Power The Performers

The ongoing efforts to stem the spread of COVID-19 is working. Staying at home and maintaining social distancing are all helping to get us past the pandemic’s peak and starting to move us back to some semblance of normalcy. We will get there, especially if we band together to do what we can to help.

While every sector of worldwide economies and social structures have been impacted, it is especially gut wrenching to know that our musician friends are hurting pretty badly. With live events canceled, an entire industry important to music lovers all over the world has been hard hit. What would we do without our performers? To help, our friends at the Grammys have focused their efforts on their ongoing charitable outreach program, MusicCares.

MusicCares provides a safety net of critical assistance for music people in times of need. They’ve set up a special COVID-19 fund to help. You can donate here and Spotify will dollar-for-dollar match whatever is donated.

But there is more we can do.

Starting tomorrow, May 1, PS Audio is doing what we can to help both musicians and our community of stay-at-home music lovers. In a program we call Power The Performers, we’re going to make it easier to get one of our top performers in your hands and, at the same time, make a donation to MusicCares.

For the month of May, we’re lowering the US price on one of our top performers for systems and source equipment, the Stellar P3 Power Plant, by a whopping $700 bucks and then, for each sold, we’ll donate $100 cash to MusicCares. Combined with Spotify’s generous dollar-for-dollar matching program, for every P3 sold you can feel good that $200 will be made available to musicians in need.

The Stellar P3 provides perfect power for your performers and, at $1,499, is just what your sources need. At the end of May, we’ll tally up the number sold and cut a check to MusicCares. Every P3 sold comes with our famous free-shipping and hassle-free try-it-at-home guarantee. If you decide not to keep the P3, no worries, we’ll take it back and donate the $100 cash anyway.

The Power To The Performers special is available only to US residents. If you are outside the US, please check with your local distributor. We’re working hard with our international distributors to help them make P3s easier to afford in May as well as do what they can to help musicians.

M1200’s ship

Look at these two bandit-looking brothers, Manny and Danny, getting the new Stellar M1200 monoblock amplifiers ready for shipping! Yup, right on time and despite all the chaos, Stellar M1200s have shipped to beta testers and garnered rave reviews.

“The M1200s are the best sounding amps I’ve ever had in my system. They check off every box I can think of. Detail, clarity, punch, fun, huge soundstage, musicality, precision, body, smooth yet edgy when the recording calls for it, engaging (did I mention I got lost in the music more than once?), and oh yeah, fun. Even 70’s rock sounds good. Are they better than the M700s? By a lot. Are they worth double the price? I can’t answer that for anybody else but me. To me they are.”

“Why is this incredible improvement to my system happening?
Is it the Tubes?
The huge increase is wattage (increasing headroom)?
Whatever is inside causing the weight to double that of the M700s?

BEATS ME!!! I’ll leave the explanations to the engineers. But about this I’m 100% sure – the M1200s significantly upped the overall performance of my humble system more so than any of the dozens of tweaks and upgrades I’ve made to various systems over the years. Thank you PS Audio and my new electrical engineering Guru, Darren Myers. The downside of all this, however, is that now I’ll have to give serious consideration to Darren’s phono preamp – damn, this hobby never lets me just stay satisfied with what I’ve got.”

We’re accepting a limited number of preorders for this groundbreaking amplifier. If you’re interested, call us at 800PSAUDIO

$600 vinyl

Alright, alright, we know vinyl’s pricey, a lot pricier than CDs, but $600 for a hand cut vinyl album? Sure, why not?

The Electric Recording Co. of London England, which has been releasing music since 2012, specializes in meticulous recreations of classical and jazz albums from the 1950s and ’60s. Its catalog includes reissues of landmark recordings by Wilhelm Furtwängler, John Coltrane and Thelonious Monk, as well as lesser-known artists favored by collectors, like the violinist Johanna Martzy.

Its albums, assembled by hand and released in editions of 300 or fewer — at a cost of $400 to $600 for each LP — are made with restored vintage equipment down to its vacuum-tube amplifiers, and mono tape systems that have not been used in more than half a century. The goal is to ensure a faithful restoration of what the label’s founder, Pete Hutchison, sees as a lost golden age of record-making. Even its record jackets, printed one by one on letterpress machines, show a fanatical devotion to age-old craft.

While its founder, Pete Hutchison (pictured here) doesn’t quite seem to get our crowd when he says, ““Audiophiles listen with their ears, not with their hearts,” we can’t fault someone this dedicated for a statement like that.

You can read the entire NY Times article here.

ht to David McPhee for sending this to me.