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

Getting it wrong

Paul McGowan

We've been covering how a DSD/SACD converter works and we learned a few days ago that just about all modern DACS, certainly those that advertise 24 bit resolution, use a...

Timing is everything

Paul McGowan

Yesterday we discovered what 1-bit DSD looks like and how it's fundamentally different from that of the standard CD format, PCM. I am going to spend a few posts helping...

How dense are you?

Paul McGowan

Yesterday I surprised a few of you when we learned that the output of just about every modern DAC with 24 bit resolution is actually DSD, or Pulse Density Modulation,...

Can't get there from here

Paul McGowan

The day of the 16 bit ladder DAC is pretty much over. If you were particularly fond of the beast, despair not because we have something better called DSD. The...

Smoothing ruffled feathers

Paul McGowan

I announced in yesterday's post we'd find out today why traditional ladder DACS are no longer used in high-end audio but it'll have to wait until tomorrow as many of...

Telling the truth

Paul McGowan

In our ongoing series on the differences between CD's and SACD's we've covered the first part of the CD process, encoding audio into a digital format known as PCM, and...