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.
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Paul's Posts
Balanced vs. single ended
Noise is the enemy of fidelity, and how we move signals from one component to another has a major effect on how much noise we let in. Most audio gear...
Capacitors
Every component in an audio circuit leaves its mark, and few have been debated as much as capacitors. For decades, they were a necessary part of signal paths, blocking DC...
Clipping
In the early days of audio, clipping used to be one of the most damaging problems in audio, and it’s also one of the easiest to avoid if we understand...
The damping factor myth
Numbers can look impressive, but they don’t always mean what we think they do. Audiophiles are often drawn to specifications because they seem like objective markers of quality. The trouble...
More about power supplies
A day or two ago, we were discussing power supplies, and I mentioned switched-mode devices. The high-end community has traditionally eschewed these, but over time, like digital audio, they have...
Magnets vs. wires
One of the oldest debates in audio design is whether to couple signals magnetically, through transformers or inductors, or to pass them directly through wiring and capacitors. Both approaches have...