PS Audio founder and CEO, Paul McGowan, writes a daily blog: short, informative, fun, often controversial, but always interesting. Subjects range from personal stories, how to setup your system, news of the day, streaming, vinyl, tubes, transistors, loudspeakers, holographic imaging and more. Kind of like the Car Talk of audio. Not much is sacred, and there’s rarely a mention of our own products.
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Paul's Posts
Forgotten surfaces
We count the walls but rarely the floor or ceiling. Most audiophiles, when tuning their rooms, focus on the obvious: side walls and the rear wall behind the speakers. These...
The first time
The first listen is always the most honest. There’s something about hearing a new system—or even a new recording—for the very first time. In that moment, you haven’t learned its...
Background noise
Silence reveals everything. I’ll never forget sitting in my listening room during a blackout. The power went out, and for a few seconds the world was completely quiet—no HVAC hum,...
Living with compromise
Every system is a compromise. I’ve never heard the perfect loudspeaker, amplifier, or room. Every design is a set of choices: efficiency versus bass extension, warmth versus clarity, scale versus...
Emotional listening
My reference isn’t technical. It’s emotional. Over the years, I’ve measured countless systems and pored over mountains of data—frequency response graphs, distortion plots, impulse responses. They tell part of the...
Golden silence
Silence is harder to reproduce than sound. It’s easy to focus on notes, on the energy of instruments and voices, but the space between them is just as important. In...