July 2009 PS Newsletter

• Check this out!
• Oh Canada!
• PW series getting into people’s hands
• HDMI/I2S cables now available
• Help me design the new amp
• Update on the Digital Lens
• How to build a library part 1

Check this out!
What started out as a simple idea has mushroomed into "a thing".

See the picture of me standing next to the stack of used audio equipment?  These are all trade-ins for PerfectWave products.

They come in daily and seem to be growing exponentially - and you’re not even seeing the half of them.  In fact, there are so many we’ve had to apportion a part of the warehouse with new shelving just to hold them! Krell’s, Theta’s, Proceed’s, MSB’s, Sony’s and more than I can name.  How did this happen?  It’s a bit of a story, so here goes.

The PerfectWaves are certainly the biggest buzz in audio today, but let’s go back to before they were released.  When we first contemplated how we would launch the PerfectWave series of products we had a couple of goals in mind: honoring early adopters and making these ground-breaking products affordable to as many people as we could. We asked ourselves the following question: "what are the biggest hurdles people face upgrading to the PerfectWaves?"  The answers came easily: the cost of the new equipment and the disposition of the old equipment they invested in.   Let’s face it; no one needs two CD transports or two DACS.

If you didn’t have any old equipment to start with and were building your system from scratch, then the solution is pretty simple: get the PerfectWaves and start enjoying them.   But most of us aren’t starting fresh and we have an existing system we’re happy with.  Sure, we’d all like to be happier, we’d all like to upgrade to the world’s best optical disc player and high-end DAC/music server made, but what about all the investment in your current system?
 
If you think about it, it’s the same dilemma people have buying a new car, computer, camera, cell phone etc. You’re excited about the benefits of getting the latest technology but what do you do with what you have?

Car dealers figured it out years ago: they buy your old vehicle and get you into the new one.  In this way, you recapture some of your original investment and apply it towards the new one.  Years ago hi-fi dealers did the same thing (and some still do) but it seems as if today’s trend is to ignore this quandary in favor of either putting the burden on the customer to sell the old gear, or store it for another day. Indeed, you can go to Audiogon, AudioXsell or eBay and sell your equipment, but this is a pain in the keester, leaves you without gear for a period of time and is a crapshoot at best.  And for those of you buying the used equipment, it too is a gamble. 

So we figured out a way for everyone to win: PS and most of our dealers will take this burden on for you and make it easy to own a PerfectWave.  In fact, even some of our international distributors are warming up to the idea as well.  All over the United States (and now Canada) people are eagerly taking us up on our offer to breathe new life into their systems and get much of their original investment back and put to work.

Here’s how it works.  We will give you up to $1000 of your old equipment’s original MSRP (retail price) to apply to the purchase of a PerfectWave DAC or Transport.  Trade in a CD player or transport for a new PWT, or a DAC towards the PWD.  Buy the combo, trade in a DAC and CD player,  and get up to $2,000 for your old equipment towards the purchase of the PerfectWave.

This program was scheduled to end this July but we’re extending it through August for three reasons: first, the PW’s were late shipping and we’re just now getting up to speed.  Second, we simply do not have the heart to end a program this successful (people are writing us to say we’re their heroes), and lastly we’re considering the possibility of making it permanent. 

So successful is this program that there’s lots of talk within the halls of PS to make it the way we do business.  I can’t promise you that (and I won’t), because we haven’t even decided what the heck to do with all the trade-ins, but keep reading the newsletter for details as they emerge.  If you have an opinion on the subject, drop me a note.

Whatever happens, you can be assured that the program is going through August.  To take advantage of this offer, contact your PS dealer or PS Audio directly and find out what your trade’s worth.

Oh Canada
Here’s a news flash for our friends to the north of us: we’re returning to our original model of dealer and direct. 

Since our split with Dimexs, as our Canadian distributor, we have been working diligently to reauthorize the dealers as direct accounts and try to set up new dealers in markets that aren’t yet served. If you have quality dealer recommendations, please send them our way! Our Canadian customers know we have run some really exciting promotions in the USA that didn’t make it across the border. As we set up dealers and move forward we will make both the PerfectWave AC cable trade-up promotion and PerfectWave DAC & Transport trade-up promotion available to all dealers in Canada.

