Paul's Posts

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...

Bits of bits

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...

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