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Ignorance is bliss

Paul's Posts — 19 October 2011

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Ignorance is bliss

In yesterday’s post, When we can’t we won’t, I wrote about the notion that there is sometimes value in not knowing what you can’t do.

I’ll share with you an example of how this worked for us in the past and then, tomorrow, I’ll share with you a future idea born out of ignorance as well.

In the early 1980′s the CD was launched and, with it, we entered the era of digital audio.  Certainly digital audio had been with us for some time before the CD appeared, but this new portable storage medium changed the world and opened the digital audio floodgates.

Soon after the CD appeared we, and others in the high-end, started playing with the new medium to see if it could sound better.  We realized that by replacing the audio stage we could make a significant improvement and we did just that when we launched our first CD player.  It was an off-the-shelf Magnavox we gutted and put in our own audio circuit and called it the CD-1.  But I wasn’t happy with just modifying someone’s product and calling it our own.

It was obvious that we needed separates – one box as a transport and the other box to decode the audio.  This separates approach had many advantages and, in the past, served the high-end well by giving us separate preamps, phono stages, tuners and power amps (they used to all be together in one box).  I was excited to do the same for CD players.

We poked around inside the CD players of the day only to find that the digital audio we wanted to extract was either locked into an integrated circuit or ridiculously difficult to access.  What to do?

We then noticed that on the back of every CD player there was a single RCA connector that said “digital out”.  Could it be the audio was available here?  No one knew and the owners of the technology, Sony and Philips, weren’t telling (their technical secrets locked in something known as the Red Book).

All we knew was that the purpose of the digital out was to put album art out to a TV by some (as of yet) released interface box.  It certainly was not to extract the digital audio.  My engineers threw in the towel – because they were told it would not work.

I was just ignorant and stubborn enough to insist they challenge Sony and Philips.

Our chief engineer at the time, Mark Merrill, spent a week looking at this digital output with a scope and came to me one day and said “I don’t know what’s going on, but I can see the digital stream changing with the music I am playing.  I am guessing they just might have audio available, but more than that I don’t know.”

3 months later he had unlocked the secrets, decoded the info and we showed, at CES, a prototype of the world’s first separate D to A converter for high-end audio – and with it – an entire category of products that are still with us today.

Within 1 month of our prototype display, Arcam of England came out with an actual product and not long after that, Neil Sinclair of Theta introduced a similar product (our first commercial DAC was third).  All three were being worked on independently of each other – none of us aware of the other’s progress.

Sometimes a touch of ignorance and a stubborn challenge of what we are told “cannot be” leads to breakthroughs and innovations.

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About Author

Paul McGowan

Paul McGowan is the CEO and co-founder of PS Audio Inc. a Boulder Colorado design and manufacturing company of high-end audio products and services. McGowan has been designing and building high-end products for nearly 40 years. Hobbies include skiing, music, hiking, artisan bread baking, kick boxing and cooking. He lives in Boulder Colorado with his wife Terri and his 4 sons.

(4) Readers Comments

  1. Pingback: Ignorance is bliss | PSTracks

  2. October 19, 2011 at 3:17 am

    Well, I think there is an embedded answer in your own initial comments:
    “We then noticed that on the back of every CD player there was a single RCA connector that said “digital out”.

    …and… who designed/put that digital output at the back ? …A HiEnd engineer ?
    No. It was installed by Sony/Philips own engineers. The fact that most of HiEnd technicians didn´t have any idea about the just-born audio-digital technology (they still don’t have as they can get better salaries on any other field) only proves/confirms something (to me, at least): the best digital engineers can´t be found at most of HiEnd companies for obvious reasons (i.e.: salaries, among other benefits) and even nowadays they can make a design for a HiEnd company while keeping their job in a big-firm. Kind of ‘after-hours’ job.

    For me this is a pure commercial matter. Let’s go to basics: how many ‘audiophiles’ (users) are said to exist in the world? The truth is the only data I could get says “around 1 million”. Yes, making a lot of noise/music for us but… just 1 million all over the world. With such small niche, what kind of serious digital engineer would dedicate his life to work ONLY on that when he can get much more money and exciting different projects in any big company ? He may dedicate his weekends to that hobby-work (garage-work?) but no more than that.
    Now again let’s pay attention to this other fact : Is Sony/Philips/Pioneer/Samsung/Siemens, etc. in total ‘bankruptcy’ ? No. At all. Some of them just closed some no-profitable departments.

    Should we now start to count how many HiEnd companies have closed the doors or been sold/took over (nor even to mention the number of HiEnd stores/dealers that doesn´t exist any longer) ? In a second the following comes to my mind: TagMcLaren, Krell, Theta Digital, Wadia, Martin Logan, B&K Components, Klipsch, Sonus Faber,… just to mention the most famous ones. I guess there must be others in serious situations.
    Digital technology is putting many of them in a non comfortable situation (not by casuality, more turntables, tube-amplifiers and loudspeaker brands appear or are still in the business as a safe/necessary-value).

    A small niche, too small for so many but, as many of them are just pure-amateurs with another job (somethig impossible in many other serious industries), well, there they are…

    And this is just the beginning… or HiEnd designers realize that they have to start from the scratch (kind of page in blanck) and so, joining forces together to create really original products not commonly available but logical… or I am afraid that this, very unfortunately, …this is only the beginning of an already announced-technological ‘dead’ for many of them, because the new coming generations KNOW about computers and what they can do.
    And please, I really hope that no more HiEnd brands follow that absurd trick of putting a simple cheap Atom board with a Linux OS software inside a luxury chassis. They may trick the parents… but never to their kids (next generation of audiophiles).

    What the HiEnd market needs is a serious approach to original products… but that is another story.
    As you use to say: “Just my 2 cents”.

    All the best

    • October 19, 2011 at 7:13 am

      Interesting viewpoint, certainly understandable but I am not sure I agree with all your points.

      First, you cite the door closings of many high-end companies as some sort of evidence of the high end’s demise – but in fact, the tech industry in general (big and small) is littered with door closings on an industry wide scale that dwarfs the high-end.

      Secondly, our team of engineers are some of the best around and we’re not alone. Our engineers come to work for us not because they can’t get a job at a high tech company, but because they want to innovate, they are passionate about audio and don’t want to be a cog in a large corporation like Sony or Philips or IBM. Do you have any idea how boring it is for some to work as a staff engineer at IBM? Innovators, mavericks, people who like to shoot from the hip and be heard don’t fit in well with these big structures. In fact, it’s one of the big structured company’s issues – how to engage creative mavericks into the big corporate structure.

      The fact is, most innovation comes from small scrappy little companies – not from big corporate giants. Take Apple for example – one of the more innovative companies out there. Most of their serious innovations, the iPod, their touch screens, the new voice recognition software, even their icon based GUI that’s the core of their OS, were acquired through acquisition of small companies or organisations. The most famous, of which, is the small group of mavericks Xerox funded called PARC that actually invented the icon based object oriented GUI Apple made famous and now used on every computer in the world.

      High-end companies are indeed run by mavericks, they are typically scrappy and underfunded and much of the original innovation in audio comes from them. Nelson Pass is a great example of a maverick in our industry that the big guys have taken ideas from and implemented in products you use today. Bob Stuart of Meridian the same. There are many others.

      Perhaps you’ll enjoy tomorrow’s post.

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