Paul's Posts

As long as we're getting historic I thought it might be fun to explore one of the most ground breaking audio products of all time, the McIntosh C8 Audio Compensator... Read more...

100 Years Ago

One hundred years ago, three seminal events of 1923 changed the world forever: The first commercial radio station in the United States, KDKA in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania was launched while in... Read more...

Creepy woofers

In the world of loudspeaker design, there are many unique and descriptive terms used to describe various components and their functions. One such term is a bit creepy: "spider," which... Read more...

Balancing EQ And Ketchup

In just about every commercial recording studio in the world, (and most every recording you hear) the practice of EQ’ing is commonplace: correcting problems like unwanted background noise, microphone imbalances,... Read more...

The Illusion Of Being Right

I would suggest that throughout time it’s rather commonplace to hear people discounting or dismissing the experiences of others when worldviews do not match. Sometimes that’s helpful. If I see... Read more...

Starting and stopping

Ever wonder why loudspeaker designers get so excited about woofer cone materials like Kevlar, aluminum, paper, sandwich cones of carbon fiber, and other materials?* Their excitement comes from understanding the... Read more...

Banjo...

As our recording label Octave Records grows and we perfect our new state-of-the-art DSD256 capture and mix studio, the recordings we produce are significantly better with each release. Imagine then... Read more...

The Perfect Loudspeaker

As much as one would like to have such a thing as today’s headline, a perfect loudspeaker is a theoretical concept that does not exist in reality. If there were... Read more...

Slew Rate

In yesterday’s post, we discussed some types of distortion that are not typically part of a manufacturer’s specifications. One of those terms, slew rate, generated a bunch of questions and... Read more...

Transient considerations

There are a lot of parameters audio design engineers must consider when crafting a new amplification circuit. Chief among them is the dynamic ability of a circuit to properly reproduce... Read more...

Point of focus

In composing a photograph it's important to have the point of focus on the subject at hand. A sharp image is what draws the eye to where the photographer wants.... Read more...

Built ins

After all these decades of building phono stages, I am still confused. Why didn't turntable manufacturers build phono stages into their turntables in the same way CD player manufacturers built... Read more...

A Purist’s Approach

Purity is defined as freedom from adulteration or contamination. In other words, pure is free from anything other than itself. Pure water, pure air, pure sound. So what happens when we use... Read more...

Better or different?

I know I've told this story a million times but it probably bears repeating. Back in the 90s, when we first started investigating the importance of AC power, we were... Read more...

Nostalgia

How many times have we been nostalgic about something only to relive it and realize our memories were gilded? We often remember only the good parts and strip away the... Read more...

Front And Center

If the goal of high-end audio is to recreate the sound of live musicians in our rooms why do nearly all studio recordings place the main vocal in the center?... Read more...

What is flat?

How can flat-measuring speakers sound different? And for that matter, how can same-measuring-anything sound different? The answer lies in a couple of areas. First, we do not measure all parameters... Read more...

The practiced ear

As a lifelong photographer, I have, over many decades, developed a practiced eye. What's that mean? Simply that my eye/brain connections are wired to see through the camera's viewfinder in... Read more...

12 notes

I have always found it intriguing that the 12 musical notes in Western music, also known as the chromatic scale, can be combined and arranged in various ways to create... Read more...

Art Of HiFi Series

Thank you for all the kind words from those just now receiving their SACD copies of The Art of HiFi Series: Bass. (I especially liked “rattled my wife’s dental plates”) What’s next in... Read more...

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