Tag Archives: stereo system

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Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Racing shorts and foundations

I don’t know about where you live but here in Boulder, Colorado, most every bike rider looks like they’re getting ready for the Tour de France.

Is all that expensive gear effective? Does the money spent on high-tech racing clothing noticeably improve performance?

If you look at the marketing pitch on this gear it reads something like: “our gear is designed to be lightweight, aerodynamic, and breathable reducing wind resistance and improving speed and efficiency. The ultra-light materials provide UV protection, temperature regulation, and improved muscle support.”

All this sounds wonderful but I wonder if for the average bike rider, it isn’t like adding an acoustic isolation base to a Bose radio and hoping for better sound?

This isn’t a rant about high-fashion bicycle clothing. No, actually it’s just me trying to keep things in perspective.

How many times have people tried to upgrade their stereo system’s performance by adding an expensive tweak when what they really need to do is get the basics right?

Foundations matter.

  • Is your AC power foundation solid?
  • How about your loudspeakers?
  • Setup?
  • Power amplification?
  • Room?

For the few who can bike faster than anyone in town, it might help to get some aerodynamic clothing.

For the few whose HiFi system’s fundamental foundations are solid, it probably makes sense to add a few tweaky flourishes.

For the rest of us, a strong foundation is where you start.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Taking technology personally

How many times has it felt like technology has it out for you? Butt dialing someone right after their call, closing the page too soon and losing it, pressing delete, and then…..

Half the time I walk into Music Room 3 to play the stereo system it doesn’t work: the DAC’s on the wrong input, someone forgot to replace the amp trigger jacks, the transport’s been unplugged. It sometimes feels like the system doesn’t want me to play it. (of course, this is an exaggeration but this is what it feels like sometimes)

The opposite can be equally true. Everything just works, and the music sings to the heavens. Those times, it feels like I am in synch with technology (maybe it even likes me).

I think it’s natural to anthropomorphize our technology. We’ve reached the point where most of it is complex enough to have taken on a personality. It’s then easy to assign blame or lavish rewards on the machines we interact with.

Truth is our technology is quite literal. For the most part, technology just does what it’s told.

The good news is that even when it’s you pushing the wrong button, the stereo system doesn’t take it personally when you holler at it.

Our stereos love us no matter what.

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Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Image height

It is not difficult to imagine left, right, and center imaging on a stereo system.

It’s also likely not too much of a stretch to understand depth. After all, a proper stereo recording reproduces depth as a measure of how far away from the recording microphones the instruments or performers are.

Harder for most people to grasp is imaging height. How is it that the left and right loudspeakers can provide an illusion of height?

When we’re recording a singer at Octave Records, they are typically facing directly at the microphone and in fairly close proximity. Being that close, how then on a good recording can we hear if the singer is seated or standing?

Typically, this is a result of how boundaries change sound. When you are seated the microphone (and you) are closer to the floor. Standing up is the opposite.

How does being closer to the floor sound? It’s easy to try a little experiment to find out. In a quiet room, start speaking in the middle of the room. Listen carefully to the quality of your voice. As you continue speaking and listening, move closer to a boundary wall. Note how your voice changes: a reinforcement of upper and lower tones will likely be evident.

It might be subtle but in a properly setup system and on a good recording it’s easy to hear height as well as depth.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Stereo fascination

When I was growing up my father’s home-built stereo system—the envy of our neighbors and relatives—was monophonic. To fill our living room with sound there were two sets of parallel-wired speakers built into the left and right sides of the room. The lowest frequencies were handled by a subwoofer he had built into a commandeered hall closet.

We were in monophonic heaven.

Then, in the early 1960s, just before I was hijacked by the US government to serve my time in the Army, stereo arrived. My father was anxious to try it out.

In those days, moving from monophonic to stereo was a pretty big deal: a new phono cartridge and at a minimum, a second channel for the preamp, and the amplifier were required. *(By the late 1950s and early 1960s there were a few stereo-specific amps and preamps available but for most HiFi aficionados like my father, this new stereo thing was an unknown. Possibly a gimmick. Easier to cobble together something just to see what all the fuss was about).

Following an entire weekend of setting up the extra equipment which—to the horror of my mother—wound up strewn across the living room floor, we were ready to hear what all the fuss of stereo was about. That’s when my Dad pulled out the only stereo album he had managed to find at the local record store. Instead of music, it was an entire recording of stereo sound effects including my favorite, a locomotive traveling from left to right across our living room.

That single demo was amazing. Instead of what we were used to, a wall of monophonic sound filling the room, suddenly there was another element. Dimensionality.

To me, the addition of stereo was of the same magnitude as the next revolution, color television.

Heady times.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek Audio and Paul McGowan of PS Audio, Intl.

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See through music

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 at a live show.

Better than a front row seat.

This see-through music is one of the first qualities I look for in a high-end audio two-channel system. It’s one of the more difficult challenges for a system and hard to achieve because rarely does setup have a big impact on the level of transparency. Instead, it’s almost always a function of cables and electronics.

Speaker and seating positioning coupled with room conditions offer big benefits in tonal balance and the system’s disappearing act, but when it comes to seeing through the music it’s almost always in the equipment itself.

Case in point, the new DSMK2 DAC. Every time I turn the system on I am stunned at the transparency I hear. Going back to the MK1 immediately clouds the music (relative to what I am hearing on the MK2)—and the MK1 is no slouch! It’s held its own as one of the most transparent DACs around.

So when the MK2 takes the music to this new level you know something special is going on.

