Paul's Posts

In yesterday's post I had been driven crazy by the remarkable performance improvements of a product that made no sense. A CD transport producing the bits feeding a DAC. What... Read more...

Who's in charge here?

In yesterday's post I wrote about the state of digital audio back in the early 1990s. At that early stage in the technology's development, no one was jumping up and... Read more...

Focusing

Recently I've shared a few stories with you of our history over the last 50 years—half a century of making audio equipment. There are a lot of stories, some I covered in... Read more...

Logos

50 years ago, in 1974, Stan Warren knocked on my door. It was one week after he first listened to the phono preamplifier I had designed for the local radio... Read more...

Headroom

Having enough room inside a building so that even tall people don't hit their heads is a wonderful idea. Especially if you are tall. Doesn't matter much if you're short.... Read more...

Obedience

Though we've been through this before I think it's always good to hit the refresh button from time to time. Loudspeakers are an obedient lot. They respond in exactly the... Read more...

Enthusiast vs. Phile

What's the difference between and Audio Enthusiast and an Audiophile? Technically, not a lot—we're all here to enjoy music and high end audio, to have fun—but this comment I received... Read more...

An inside view

Casual listening, whether in the car or in your home, never gives us the chance to listen inside the music. That is a rare treat afforded only to those of us... Read more...

Magnitude differences

Here's a thought experiment for you. Take your favorite set of electronics: perhaps a BHK preamp and amp with a DirectStream DAC and all interconnected with Audioquest Dragons. For loudspeakers, we'll... Read more...

Judging by the datasheet

Imagine trying to judge how something will taste by its list of ingredients. Sure, blueberry jam's always going to taste like blueberries, but that's about as far as you can take... Read more...

Simple solutions

When dealing with complex engineering problems there are often cascading effects that can be really frustrating. Let's imagine you are designing the output stage of a preamp or DAC and you... Read more...

Critics

At our core, we're all critics. We evaluate our system's performance, the music we listen to, the tweaks we try, the setups we work hard at to maximize performance. But... Read more...

Bye, bye, amping

How many people these days bi-amp? I am guessing nearly no one. Bi-wiring, where you separate out the speaker cables into upper and lower frequencies is done all the time. But, bi-amping,... Read more...

Favorite music

Back in the 1970s, when Terri and I were rock and roll DJs in Santa Maria, California, the radio station's phone lines were continually abuzz asking us to play their favorites:... Read more...

Are we getting closer?

Back in the prehistoric past of digital audio everything mattered. A lot. How you ripped a CD, how you transferred the data, how you stored the data, and how you... Read more...

Essentials

What's essential in your music reproduction system? One view is everything. If you didn't have what you have you wouldn't get the same results. Hard to argue with. Another view... Read more...

Dynamic contrasts

In our quest for perfection we like to have the maximum dynamic range, lowest THD and noise. But, how much matters? We've discussed before that the impacts of low distortion... Read more...

Chassis

The chassis of our equipment is typically all we interact with. It's what we see, touch, and feel. Other than holding the circuit boards and input and output connectors in place,... Read more...

Inventions

The beautiful summers we are blessed with here in Colorado are near perfect. Warm days, cool evenings, with sweet air and low humidity. Everything's just about perfect until you hear that irritating... Read more...

Squaring up

As long as we're thinking about things hard to imagine let's jump into a brief description of square waves. A square wave is just what it sounds like. A wave... Read more...

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