Can't win for losing

When Don Grusin's album Out of Thin Air launched we were ecstatic about the sound. The piano was expertly captured by former Telarc engineer Robert Freiderich and our own Gus Skinas. We just released a video about the recording which you can watch here. (Scroll down to the bottom of the pictures) So it was a great surprise when I received a note from an unhappy buyer of the SACD berating us for having produced an album where the piano sounded as if in the listener's room. "I want to hear the piano close up, not the room too." Of course, capturing the instrument and the room was exactly what we were hoping to accomplish. Robert, Don, and Gus spent days getting the microphones just right to do exactly that. On a similar note, one of PS Audio's first returns 46 years ago came from a gentleman who, after purchasing our $59.95 phono preamplifier, took us up on our buy-back offer because it made his speakers disappear. Before the PS Audio phono stage, he could clearly hear left and right as the sound ping-ponged between them. Now with our phono stage installed, all was lost and only the music remained as if musicians were in the room. It had taken Stan and me a year of hard work to make our speakers disappear through circuit refinements in the phono stage. When the poet John Lydgate wrote: “You can please some of the people all of the time, you can please all of the people some of the time, but you can't please all of the people all of the time”, I would love to know when it is we've pleased all of the people some of the time. I must have been drunk when that happened.