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
Who needs a preamp?
You don’t often find a tire shop recommending shoes. And that's human nature—if a company doesn’t make a certain product, they’re probably not going to champion its importance. Which brings...
Power IS the signal
It took me a long time to fully appreciate that the power we feed our systems is the signal. Think about it. Every sound that comes out of a loudspeaker...
Winning an argument
It’s hard to win an argument with a spec sheet. Digital trounces vinyl. Lower noise, wider dynamic range, flatter frequency response. In theory—and in measurement—digital wins every time. And yet,...
How lossless works
Octave Radio streams as MP3. That often raises eyebrows, especially from those who know how seriously we take sound quality at Octave Records. After all, we record at some of...
Wait…Octave Radio is compressed?
When I talk about Octave Records, I usually bring up how we record at some of the highest bit depths and sample rates in the world. We don’t compress the...
The elephant in the room
Yesterday, we talked about the preamplifier as the system's gatekeeper—and how, perhaps surprisingly, it's the power supply that makes or breaks the whole design. At its core, a preamp is...