Back in the early days of PS Audio, we were all vinyl freaks. Every last one of us. Records were not just the reference — they were the religion. The turntable sat at the center of everything (often next to the bong), and digital was the pretender we tolerated at best and mocked at worst.
Early CD players were bright, edgy, dimensionally flat. Ugh. They had the resolution on paper and something genuinely unpleasant in practice. I remember A/B'ing the same recording on LP and CD in the early '80s and cringing. The format wars were fierce, tribal, and — from the vinyl side — felt entirely justified.
But we couldn't ignore what was happening. PS Audio jumped into the digital fray and produced one of the world's first DACs, the Digital Lin. Later, in 1992 launched the UltraLink — the world's first 20-bit DAC.
Twenty whole bits.
We were enormously proud of it, and by the standards of the time, rightfully so. It was a genuine step forward.
The real crack in my vinyl armor came when I sat down with Keith Johnson — Professor Johnson (as he was known at Reference Recordings), one of the best engineers in the business — and heard what he'd done with HDCD. There was a subtlety and a rightness to it I hadn't heard from digital before.
But the genuine epiphany was DSD. Gus Skinas and Ted Smith really opened my eyes and ears and I've never looked back. From DirectStream to the PMG Signature, DSD has been the basis for everything digital.
I still play records on occasion and love them. But digital done right is no longer the lesser format.
The format wars are over.
The technology won.
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