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On the road

Paul's Posts — 05 October 2012

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On the road

I travel a lot for our company and visit with audio clubs, customers and speak at a few of our dealers.  When I go on these trips of course I want to play music and show off our equipment’s features and share with people the joy of choosing from my library on an iPad.

One of the cool things I love to do in these meetings is start by explaining what’s going on, playing a track, and then handing the iPad over to one of the audience members.  I make sure I choose one of the shy people who clearly have never had a chance to play with such a device in this setting.

I am delighted as the person reluctantly takes the iPad, figures out how to use it in less than 1 second and then beams with delight as he plays his first track.  Then everyone wants in and the iPad gets passed around the room.  As a speaker, it’s delightful to have most of my work handled for me by the folks that are attending the talk!

To give a good demo I need to make sure I have the right music people want and I really want to make sure there’s an impressive library to choose from.  I travel with about 1000 albums, or 15,000 or so tracks.  You might wonder how I transport this rather large library.

I travel with nothing more than my laptop and a single 1tB USB hard drive.  What I love about this hard drive is it has no power supply, not even a wire other than it’s little USB cable.  It’s completely powered off the laptop and is smaller than a paperback book.

It’s called a Seagate Free Agent and you can see a photo of it here.

On the road

The unit costs under $100 and slips into the back pocket of my jeans if need be.

I gotta tell you, this is really the way to go when it comes to music storage.

Tomorrow let’s delve into building a music library.

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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.

(6) Readers Comments

  1. mgpeterson

    October 5, 2012 at 9:54 am

    So NAS is bad. USB cable is good. So what about digital music stored on my desktop PC’s hard drive but delivered over my home wifi network? For example: from PC, ethernet cable to Airport Extreme / wirelessly to Airport Express / toslink to Digital Link III / inteconnect cables to preamp etc.

    • Tom

      October 5, 2012 at 10:06 am

      I’m very ready to move my music to storage and what you describe sounds good to me.

      But the issue that brings me up short isn’t so much the listening as the looking and this applies to NAS or USB.

      What I mean is, how do I get to see the files to make selections? I don’t feel like leaving a tablet computer sitting in my listening room and I certainly don’t want to schlep one into that room when I want to listen to music. Ditto for using a smartphone.

      More to the point, I don’t own either a tablet computer or a smartphone. My wife has one of the latter but I’m not about to say “Honey, pass me your phone, I want to go listen to some Mozart.”

    • October 5, 2012 at 11:22 am

      Funny enough I am traveling right now do this is from my phone and I’ll be short. If you store on the PC hard drive it’s fine, in fact it’s the fastest of all the choices. Just that some computers aren’t good at adding storage to if you don’t have enough to start with.

  2. dr.goodears

    October 5, 2012 at 8:29 pm

    ” One of the cool things I love to do in these meetings is start by explaining what’s going on, playing a track, and then handing the iPad over to one of the audience members. ”

    Yep, so does the “genius” at the local Apple Store who also offers up a entre of Pandora with a side dish of Rhapsody.

    Being remarkable and making exceptional products is an artform in these heavily mass produced – mass distributed – “race-to-the-bottom” times. Your story is a compelling one and sometimes you leave cards on the table.

    Just sayin …

  3. oxbow

    October 7, 2012 at 5:26 pm

    I am a little confused. My understanding is that USB is restricted in its ability to transfer music to 16/44, and thus is unsuitable for HD. So why USB?

    • October 8, 2012 at 10:46 am

      I think you’re confusing things a bit. First, USB is not restricted to 16/44 but some DAC’s USB inputs are – this is controlled through the type of driver they can use. For example, our new low cost NuWave DAC can now accept USB input up to 192kHz 24 bits.

      But USB that I am referring to in these posts has nothing to do with playing the music, only storing and accessing the stored information – and that’s not restricted to anything.

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