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

Winning an argument

Paul McGowan

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

Paul McGowan

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?

Paul McGowan

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

Paul McGowan

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...

The gatekeeper

Paul McGowan

While we’re on the subject of preamplifiers, let’s take a moment to consider the new PMG Signature Preamplifier—a revolution in preamp design. We’ve been building preamps for a long time....

Being misled

Paul McGowan

While we're on the subject of words and how they impact our thought processes and opinions on high-end audio, another instance occurred to me. In our new PMG Signature 512...