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Shaking your world

Paul's Posts — 22 May 2012

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Shaking your world

Not often I run into something that simply shakes up my world and when that happens it’s hard for me to not stop everything we’re doing and shout it out loud.  Thank goodness for this little blog – I can shout without disrupting PS Engineering.

Case in point the new power amp we have been working on.  We haven’t released a new power amp in a couple of years because to date I haven’t heard anything that just knocked me out.  Why is that important?  Because no one in the company has any interest in building products just to fill a hole in the product line up.  We build products because they deserve to be built.  To date I haven’t heard anything that deserves to be built when it comes to power amplifiers.

But then …… an OEM manufacturer twisted our arm to give their new technology a listen and finally, after the device sat in the listening room for months, I finally got around to auditioning it.  I was stunned.  My world shaken so badly that I asked our chief engineer to take the unit back and run a full battery of tests on it so convinced I was that something must be amiss technically.  And if so, I needed to know what it was because if technically incorrect then maybe we need to reevaluate what’s right and wrong.

But no, it was perfect, flat, correct.  Identical in specs to every other amp we listened to.  Identical to our reference amplifier in every respect except how it sounded.  It’s back in the listening room, the reference amp retired forever.  The new amp sitting open on a piece of plywood, sans chassis, with wires dangling about.

Tomorrow how I knew.

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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. David Bevin

    May 22, 2012 at 4:49 am

    Paul, I look forward to your insights on this amplifier but would you please take a moment to list what PS Audio has for it’s basic set-up in it’s listening room or direct your readers to where that info may be?

    • May 22, 2012 at 5:24 pm

      Hi David, our listening room uses a pair of Magneplanar 3.7 for the main left and right as well as an original pair of Magneplanar Tympani 1D bass panels for a bit of midbass fill in – plus two Martin Logan Descent subwoofers for the extremes. We have 2 P10 Power Plants powering the system and most of the listening occurs though the PerfectWave DAC and Bridge/Transport but occasionally we use the Clear Audio Turntable and GCPH phono preamplifier. The room is acoustically treated with DAAD diffusors and RPG diffusors as well.

  2. Terry Franklin

    May 22, 2012 at 8:14 am

    But is it better than my GCA-250?

  3. May 22, 2012 at 4:05 pm

    :)

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