Paul's Posts

There's an interesting misconception about analog vs. digital. One is continuous while the other is broken apart. At a certain speed, that is simply not true. Go fast enough and everything... Read more...

Supermarket sushi

Prepackaged supermarket sushi is not high-end anymore than a prepackaged receiver and speaker pair are. It's not that supermarket sushi isn't edible. When I am in a hurry for lunch,... Read more...

Zero DAC

I suppose my post of yesterday did not make sense to quite a number of people. Apologies for that. Let me try again. In 99.9% of the DACs on the... Read more...

The other side

Good speculations on yesterday's question. Thank you. On the subject of DSD's superior ability to capture music's essence (vs. a PCM capture) some speculated it might have something to do with... Read more...

One way street

Yesterday we were doing math to show how moving from DSD256 to DXD is, mathematically, the same sort of speed. DSD256 is a continuous stream of single bits running at... Read more...

Doing the math

Sometimes it helps to look at the mathematics behind digital audio to help us understand what's going on. Especially when that mathematics is simple arithmetic. For example, I get asked... Read more...

Risks and rewards

They say that without risk there would be no reward, though I would have to counter with the fact there's no risk in my devouring breakfast, yet the reward is... Read more...

Understanding the impossible

One a recent YouTube video I made, A Tour of Octave Studios, I got a bunch of nice comments but one really stuck out for me. "Impossible", is how it... Read more...

Musicality

I am not a fan of some modern art. I have tried to connect, but some of it looks to me like a child's finger painting. Same is true for some... Read more...

The DAC

In yesterday's post I told the story of how we jumped into digital audio by replacing the analog output stage of a CD player. Off the shelf, Sony and Philips... Read more...

Starting from scratch

In early foot races, a line was scratched into the ground to mark the starting point for the runners. All participants began the race from this "scratch" line, ensuring that... Read more...

Hand crafting

Few (if any) of us went down to the local electronics store, grabbed an off the shelf receiver and matching speakers and called it a high-end system. In fact, for... Read more...

Greener grass

You know the old saying about the color of grass on the other side? It's a snarky saying suggesting that once you get to the other side the color's not... Read more...

DAC outs

I have been pretty vocal about the importance of the DAC's output stage. In fact, I have not been shy suggesting it is the most important sonic element in a... Read more...

The dawn of imaging

Back in the early 1970s, when I first began this long audio journey, there was no mention of the soundstage or image of a stereo system. Music was attached to the... Read more...

Hybrids

Boysenberries and Labradoodles are manufactured hybrids. Before someone got the wild hair to combine a blackberry, raspberry, and loganberry we did not have the tasty fruit—not to mention how before that fateful... Read more...

All knowing

I love that some folks think that because we've been building high-performance audio equipment for the past 50 years that we would basically know everyone and everything there is to... Read more...

Hard headed thinking

I recently received a long and detailed description of why digital cannot work as well as the "real thing", analog. In that description the writer posits that because digital is... Read more...

Courtesy cables

I've been thinking. (God help us is the common refrain when they hear me utter those words). For decades now we've been including a "courtesy power cable" with every product we... Read more...

Recipes

When we think of building something—anything, from baking a cake to designing a new preamplifier, we typically start with a recipe. A recipe is a set of instructions that detail... Read more...

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