads, Acoustats, Martin Logans, Magneplanars. Every one of those speakers had their good points—great points […]
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 […]
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 […]