Paul's Posts

I've spent more than fifty years building audio equipment, and the last stretch of months pouring myself into Maestro, the music software I've been quietly obsessed with. People sometimes ask... Read more...

Ella

Of course, the greatest and most revered Ella in the world is Ella Fitzgerald...amazing even to this day. Which is one of the reasons I chose Ella for the name... Read more...

Expensive mistakes

The most expensive way to build an audio system is to ignore synergy. I've watched people spend serious money on components that don't work well together — an amplifier that... Read more...

Recording arsenals

Reference discs and playlists should be an important part of your arsenal. Without reference materials you'll never be able to set a standard for evaluating everything from system tweaks to... Read more...

Listening and learning

The albums we know best teach us the most about our systems. I have records I've listened to hundreds of times. Not because I couldn't find anything new — I... Read more...

Groovy

A vinyl record is a physical imprint of sound. Not an approximation. Not a code like digital. The actual shape of the sound wave — compressed into a groove cut... Read more...

Magical moments

Magic happens when you least expect it. Not a gradual appreciation. Not a slow dawning. One moment, in someone's living room or a hi-fi shop or a friend's basement, when... Read more...

Tired?

Some systems make you want to stay. Others make you reach for the volume control. Listening fatigue. The most common cause is distortion, but not the kind we easily measure.... Read more...

The sounds of silence

The quiet parts of the music are as important as their counterpart. We spend a lot of our attention chasing the loud moments — the crescendo, the impact, the sweep... Read more...

Future proof?

Imagine you're an archaeologist a hundred years from now, holding a hard drive you've just excavated from the ruins of a data center. You have no context. No manual. No... Read more...

Bookshelves

The term "bookshelf speaker" has been misleading people for about seventy years, and the name shows no sign of going away. In 1954, Edgar Villchur and Henry Kloss introduced the... Read more...

Stereo religion

The word evangelist is older than audio, older than electricity, older than anything we'd recognize as technology. It comes from the Greek — euangelion — meaning good news. An evangelist... Read more...

Movies or music?

An A/V receiver and a high-end integrated amplifier look similar from the outside. They are miles apart from each other. A receiver tries to do everything. It decodes multichannel surround... Read more...

Motors

The voice coil is a tiny copper or aluminum cylinder buried inside your speaker, and almost every aspect of how a driver sounds traces back to choices made about it.... Read more...

Tired?

A great system invites you to listen all night. A not-so-great one fatigues and wears you out. You struggle to stay engaged. Listening fatigue has identifiable causes, and once you... Read more...

Warmth

"Warm" is one of those audiophile words that gets used so often it stops meaning anything—at least to those of us who have been around long enough, but it might... Read more...

Band Aids

EQ in a music system is a Band-Aid. Sometimes a Band-Aid is what you need. Most of the time, the wound is somewhere else. A lot of HiFi Family members... Read more...

Surrounded

Atmos and surround are wonderful for movies, but they aren't the same experience as listening to a proper two-channel system. The difference between the two is more fundamental than the... Read more...

Unwanted violins

Tinnitus doesn't mean the end of high-fidelity listening. It means listening differently — and most of us at some point will need to learn that. Many of us audiophiles, especially... Read more...

The worldwide HiFi Family

There's a particular kind of joy that only happens at a high-end audio show. You walk into a room full of strangers and within five minutes realize you're surrounded by... Read more...

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