We are still catching up on preorders for the PWT and PWD so we’ll make that promotion available starting September 1 and run in through October 31, 2009 when the products will actually be available to see and hear at your dealers. Stay tuned for more details.

The PerfectWave AC power cable trade-up promotion will start August 1 and run through September 30, 2009. It’s a great way to upgrade this critical part of your system’s power delivery. And it’s simple, too! Trade ANY working aftermarket AC power cable and receive 25% credit toward the retail price of ANY new PerfectWave series power cable.

PS Audio will also make our products available for purchase directly from our website to Canadian customers. The nature of this is to serve the many people in Canada who don’t have a local dealer yet wish to buy PS products. Cost will be normal US retail (in $US) plus all shipping costs to your location. This means you’ll pay what US customers pay and  basically the same as what you’ll pay at a retailer in Canada as we go forward.

We think these changes are exciting and help address some of the concerns we’ve heard over the last few years.

PW series getting into people’s hands
So now that PerfectWave is finally getting out into the world, what’s the reaction been?  I think Tom Alleman sums it up best:

"I’m using a 1 meter WireWorld Silver Starlight 5 squared HDMI to connect PWT to PWD using "Native" mode and it sounds F _ _ _ _ _ _ AWESOME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

OK, that sort of says it all.  For a few more specifics, we turn to Cris:
 
"I just got back from "Music Matters" at Bjorn’s in San Antonio. I met with Dave Kakenmaster and was able to audition the PerfectWave transport and DAC.

What a setup. I have never in my 61 years heard any frontend sound better. Well maybe some analog setups, but they cost much, much more. The music I heard was so not digital, it was a little like listening to a very good analog kit.

I noticed playing Redbook cds on a standard setup that everything had an edge on it, as if you could run your fingernails over the waveforms and feel the roughness. Not so playing them on the PerfectWave setup in native mode. Beautiful, smooth, and silky just like in real life.

Then the icing on the cake. Dave put on an HRx recording and all I could say was WOW! Until I heard this recording I thought I had heard really good sounds from very nice equipment, but this just took my breath away. As real as being there.

So, how did this all end? I ordered both on the spot. Paul and gang, you really came through with this one. I am always on the prowl for what the next best thing that will do justice to the music and this pair does just tha t.

Music is what this is all about and the equipment is just an end to the means. This equipment puts the music first as it should, I heard things from well known pieces that I have never heard before. Instruments that were smeared together into two dimensions were now layered and easily recognized for placement in three dimensions and sounded real, and right in the room with me.

My setup as it exists today is Definitive Technology STS speakers, PS Audio’s Trio A-100, P-200, DL-III, Denon 1930CI. PS Audio Transcendent XLR’s from DAC to preamp to amp, Cardas Neutral Reference coax from Denon to DL-III. Speaker cables are Analysis Oval 9s. This system is just sweet and when i receive my PerfectWave set I am good to go. Well until the next best thing comes out or I’m divorced for having spent too much money.

My thanks to PS Audio’s Dave Kakenmaster for a great time, and to Bjorn for hosting such a wonderful event. Paul, thank you for your passion and love of this hobby and creating equipment that us mortals can afford."
 
While many of our customers are experiencing high resolution audio for the very first time with all of its jaw dropping capabilities, it’s the wonders of good old Red Book CD’s that have most PerfectWave owners talking excitedly.  The PerfectWave Transport is really the star performer when it comes to Red Book CD’s. 
 
The more I travel with these products, the more I talk to fellow Audiophiles about them and their abilities, the more convinced I am that nothing even remotely compares to the PerfectWave transport’s ability to wring more than any of us thought possible out of CD’s. They just sound right.  I can’t describe it any other way and every time I sit down to listen, I am convinced I could never go back and listen to CD’s again - on a standard CD mechanism of any kind.  The gap is just too big and once you get spoiled, there’s no turning back.
 
