Paul's Posts

Most of us have figured out how variable the speed of time is. What's the old saying about watching a pot of water boil or staring at a tomato in... Read more...

Do no harm

When designing a new piece of equipment the hope and desire of the designer is to make something magical. To sound extraordinary. What in a circuit controls the level of... Read more...

Movie music

There aren't that many movies Terri and I feel comfortable watching. The bulk of releases these days seem either too violent, too stupid, too scary, too lame, too depressing, or... Read more...

Lossless

The world's first supercomputer, the CDC 6600, was launched in 1964 and designed by Seymour Cray. It had a processing speed of up to 3 million floating-point operations per second... Read more...

From witchcraft to understanding

I often get notes from folks exclaiming that what we as audiophiles do seems like witchcraft to them. That the idea of three dimensional sound detached from the speakers is... Read more...

Clearing the haze

Try as I might, my explanations of differences between formats lack a certain clarity. So when someone else writes a beautifully clear explanation of the differences between DSD and PCM I... Read more...

Basic vs. simple

Creating a complex product that features an elegant simplicity—like an iPhone—is exponentially more difficult than building an elegantly simple, but basic product. To the user, the two might seem similar but... Read more...

So....

Before we get started there are two housekeeping items to attend to. First, apologies for yesterday's long post. Second, as some correctly pointed out, a byte is technically 8 bits... Read more...

Bits vs. bytes

Want to cross your eyes this morning? There's always a lot of questions when it comes to how we at Octave Records make our recordings. Why? Because we don't do what... Read more...

Dealing with the good and the bad

One of my greatest life lessons is to be good with the bad. By that I mean getting not only comfortable with my weaknesses, but actually embracing them as strengths. As a... Read more...

Scientific versus purist

One definition of distortion would be to say any deviation whatsoever of the original audio signal. If the output of our amplifier is identical in every respect to its input then... Read more...

Sub ins

In yesterday's post, Sub outs, I fear I got so involved in the discussion as to completely ignore a long standing rule that the best way to connect a subwoofer... Read more...

Sub outs

If you're running a subwoofer to help achieve a truly full range sound, it might make sense to feed it with a dedicated subwoofer output on your preamp. But, there's a s problem. A... Read more...

Twin approaches

In a prior post I pointed out that no one parameter like distortion or timing is more important than the others (assuming a reasonable level for all parameters). That concept is... Read more...

So real you can...

Defining something we hear as "so real you can touch it" is the perfect description of what we all hope for in our high-end audio systems. And what parameters impact the... Read more...

Deniers and skeptics

I was recently called out for using the term Deniers as a way of referring to those who scoff at the notion cables matter. The reader said the term is pejorative and suggested... Read more...

Better or the same?

One of the things I dearly love about our community is the questions I get asked. They are always so interesting. Would transcoding a person's MP3 library to DSD be a... Read more...

Over the top

If the majority of people listening to music don't care about quality why would the high end audio market make sense? After all, wouldn't we have a bigger marketplace if... Read more...

Upside down amps

A Stellar M1200 power amplifier sounds different when placed upside down. Now that's a rather silly statement, right? Not so fast. Consider for a moment the difference in sound quality... Read more...

Sonic penalties

When there's cake to be had we want to eat it. Features and services? We want those too just not with any added sonic penalties. Take for example the idea... Read more...

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