Paul's Posts

Years ago, I ran across the claim that replacing the resistors and capacitors in an amplifier with better ones couldn’t improve the sound. Unless the original parts were defective, the... Read more...

The Only Room That Matters

There's only one room that tells the truth about how a piece of equipment sounds. Yours. A trade show room is a hotel room with six people standing in it... Read more...

Mood enhancement

Watermelon tastes sweeter when it's cold. Same fruit. Same sugar content. Same everything — except the temperature. Something about the cold amplifies the sweetness in a way the warm version... Read more...

Mix it up

At some point, most of us stopped discovering and started rotating. The same albums. The same artists. The same reference recordings we've been using since we put the system together.... Read more...

Trust Your Ears

It's easy and reliable to measure that which we understand, but what happens when our senses uncover something new? For decades, doctors prescribed aspirin without knowing exactly how it worked.... Read more...

Core beliefs

For most of us, our beliefs become fact. We develop ideas and stories that explain how the world works, what's possible, what's impossible, and after a while those ideas and... Read more...

Enhacements

I receive a lot of letters asking for advice. More often than not, that advice request leans towards how to fix what the writer already has. How do I fix... Read more...

Organic Audio

Standing in the supermarket aisle looking at all the packaging proclaiming organic this and organic that, it occurred to me high-end audio is similar. We don't tolerate artificial ingredients. The... Read more...

Long and winding road

Ever heard of a hedonic treadmill? The idea is simple: we adapt to improvements. Something that thrilled us becomes the new normal, and we return to roughly the same level... Read more...

Fundamental challenges

Dynamic speakers are remarkable devices. They work on principles that haven't fundamentally changed in a century. And they carry a limitation baked into their basic physics. The voice coil they... Read more...

Keep it alive

There's a common misconception that treating a listening room means covering every surface with absorptive material until all the reflections are gone. The goal isn't to deaden the room, but... Read more...

Two vs. one

Almost every high-end speaker has two sets of binding posts. Almost no one uses both of them. In practice, a simple jumper connects the two sets on the speaker side,... Read more...

MIcrophones

A microphone is not an ear, and that's important to remember since most of what we listen to on our systems passes through one. Your ears don't hear passively. They're... Read more...

Musical tears

Have you ever noticed that music is the only art form that can make you cry before you understand why? How does that work? I am guessing it has to... Read more...

What's hiding in there?

Every design decision we've ever made started with the same question: is there more music in there that we're not hearing yet? Not "can we measure better." Not "can we... Read more...

Family

Since day one of PS Audio, some 50 years ago, we knew our relationship with customers felt different from a typical business transaction. People wrote to us not just with... Read more...

Bottom end

Most of the music we love doesn't go very low in frequency. The lowest note on a standard bass guitar is around 41Hz. A kick drum fundamental sits between 50... Read more...

The easy way out

DSD is one of the most misunderstood formats in audio, and the thing that confuses people most is this: why some SACD players convert it to PCM before they play... Read more...

The magnifying glass

A revealing HiFi system brings out everything great as well as the opposite. You've invested in a genuinely revealing system and now you're worried it's going to make your favorite... Read more...

Boxes

What the chassis does to the sound is one of those things that should be obvious but isn't. A circuit lives in a physical enclosure. That enclosure vibrates — from... Read more...

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