I don’t know about you but for me, once I’ve heard a great high-end audio system there’s no going back. And it’s not just high-end audio systems that reset standards. New recordings and new music do it to me as well. With each exposure to a performance upgrade, I get inspired to push forward toward…

While it might feel counterintuitive, it is often helpful to zoom in for a micro view in order to perfect the macro view: focusing closely on the smallest details of microphone placement in recordings or exacting speaker placement in the playback chain are both secrets of success. But, like many endeavors, there’s the threat of…

My wife Terri is working on getting a sign made for Octave Studios that reads like today’s post’s headline. Fix it in pre: a takeoff on the infamous fix it in post. We will clean that mess up later. While it might work in film, it rarely applies well in high-end audio recording. I think…

Now that we’ve moved the main PS Audio reference system from Music Room Two to Music Room Three we have a new challenge at hand. Where formerly the problems in MR2 were a loss of low end (a severe suck out from 100Hz and below), now we’re noticing in MR3 a kind of lackluster presentation….

If I am to enjoy a morning breakfast of blueberries, yogurt, and granola there has to be a proper balance between the flavors. My preference in berries runs towards the firm and tart which means that in order to reach a perfect balance there needs to be a bit of sweetness. Too much in any…

I have been asked so many times whether or not I am crazy that those questions not only roll off my back like water and ducks, but I have become convinced it is true. I would perhaps prefer the word obsessed to crazy but then what difference would it make? In any hobby or passionate…

Ever wonder why harmonic distortion figures include the word total? Surely we don’t benefit from knowing partial harmonic distortion. Or do we? Harmonic distortion happens when higher frequencies that are not part of the music are added to the signal when passing through our equipment chain. If we take a single tone, say 1kHz, then…

Two of the most valuable tools we have at Octave Records are a pair of Audeze headphones and the FR30 loudspeakers. Putting the headphones on while setting up a recording mix is an incredibly important tool that allows us to hear deep into the music as if looking through a magnifying glass before switching to…

When you are watching a live show you can see the musicians and hear their individual instruments. The visuals add clarity to what you are hearing. Listening on your stereo system loses that visual element but in exchange adds a proximity advantage. You are now closer to the musicians than you could have ever been…

What a great word. noun: 1. The quality of being easily shaped or moulded. 2. The adaptability of an organism to changes in its environment or differences between its various habitats. Plasticity very much describes our ever-adapting ear/brain mechanism. Unlike our test equipment which we rely upon to be solid and unchanging, our ear/brain mechanism…

Yeah, I know what you thought upon reading that headline… 🙂 No, this post is about materials and perceptions. When I was growing up the cool-guy-car surfers always wanted to own was called a Woody: wood-paneled vehicles from the late 1940s and early 1950s. On the positive side, they looked cool and were great for…

It might not make much sense when we see an amplifier’s frequency range specified as 10Hz to 60kHz. After all, this kind of extreme frequency range is unusable to humans. Our hearing is limited to 20Hz and 20kHz (and that’s on a good day). But here’s what might be missing. To be flat at the…

One of my YouTube viewers writes: “Paul, love almost all your videos. but. I think TOTAL ABSORTION behind the speakers is crucial. Reflection behind the speakers is just noise. PERIOD. WORST CASE. A glass window in the imaging space. PERIOD. Sorry.” This is part of the old live-end vs. dead-end debate in rooms (the actual…

We learn from very early on to protect ourselves from pain and unpleasantness. If something is too loud we cover our ears and move away. On a more moderate scale, we do the same thing when listening to music. If something is too piercing, bright, screechy, or objectionable our ears tighten up as a form…

Sorting out recording qualities from the hundreds (perhaps thousands) of choices of high-resolution DSD offerings can be a challenge. We go to a label’s offerings and read the blurb, listen to the sampler, and then roll the dice. More often than not, high-resolution DSD releases were not recorded in DSD. Instead, they were “remastered”. If…

It is always a conundrum whether to polish or rearrange a system. The first time I hear a new system that has yet to be dialed in I have to decide if it is close enough for a bit of polish or so far off we need to start from scratch. We just went through…

When we think of the analog sound we’re inevitably referencing a reproduction. This is because we experience analog sound through our stereo systems which, of course, are reproduction playback systems. And every analog reproduction is either captured on vinyl or magnetic tape. This of course means everything we associate with analog has passed through analog…

It wasn’t that long ago that my purchasing decisions were made mostly in stores. I would figure out what I wanted, search for a retail outlet that carried it, hopped in the car, and hoped for the best. Today it is different. Other than food and clothing, I want to try everything I buy at…

Can audio components run too cool? This is an interesting question. We’ve all experienced how different our systems sound when we first turn them on. Cold they sound like their temperature: stiff, sluggish, perhaps a bit sterile. Warmed up for an hour or so we become much more engaged. On the other side of the…

In 1976 Swedish recording engineer, Gert Palmcrantz recorded live to analog tape a Swedish jazz group featuring Arne Domnérus, alto sax, clarinet; Bengt Hallberg, piano; Lars Erstrand, vibes; Georg Riedel, bass; and Egil Johansen, drums. That album, Jazz at The Pawnshop was released as a two-record set by Proprius Records on 180-gram vinyl in 1977…

<Begin non-audio related rant:> We are all familiar with websites (like our own) requiring us to prove we are human. Sometimes it’s a simple checkbox certifying your humanness. Other times it’s a challenge to see if you can pick out certain features from an image. All to prove you are not a robot. Robots are…

Since the beginning of the pandemic and the partsdemic: the crazy times we all seem to be accepting as “normal”, there is sometimes a light of success shining through. Yesterday afternoon we shipped the first lot of DirectStream MKII DACs to anxious beta testers. What a journey it has been. If memory serves correctly, designer…

Linn’s Ivor Tiefenbrun famously suggested that if you can’t get the information off the vinyl disc in the first place then nothing else you do afterward matters. There’s much truth in what he said (though I have never agreed with the conclusion that some make that turntables are more important than speakers). But this thought…

On the rear of my Infinity IRSV is a wire bundle connecting all the tweeters and midranges to the crossover. The wiring appears to be standard lamp cord until you look closely. There, in small white writing, are the words Monster Cable. Before Monster Cable we all connected our speakers to our amplifiers with what…

Routines are often helpful patterns we use to repeat tasks in such a way as to make sure they are done correctly. A couple of quick examples might include shutting down a computer or washing one’s hands after going to the bathroom. Rituals, on the other hand, are often unnecessary routines we practice to feel…

We often think of the revealing nature of a great system as a double-edged sword: wonderful recordings sound better while poor ones sound worse. The idea of a system’s ability to magnifying a recording’s good and bad points is problematic when it comes to simply enjoying the music. This is why a lot of folks…