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.

Easy to subscribe and even easier to unsubscribe if you wish. Join us.

Paul's Posts

First steps

Paul McGowan

Most of the time, your amp isn’t working hard. Even when you’re really into it—volume up, speakers cooking—you’re probably only using a watt or two. Maybe less. The average listening...

Life in a vacuum

Paul McGowan

In a world of vanishing distortion and near-perfect specs, tubes shouldn’t still matter. But they do. There’s something unmistakable about a great tube design. The way it handles space, the...

The grill

Paul McGowan

It's one of those little choices we all face when setting up a system: leave the grilles on, or take them off? When we were designing the Aspen speakers, this...

Looks are deceiving

Paul McGowan

It’s easy to look at a modest-sized speaker and assume it can’t throw a big stage. But size alone doesn’t determine scale. The Aspen speakers are a perfect example of...

Audio myth

Paul McGowan

I’ve been doing this long enough to know better than to dismiss what people hear. If someone tells me their new DAC sounded harsh out of the box, and that...

Getting close

Paul McGowan

Most of us listen from across the room. We lean back, center ourselves between the speakers, and let the system open up in front of us. That’s far-field listening—where distance...