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.
Easy to subscribe and even easier to unsubscribe if you wish. Join us.
Paul's Posts
Getting it right
If you get the midrange right, everything else falls into place. The human ear is most sensitive between 300Hz and 3kHz. That’s where vocals live, where instrumental tone develops, where...
Color of silence
A quiet system isn’t just silent. It’s colorful. When noise disappears, music expands. The silence between notes becomes meaningful, full of tension or relief. That’s when you start to hear...
Contrasts
Dynamics aren’t just about loud—they’re about contrast. I remember visiting a friend’s room where everything sounded big, but nothing stood out. It was as if the music had been flattened...
Emotions
Some systems are technically perfect—but emotionally flat. We always build systems focused on specs: low distortion, flat response, perfect alignment. But that's just the starting point. From there, the listening...
The subwoofer secret
They're not about deeper bass. Most people add a subwoofer to get more bass or extend their speakers' low-frequency range. But that's backwards. The real reason to use subwoofers in...
Decay
The end of a note tells you just as much as the beginning. Attack gets all the attention in audio reviews—how fast the transient is, how crisp the edge. But...