Paul's Posts

My friend, Cello owner Jim McCullough, sent me a link to one of the best short videos of recorded music I have ever watched. This is worth your time. Click... Read more...

The trouble with convention

I remember my excitement when Mark Levinson's company broke with the pack and started building products with Lemo Connectors. Wow. Those were wicked cool looking and they had an even... Read more...

Paradigm shifts

Paradigms are models of accepted norms: templates of how we arrive at a product or result using standard practices. The paradigm of a room full of neatly ordered books on... Read more...

Listening is scary

Ted Smith has done it again. A major breakthrough in the art of digital audio. Over this weekend we have been beta testing our newest operating system for our DirectStream... Read more...

Stereotype solutions

In 1798 a French printer, Firmin Didot, invented a new technology that might be second only to Gutenberg's original invention of the printing press in 1450. Before Didot's stroke of... Read more...

Closer to the other pasture

Isn't it ironic that the measure of success for a digital-based audio system is getting closer to analog? And, perhaps even weirder, the holy grail in an analog system is... Read more...

What I think I know

It's a head scratcher for me when I tackle a problem and the results aren't as expected. For example, I have been searching for an upgraded chair to use in... Read more...

Easy alternatives

An easy alternative to Maldon sea salt is kosher sea salt. Both are made from pure salt evaporated from the ocean. Both raise salinity levels in the exact same proportions.... Read more...

The Sound Of Microphones

It’s rare that I can hear a recorded voice and be unable to distinguish it from the live version. So rare, in fact, that I think the only times I... Read more...

Standing on the periphery

Tackling the challenge of changing people's minds is not only daunting but in all likelihood a futile exercise. When I think about the number of times I have actually swayed... Read more...

Burden of proof

In a legal proceeding, the burden of proof falls on the party that is bringing the claim against another. "That guy robbed me." In a scientific setting, the same can... Read more...

The deluxe version

I am enamored with the term Deluxe because it's a word with grand implications that go typically wanting. In mixed nuts, it just means a lack of peanuts. In an... Read more...

Near and far

Like it or not there is an optimum distance between listener and boxes for every speaker setup. Too close and imagining as well as frequency response suffers. Too far and... Read more...

Prove it to me

How often do we go into a decision making process pre-convinced of the outcome? And, when we do that, how is the outcome affected? It cannot be nothing. As soon... Read more...

Vibration isolation products are snake oil

We've saved perhaps the best for last. "Best" because this is a subject that genuinely gets the hairs on the back of some necks to stand at stiff attention, yet... Read more...

Interconnects and speaker cables matter

Yikes. After yesterday's brave venture into the hornet's nest of opinion about power cables and how they matter I can only just imagine the brouhaha today's post is likely to... Read more...

Cables matter

Oh boy. I saved this and the next Fact or Fiction for last. This is a real viper pit of a question and those loyal readers of this blog know... Read more...

Speaker size should match the room

This fact or fiction question is an interesting one because the notion of matching speaker size to room dimensions is so ingrained into our culture as to be taken for... Read more...

Single driver speakers are better than multi-driver designs

Fact or fiction? There are so many ifs to consider it's hard to give a good answer but let's first examine what this all means. For many years of early... Read more...

Parts quality affects performance

When this particular Fact or Fiction proposition was originally proposed I passed it over because its answer seemed so evident. Yes, of course, parts quality affects performance. It's a no-brainer,... Read more...

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