Over the next couple of issues or so, Copper will feature reminiscences by Paul McGowan, co-founder and CEO of PS Audio and Octave Records, which look back on the history of PS Audio as it celebrates its 50th anniversary.
Part One: In the Beginning
50 years ago, in 1974, Stan Warren knocked on my door.
It was one week after he first listened to the phono preamplifier I had designed for the local radio station, KXFM. Following his excitement of how much better that prototype sounded than his reference Dynaco preamplifier, he decided it would make sense to start a company to manufacture that very circuit.
Stan was a man of action. He sold his van, scraped together $500, and approached me with his idea of starting an audio company.
"Sure! What would we sell?"
"The phono preamplifier you designed," said Stan.
"Who would buy it?"
"Audiophiles."
"What's an audiophile?" I asked, followed by, "what would we call our company?"
"Paul and Stan Audio. PS Audio for short."
And thus it all began, based on Stan's idea and his naming scheme. But, we needed a logo – a wordmark, a brand.
In the mid 1970s there were no computers on which one could design a logo or, for that matter, anything. Back then, if you wanted a design, you had two choices: hire an artist, or rely upon pre-made art. As we had zero money, we chose the latter.
Pre-made art came in a number of forms but the easiest to use were called dry transfers – basically, sheets of vellum with inked letters or images affixed to one side. To use the art or typography, you carefully placed the sheet where you wanted it to go, lined it up so it was level and in position, and then with a pencil-like tool, rubbed the vellum's top surface to transfer the bottom-impregnated ink onto a piece of paper or whatever medium you were using.
Back then, there weren't a lot of typography choices, but one of the few that looked distinctive, and we hadn't seen much of, was called Blippo Black. It was a typeface originally designed by Joe Taylor in 1969 and became the basis of the original PS Audio logo:
The AUDIO part was a more conventional Helvetica style and to kiss off the design, Stan suggested adding the upside-down symbol of a PNP transistor.
Over the years the logo evolved in an attempt to keep the brand fresh:
One of the last logos we came up with was in 1988, just before I sold the company to head out to Colorado and build loudspeakers with Infinity founder Arnie Nudell:
The new owners of PS Audio weren't too enamored with this simplistic style, so they went back to the 3D raised look and stayed with that style until Terri and I bought back our company in 1997 and launched the first Power Plants with this logo:
This was our brand for quite some time, until we started noticing that it became more of a stylized mark than an identifiable “PS.” In fact, we noticed more and more people who didn't even know what that stylized mark stood for and could not identify the name of the company.
Our takeaway from that experience was twofold: learning the value of a stylized mark, and the value of an identifiable name. We then combined the two into our current logo, which combines the written name with an identifiable stylized shape (a sine wave):
Today, we proudly display our logo as the embodiment of our brand promise: delivering high-value, high-performance audio equipment to people we think of as our Hi-Fi Family.
Header image: Paul McGowan behind some vintage and historic PS Audio components.