HDMI/I2S cables now available
After a long wait the PerfectWave HDMI cables, designed to go between the PWT and PWD, they are finally here and ready for you.  http://www.psaudio.com/ps/products/detail/perfectwave-i2s?cat=cables-accessories

These are some of the best HDMI cables ever made, for our specific I2S interface or video HDMI, and interestingly enough the first air shipment we received of two meter I2S 12’s were immediately sold out for video rather than audio.  Go figure!

There are two models: the I2S 10 and the I2S 12.  The I2S 10 is a triple-shielded single crystal PCOCC copper cable with a thick plating of pure silver on the outside and the I2S 12 has the same triple shielding and nothing but pure silver, through and through.  These cables are amazing in what they’ll do for your system as well as your TV.

Of course I have the I2S 12 between the PWT and PWD, but I also just plunked down for the new Samsung 7100 55" LCD LED based flat screen TV and am anxious to use the I2S 12 between the new TV and my HD sources.  With bandwidth and noise floor requirements of HD and I2S as critical as they are, it doesn’t make sense to use anything but the best.

Our next shipment will be in shortly, there are a few of the 1 meters left for PW owners.  Have fun.

Help me design the new amp
As some of you may know the PerfectWave power amp is "around the corner" which means sometime next calendar year.  I have been playing with two or three different topologies and cool new ideas but I am wondering what you think about power amps.  What is it that people want in a power amp?  Two channel?  Three channel?  Class AB, Class D, how many watts?  Standard straight power amp in a PerfectWave chassis?  Integrated version?  Multiple inputs? 

I know these are a lot of questions and there are probably more answers than will be helpful but I am hopeful for a trend to appear.

So I have a group of you telling me "Paul, forget fancy, just build us a beautiful sounding, reliable two-channel power amp in the PerfectWave chassis."  I have others telling me "Paul, set our souls on fire and deliver us something that is out of the ballpark and hasn’t been done before."  Yikes!  I am personally putting together a new home theater and so I want a three channel amp and love designing products around what I want, but…... Well, you get the idea.

Anyway, send me a note with your thoughts.

Update on the Digital Lens
It’s troubling to me that in this economic slowdown many of our friends, colleagues and fellow manufacturers seem to have gone "dark" in terms of spending research and development efforts for new products.  Don’t get me wrong, I certainly understand that it’s tough for all of us, but I have to say our approach to this problem is not one of waiting out the storm; we’re keeping the proverbial "pedal to the metal" approach to our R&D in spite of the economic slowdown.

The fact of the matter is we believe this particular moment in time is not a "storm" but rather turning point in history and one of the most exciting we’ve seen in many years.  Things are changing rapidly and all we see is a bright future ahead.  This is the moment when, among other things, the future direction of high-performance audio and video is being carved out on an almost moment-by-moment basis.  It is our intention to help lead the way for these changes to take place and we want them to be pulled of correctly.

The world is being connected in a way that’s going to surprise and delight us all within a matter of a very few years.  In my opinion the worst thing we, as a high-end community, can do is let computer based companies take over the connected AV market and leave folks like you, me and our high-end community wondering when the train left the station without us.  I assure you the computer based companies do not have high-performance audio (as we understand it) in mind.  We at PS Audio do and will continue to maintain our growing foothold in this exciting field.

To that point, work on the upcoming standalone Digital Lens progresses nicely and we’ve made a few decisions I can now share with you.

First, let me explain what a Digital Lens is for those of you unfamiliar.  The Digital lens is a digital in/out device that is best thought of as the Power Plant of digital audio.  Just like the Power Plant AC regenerator that takes any quality of AC power in one end and outputs perfect AC at the other end, the Digital Lens is its equivalent.  Place any digital audio into the Lens and everything we worry about: jitter, clocks, timing, wave shape, etc. are thrown out and new digital audio is rebuilt on the fly ready to be placed into your DAC in a perfect, focused, form (hence the name Digital "Lens").

