Paul's Posts

I hope at some point you have the time and opportunity to have a listen on a good system to our first live album ever. Gabriel Mervine’s Live at Nocturne was an... Read more...

Sequencing

Whenever I give advice about the order of importance for building from scratch a magical audio system I start like this: Speakers Amplifier AC power Source This order is based... Read more...

The Preamplifier

A traditional preamp (the pre – amplifier, the interface before the main power amp) had four main functions: input selection, phono stage, gain stage, volume/balance control. Preamplifiers were the center of the HiFi system—the... Read more...

We've known it all our lives

In my recent post, Timbre, I brought up a number of examples of instruments that have unique timbre. But, one of the problems we have in evaluating how well our... Read more...

Timbre

Musical timbre is the term we use to describe the sonic qualities that distinguish one instrument or voice from another. It's a complex and subjective quality that includes the harmonic... Read more...

Racing shorts and foundations

I don't know about where you live but here in Boulder, Colorado, most every bike rider looks like they're getting ready for the Tour de France. Is all that expensive... Read more...

Ultrasonics Matter

On a good day, the limits of human hearing are said to be 20kHz. As we age, that goes down in frequency. So why, you might ask, do we expect... Read more...

The Audio Compensator

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...

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