I can’t wait for you to experience what I and the Beta Testers are experiencing.

See-through music.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek Audio and Paul McGowan of PS Audio, Intl.

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Polishing touches

It is always a conundrum whether to polish or rearrange a stereo system.

The first time I hear a new audio 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 this exercise at PS Audio.

Ever since we replaced the Infinity IRSV with the aspen FR30s we’ve not been happy with the system’s bottom end—frustrating because the FR30s have an extraordinary bottom end that rivals the IRSV (aspens extend down to about 23Hz in the room and are more than capable of rattling your pant leg and putting a smile on your face). Unfortunately, because of Music Room 2’s dimensional ratios (and the fact its floor is as bouncy as a spring), the best position for imaging is the worst place for the bottom end (in the case of the IRSV we simply moved the separate bass towers to where in the room we got proper bass performance at the listening position).

Music Room 3, however, is a little longer front to back and the dimensional ratios work. Those few feet of additional length are all that we needed to enjoy the aspen’s thundering bass and so they were moved.

Caleb and the guys in sales did all the heavy lifting of switching systems and rooms. When I first sat down for a listen I was duly impressed. They had done a wonderful job of setting everything up and in the right place. I whipped out the disc from The Audiophile’s Guide: The Loudspeaker, and played Gabriel Mervine’s tracks (where the Quartet is presented one instrument at a time). Sounded pretty close but not perfect.

Polish or rearrange?

For me, the easiest way to determine this is to begin with some obvious polishing steps like moving a little the loudspeakers and/or the seating position. If it feels like we’re making sufficient progress then that’s the right thing to do.

If it’s just different…..then time to start from scratch.

In the case of Music Room 3 and the aspens, all we needed was a bit of a polishing touch (truth is, these are some of the easiest speaker in the world to dial in).

If you’re in the neighborhood, due stop in and have a listen.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek Audio and Paul McGowan of PS Audio, Intl.

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Not soft, if it’s a good analog front end.

Is analog soft?

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 electronics and analog storage mediums—all of which have an analog “sound” to them.

True analog sound is what comes directly out of the recording microphone. But, unless you’re at the recording studio at the time a record is being made your only means of hearing that analog microphone feed is after it’s been processed through the storage medium of vinyl or tape.

And if we dare to suggest capturing that feed with digital means, either PCM or DSD, we have then violated the analog label’s definition. By default it can no longer be “analog” (even if it sounds identical).

When I listen to music captured on pure analog means I hear a softness to it. Hard to describe, actually, but a softening of the original signal is about as good as I can come up with. And maybe the opposite is helpful. On many digital captures, there is a sharpness that colors the sound.

The perfect capture is when we can tell no difference between the source and the output.

Nice if we had a name for that.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek Audio and Paul McGowan of PS Audio, Intl.

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I seldom listen to music that sounds bad on my stereo, as there’s so much ow, that sounds great and that’s for me

Bad recordings and great systems

We often think of the revealing nature of a great stereo 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 narrow down their musical choices.

To the extent our systems bring us pleasure to enjoy all recordings can, in the end, be a good yardstick by which we measure success.

Fortunately, it isn’t always that black and white.

In my experience, systems go through three evolutionary phases:

  1. Phase one we go from a mediocre consumer setup where nothing sounds great yet nothing sounds bad. Oatmeal.
  2. Phase two we have upgraded systems and setup so the great recordings sound spectacular and the poor recordings are exposed.
  3. Phase three we elevated performance such that truly great recordings are breathtaking and poor recordings don’t irritate us—they can be appreciated for what they are without reaching to turn down the volume control.

Where is your system?

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Call it what you want to, but overkill for a good stereo system is part of the fun!

Overkill

What an odd concept.

Overkill.

Makes me think of Monty Python’s “not dead yet!”

As (sometimes) obsessive audiophiles we are often accused of overkill but I prefer a different description.

Finishing touches.

It might be overkill to check for the hundredth time how level your turntable is, but after spending an hour carefully setting the VTA it is to me more like the final check before liftoff.

Knowing everything is right has a wonderful calming effect: a measure of confidence that lets down my defenses and encourages the music to flow as it should.

Overkill might just be the last tweak we need.

Blog Posts

Asheville, Walnut Cove, Biltmore Forrest and Western North Carolina’s Audio and Home Theater specialists present Cane Creek AV and Paul McGowan – PS Audio, Intl.

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Temperament

Seems to me the more complex the stereo system the more I tend to approach its operation as if it had a mind of its own. I often think of audio equipment as being somewhat temperamental which causes me to approach with caution.

As devices get “smarter” anthropomorphizing them seems a natural consequence. For the briefest of moments, I hesitate before turning on my stereo system to make sure I get the order of turn-on correct.

Working with Octave Record’s Pyramix workstation—the single most intricate and complex DAW made—I often approach with care, afraid to “piss it off”.

Of course, machines don’t get pissed off but they certainly can have that impact on those that interface with them. We love them when they work and get gray hairs when they don’t.

How many of us have our secret formulas of levels, interconnects, positioning, and rituals required for the playing of music? Watch a true vinylphobe’s ritual before the music starts if you’re not convinced.

There’s no question in my mind that between the Octave Studio’s mixroom and our main listening room at PS there is a noticeable personality to each that must be both observed and honored.

The temperament of each person’s high-end audio system is both real and necessary.

Some call it personality while others would not be so humanizing.

Whatever we wish to call it, our systems have a voice!