The Lens will allow you to take USB from your computer, or digital audio from a $29 CD player, the output of an Apple TV’s optical feed, the digital or HDMI output of your DVD or Blu Ray player with surround info on it, or any sample rate and bit depth digital audio from any source and make that digital signal about as perfect as it can be.  You can then place the output of the Lens into your new PWD through I2S, or your existing D to A or surround processor through either coax, balanced or optical and enjoy jitter free digital audio from any source.  The performance improvements for audio and video system are stunning.

Does this mean that a $29 CD player through the Lens will sound as good as a PerfectWave Transport?  No, because a source is only as good as its ability to extract the data in the first place.  Think of it as you might a turntable.  The best phono stage in the world won’t make a cheap turntable and cartridge get the info off the album any better and the same is true for the PWT.  Nothing extracts the data and handles it as well.  But what can happen is a $29 CD player will sound unlike anything you can imagine SHOULD come out of it and it’ll be most acceptable.

So here are some of the decisions we’ve now made on the Digital Lens.  After much debate on our forums we have chosen to go with a full width PerfectWave chassis.  We made this decision mainly because of our next decision: adding more inputs.  Because the Digital Lens also acts as a digital input "hub" for all your equipment, we felt it important to add about everything you would need for an input. 

Here’s what we currently have for inputs on the Lens.
·        3 optical
·        3 RCA coax
·        2 USB up to 96kHz 24 bit
·        1 balanced XLR
·        2 I2S HDMI type
·        4 HDMI video/audio inputs

So you can see there wouldn’t be a ghost of a chance to put all of these in a half-width PW or Trio chassis as some of you had asked for.  But what you can also see is that the Lens will act as the input traffic router for an entire digital audio/video system.  It can be used strictly for high-end audio, or high-end video or both.  It’s really versatile and fixes digital audio problems for good.

Another decision we’re making is to not have a video based touch screen on the front panel.  The costs are just too high and while they are really necessary on the PWD and PWT, we believe we can accomplish the same thing in a less expensive way that still has input naming and makes it easy to select.  This decision is important to keeping the costs of the final unit as low as possible.

So, that’s about as much of a tease as I can safely offer at this point.  Our hope is to begin Beta testing in late October, followed by production releases in November or December.  The retail on the Lens will be much less than a PerfectWave DAC or Transport but more than that I cannot say until we have things nailed down better.  I am excited.

How to build a library part 1
My long time friend and reviewer Tony Cordesman just ordered his own pair of PerfectWaves and wrote me the following note:

"I realize the "Bridge" is not due until December, but I suspect I am joining a large club that intends to rely on it to load their CD collection, and their draw downs off the web onto a suitable hard drive. Some, like me, will transit off of Macs. Others (largely possessed by the devil and compulsory listeners to Barry Manilow) will use PCs.
 
So, my questions to you are:
 
·        What is the best road to the Bridge at this point in time?   How should we store our music to make the easiest transition when the Bridge becomes available?
 
·        Given the need for back-up and really large collections, do you have recommendations as to not only the type and interface for the hard drive, but a backup routine?
 
·        For those of use who have caught your HD bug, what will minimize the jitter issues in storage which seem to be far greater for Hi Res than standard CD, and presumably will be embedded in storing material until we do so off of your drive unit?
 
·        Will there be a remote that can read the collection data on its screen or will we need to use a Mac wireless IPod or its equivalent?"
 
·        Why does the DAC use USB connections when Firewire seems technically better?
 
·        What about jitter into the DAC, particularly from Hi Res recordings?
 
·        I do not know of any card with an AES connection to a hard drive or computer, and it is believed that many 24-32 bit/192 KHz claims for add in cards can’t come close to delivering what they claim. How do you get the proper interface, which I guess has to be coaxial?
 
·        We hear about lossless compression for CD standards of digital.  What about Hi Res?
 
·        A technical issue for classical music. Far too many Album sort by the composer’s first name. Not an area I suspect the bridge can fix, but reviewers are used to demanding paltry miracles.
 
