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

The bass boom

Paul McGowan

Deep bass should never be boomy. I’ve been in countless rooms where the low end takes over. Kick drums lose definition, bass guitars blur into a single tone, and the...

Truth

Paul McGowan

The midrange holds the key to musical truth. Voices, strings, horns—most of what we consider “music” lives between 300 Hz and 3 kHz. If that range is wrong, nothing else...

Loud to soft

Paul McGowan

Dynamics define realism. I remember sitting in front of a grand piano as the player struck a single key with force. The sudden rise from silence to thunder startled me,...

The illusion of space

Paul McGowan

Stereo is an illusion of space. I first learned this listening to a pair of large planar speakers decades ago. The physical panels stood six feet apart, yet the music...

The illusion of live

Paul McGowan

The goal of high-end playback isn’t to copy live sound, but to make recorded music believable. I often hear people say they want their systems to sound “like live music.”...

On the matter of power

Paul McGowan

Great sound starts at the wall. For years, I assumed AC power was just AC power. If the lights came on and voltage looked stable, what could be wrong with...