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 damping factor myth
Numbers can look impressive, but they don’t always mean what we think they do. Audiophiles are often drawn to specifications because they seem like objective markers of quality. The trouble...
More about power supplies
A day or two ago, we were discussing power supplies, and I mentioned switched-mode devices. The high-end community has traditionally eschewed these, but over time, like digital audio, they have...
Magnets vs. wires
One of the oldest debates in audio design is whether to couple signals magnetically, through transformers or inductors, or to pass them directly through wiring and capacitors. Both approaches have...
Different silicon
At the heart of most amplifiers are transistors, and two of the most common types are field-effect transistors (FETs) and bipolar junction transistors (BJTs). On a schematic they may look...
Why Power Supplies Matter
Every component in an audio system is at the mercy of its power supply. The circuits may handle the signal, but the signal itself rides on the back of the...
The Truth About Signal-to-Noise Ratio
Signal-to-noise ratio is one of the most misunderstood specifications in audio. It’s supposed to tell us how much louder the music is than the background noise of the system. On...