Tony’s questions are the same as many of you are asking in anticipation of receiving the Bridge so I thought the Newsletter might be a great place to start a dialog about building your library.   I don’t know one person that doesn’t want a music library available at the touch of a button.  I know people who worry that they might be compromising their collections’ performance but once over that notion, everyone wants a library….trust me.  If you don’t now, you will .
 
For those of you unfamiliar with the Bridge, it is a card that will insert into the back of the PerfectWave DAC and enable the PWD to connect up to your network, hard drive music storage, internet radio, summer home, computers, etc. and play music that’s on those sources. 
 
As its name implies, the Bridge turns one of the best sounding high-end D to A processor into one of the best sounding music servers by simply adding it to the PWD.    Inside the Bridge is a built-in Digital Lens so everything that streams over the network or the internet gets "lensified" before going out through I2S into the DAC; thus solving the question of performance.  The Bridge is scheduled to ship in December 2009.
 
While many of us find all this computer, network and hard drive stuff intimidating (I certainly do), the fact is it can be extremely simple once you get it.  Of course, one could say that playing the piano is simple once you learn….but honestly, if you take a few minutes to read a few of our ongoing newsletters, it’ll all seem like child’s play soon enough. So let’s make this a multi-part dialog between me and you and we’ll take it one step at a time.
 
Part one - the basic overview
A digitally stored music library is really no different in concept than a book library.  Inside any book library we have a few basic requirements:
 
·        Books
·        A way to get the books in and out of the library
·        A catalog or way to find what’s there and how to access it
·        A way to read the books
 
That pretty much sums it up.  If you replace the word "books" for "music" and the word "read" is replaced with "play" you now understand what a music library is. 
 
Inside our book library we have different categories: history, fiction, mystery, etc. and within those categories we have a multitude of offerings.  Think of these in music library terms: classical, jazz, rock, pop etc.  Within each of these categories we have many authors (oops, I meant performers).
 
We have different levels of difficulty and book length: the length of the books and the difficulty of the read are somewhat like the various types of formats we have.  Think of MP3’s as simple-minded periodicals and high-resolution audio as complex volumes with greater content.
 
Accessing the library
Take our book library analogy to the 21st century and think of Amazon’s hot new product the Kindle - an electronic book.  You may have heard of it.  It weighs less than a paperback; it’s thinner than a magazine and accesses a library over 300,000 books from almost anywhere in the world, delivered to your Kindle in less than 60 seconds, wirelessly.  You simply scroll through what’s available by category, author or book title, click "go" and you’re reading in a few seconds.
 
A PerfectWave DAC with the installed Bridge is the Kindle of music libraries. All you need to do is access your home network by either plugging it into a network connection or go wireless and you’re ready to enjoy as the PWD just starts to work and content available via the bridge is accessed through the front panel touch screen or a remote.   If you have music stored on a hard drive (which we’ll discuss in the next chapter) it’s instantly available.  If you simply want to play music from an internet radio station, you use the front panel touch screen to access the station and press "go".  You can even do this from the ease of your armchair with remote access.
 
The setup of the PWD to the network is plug-n-play and takes zero technical skill.  It’s as easy as the Kindle.
 
OK, so this probably generated more questions than answers but it’s a start.  Next month we’ll start to assemble the few components we need to build our library (you already have the "books") and get a bit more into the details.  Let me know via email if you have questions on this most basic of concepts and I’d be happy to answer them.
 
Till August
Hope you’re enjoying your summer.  Check out this picture of a mountain goat my son Sean and I ran into on our hike to Gore Lake in Vail.  This creature was about the size of a small pony and had no fear whatsoever of us.  We saw him on the opposite side of the lake and called to him to see what he’d do.  He looked up, turned and walked in a most determined manner straight for us and came up to within a few feet, sniffed at us and then sauntered off to eat grass (or whatever goats eat).  It was really a crazy moment, but one I’ll treasure for years.
 
Every time I write about something weird being a treasured moment in my life I can’t help but think of my good friend Jim McCullough of Cello Audio.  He always laughs when I write such stuff, so Jim, guessing nothing weird happens in your life, this one’s for you.
 
Cheers
 
Paul McGowan

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