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
Accurate or engaging?
I’ve heard systems that measured beautifully yet left me cold: no air, little drive, no sense of the musicians reaching out. Sometimes, that’s the difference between accuracy and engagement. One...
Losing music
The wrong cables don’t just lose signal—they lose music. What? Copper is copper, right? Like everything in engineering, materials certainly matter, but it's how you put together those ingredients that...
Break in
Some components need time to sound right—and others just need us to adjust. We’ve all heard our share of skepticism about break-in, but let me assure you that it's real....
Believability
Natural sound isn’t about warmth or brightness—it’s about believability. When people describe a system as sounding natural, they often mean it doesn’t draw attention to itself. Nothing sticks out. The...
Room to listen
Yesterday we discussed elephants and rooms. Perhaps it makes sense to keep on that path. Rooms control sound—peaks, dips, and nulls form based on size, shape, and materials—and what you...
The elephant
We all know the old saying about elephants and rooms, but sometimes that is the room itself. Sound doesn’t just travel in a straight line from speaker to ear. It...