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

Sounds too good to be true

Paul McGowan

I've been singing the praises of switching power supplies in power amplifiers for a few days, explaining why they have many advantages over a traditional supply: those advantages pretty much...

What size freight cars?

Paul McGowan

Yesterday I asked how it could be that a switching power supply can regulate its output without yet another power amplifier being inserted into the supply? We know that to...

Not enough regulations

Paul McGowan

We've seen that the average SMPS (switching power supply) is really nasty on PF, averaging a low 0.2, relative to a traditional supply that is 0.7 (the perfect being 1)...

Plus and minus

Paul McGowan

Continuing our thoughts on power supplies and the differences between a classic linear supply and a SMPS, I thought it might be helpful to list some generalized plus and minus's...

I wonder

Paul McGowan

I wonder how much it matters to most of us to know and understand what's going on inside a piece of audio kit. Don't get me wrong, I certainly enjoy...

Bucking trends

Paul McGowan

In yesterday's post we learned that the size of a switching power supply is so much smaller than a conventional linear supply because the power transformer shrunk an order of...