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When a system plays at all levels without ever drawing attention to itself we might say it was without noticeable effort. Years ago when I was deep in design that was perhaps one of the more elusive goals for a power amplifier. Time and again my designs would sound right until the music got loud. The […]
In yesterday’s post on subwoofers, I cautioned about the use of series crossovers: one low pass filter in the receiver feeding another in the subwoofer. What I did not address is the age-old advice from speaker and receiver manufacturers to lessen the demands on the main speakers by means of adding a high pass filter—rolling off […]
We all have different ways of processing the information around us. Some of us must have the facts/evidence presented in what I would call a linear/serial stream: this fact followed by a related observation to equal a certain conclusion. Others are capable of more parallel logic: these observations coupled with these facts form this conclusion. […]
When we record live our goal is quite different. Now, we want to capture perfectly the moment. Like the old Memorex ad, “Is it live or Memorex?” we hope our studio recordings have that live sound. They might get close but they aren’t complete. There’s no audience applause. There’s no clinking of glasses. And, there are mistakes. Polished or […]
Do you fall into the trap of judging things based on a preconception? Do you buy into stereotypes? I do. All the time. I think it’s in our nature as humans to categorize life’s complexities based on our experiences: cables make a difference/cables can’t make a difference. Electrostats are transparent sounding/electrostats require your head in […]
One of my readers commented that “it sure is easier to just put a record on the turntable and play it” in response to trying to understand the complexity of sending music out of a computer. Well, sure it is – just as it’s even easier to put a CD into a CD player. But […]
Originally published in 2015 Paul McGowan: In one of my earlier posts Taking things for granted I mentioned being confounded by the results of making a CD copy, which turned out better than the original. I understand some of the ideas here: copying to a hard drive and then back again to lower jitter, cleaning […]
Is Class D amplification the silver bullet for the next generation? We asked Paul McGowan of PS Audio. Here’s what he says: One of the notions alive and well with many in the high-end community is the idea that a class D power amplifier will cause listener fatigue over time; and that same notion seems […]
Regular readers will know I often am critical of a few well known speaker brands. This doesn’t sit well with owners of those brands and for that I apologize. I single out a few brands because, to me, they represent great examples of perceptual confusion—conflating two ideas together that don’t necessarily match. Take Sonus Fabers […]
I spend a great deal of time on the forums and comments section of our channels: Ask Paul, Ohms Law, Paul’s Post, PS Forums, YouTube, Copper Magazine, Facebook. I do this because the internet can be an impersonal place if you let it. Just look at some of the more untended channels and you’ll see they’ve […]
One of the hallmark indicators of low impedance is a firm stand. External forces have little sway over a device with low output impedance. This can be seen in a high damping factor amp and speaker combination where the amp exerts control over the speaker, yet the speaker cannot do the same to the amp. […]
The very term luxury defines whatever it is added to as unnecessary. Air and water are necessities. Love and affection are luxuries. But while many would argue it’s the luxuries that make life worth living, I would extend that to subwoofers make stereos worth listening. Ok, that’s a stretch. Clearly, stereos are worth listening even […]
We all have our personal standards by which we determine whether or not something lives up to our expectations. When I play a new track of music I expect a certain level of musicality, transparency, tonal accuracy, and overall believability. If I listen without any preconceived expectations I can either accept or reject the new […]
If for some reason your power amplifier puts DC into your loudspeaker you’ll wind up letting the magic blue smoke out and killing your loudspeaker. ”Magic blue” smoke is engineering humor: it’s what we jokingly say when a component blows up and smoke spews from its innards – “oops, we let the magic blue smoke […]
It’s probably not a bad idea. NAS is an acronym for Network Attached Storage—a hard drive accessible over a home network. For years, NAS were shunned by most of us (including me) because they were slow and a pain in the keester. But, like all things digital, over time they’ve gotten easy and fast to […]
There are many multi-driver speakers, but few that go floor to ceiling like the IRSV. Floor to ceiling multi-driver speakers are called a Line Source. What’s counter-intuitive about a line source is how specific the imaging can be. With that many drivers, one would think the image would be tall, rather than lifelike, when the […]
A few readers have asked me to back off on being uber technical and get back to writing more about sound and high end audio from a listener’s perspective rather than a designer’s and I’ll definitely do that but I did want to finish up on our little series about DACS. One thing to remember […]
Some years backI wrote about a new power amp technology that simply blew my skirt up to the point where I have cleansed the listening room of anything but this product to amplify the Maggies. The decision to consider doing this took about 10 seconds: I knew immediately this was it. I then spent nearly […]
I have seen some crazy stuff in the 40 plus years I have been around audiophiles and high-end systems. Exotic room conditioning, trinkets aplenty, cables the size of my leg, claims of subatomic effects, components that sound different depending on their earthly orientation, low-frequency waves said to resonate with the Earth. In fact, I could […]
Gentlemen, can home made cables really offer quality as distinct from value? Here’s what Paul McGowan (PS Audio) says on the subject. Fatter wire sounds fuller, skinnier wire sounds thin, shielded wire sounds cleaner but veiled, stranded wire sounds one way and solid core thicker wire sounds yet another. These findings were very suspicious to […]
My little riff on power amplifiers and how I could tell I had a winner really sparked off a lot of comments and questions of where to buy or when it’s going to be available. One of you even scolded me about being a tease without offering anything in return. Let me just suggest my […]
Wikipedia describes Confirmation Bias as this: The tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one’s prior beliefs or values. People display this bias when they select information that supports their views, ignoring contrary information, or when they interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing attitudes. The […]
https://www.psaudio.com/askpaulvideo/what-is-damping-factor/