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BS from PS Audio Paul McGowan


mikebse2a3

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4 minutes ago, wvu80 said:

 

I like and watch regularly Paul's "ask Paul" segments and as an audio engineer himself he obviously has a lot of education, experience and knowledge.  As to your point, I think you are 100% right.

What's his background?   Mixing and or recording engineer? How long ago...... 

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11 hours ago, YK Thom said:

My inner skeptic thinks he protests too much, perhaps he is disappointed a buy out offer has yet to come his way.

I may be wrong, but I don't think so. 

 

He started PS Audio with another guy in the 70's (I think) and the business essentially failed and it was bought out years ago.  I forget who Paul went to work for but eventually he bought the company back and they just moved into a much larger facility right across from their old digs just a few months ago.  In Boulder, I think.

 

He's un-apologetic about his opinions, but he he speaks with sincerity.  We're not all right, all of the time.

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1 minute ago, Westcoastdrums said:

What's his background?   Mixing and or recording engineer? How long ago...... 

He is an engineer, the kind who designs electronics.  I believe he started in the 1970's and now at the age of 70 he is the president and doesn't design any more, he is the visionary force behind PS Audio and he does a lot of PR with his "Ask Paul" Youtube vids.  He puts one out every day.

 

I admire his philosophy about quality engineering driving his product lines.  I think he and our own PWK are brothers-in-arms in that respect.

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1 minute ago, Westcoastdrums said:
4 minutes ago, wvu80 said:

We're not all right, all of the time.

On this forum?  Are you sure? 

 

The only thing audiophiles can agree on is that all the other audiophiles are wrong.  B)

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35 minutes ago, Westcoastdrums said:

I think he and our own PWK are brothers-in-arms in that respect. 

 

35 minutes ago, Westcoastdrums said:

I think not?  Did you not read his "bash" on klipsch taken above?   Have you heard their current line?   Do you agree?   

I just re-read the original post, or tweet or whatever that was.  Is that the "bash" you're referring to?  No doubt, he took a hard (and unfair) knock on Klipsch as a company, lamenting the company had gone so far away from the owner's (PWK) original intent after PWK had sold the company.

 

Have I heard their "current line?"  I'm not sure what you meant, but no I've never heard a PS Audio product.  I know they are pricey and 2-channel only.  McGowen prides himself on quality engineering and has a philosophy of building high quality products. 

 

My point is I think PWK would have been old school in his engineering philosophy towards reproducing quality sound and I think McGowen has the same singularity of purpose.

 

All I'm doing here is giving McGowen the benefit of the doubt.  I don't think he's trying to be inaccurate, I just think he hasn't heard a Klipsch speaker from this century.  If he had I don't think he would come to that obviously erroneous conclusion.  I thought that from his other vids on horns, for instance.  He just doesn't know what a modern horn driven speaker can do or how it sounds.

 

The result is that his information, and therefore his opinion is out-of-date.

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I was merely musing when I came up with this post.  I left it sit for some time and looked at it again.  I can't decide whether to post it or not so I will, but with this note that you can feel free to not even read it if you're pressed for time.

 

-----

 

Well, I had a few browser windows open, each with several tabs, was going through them to "clean house" a bit, and found one open to https://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/air-gaps/.  Might as well add this to the BS list as well.

 

He's got flac files sounding different from wav even though after reconstruction they're numerically identical.  This is what he says, not my take on what he says.  Evidently it's because the reconstructed (but identical!) bits have become polluted during the course of reconstruction.  Bits are bits.  They're either a one or a zero.  A "distorted" "1" is still distinctly different from a "0", whether or not that "0" is "distorted" and so long as the combinations are maintained in order the information they represent can be perfectly recovered.  Now in this case the word "distorted" is mine.  He actually uses the term "pollute."  But we're used to hearing changes-from-original being called distortion.

 

So he's got polluted and jittery 1s and 0s feeding a DAC and wants to clean that up for us.  Isolation between the digital crunching section, with all it's noisy digital manipulation, from the digital to analog conversion section will surely take care of this.  Not.  Firstly, it doesn't matter if there's jitter heading toward the DAC.  Everything is re-timed when it hits there anyway.  (Do you suppose that the packets of data traversing the Internet, be they text, images, or audio, always arrive in perfect order and perfectly timed?  Absolutely no guarantees and missed packets get re-requested, re-transmitted, and re-ordered-when received all the time!)  And it must have slipped his mind that the DAC itself involves digital manipulation with all it's noise and pollution, so perfect isolation between digital and analog sections can not be achieved.  Isolating the noisier from the more-critical section's power supplies and grounds is just plain old good design.

 

But maybe some of his fancy power cords and/or power regenerators will magically fix all the pollution that's left!

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There was a small chance I would purchase some PS Audio equipment in the past.  Not now.  Voicing an opinion is one thing, but to name other companies in a (somewhat?) public forum as having lost their way, is not a good idea, especially given the limited information I have to form my own opinion.   Sorry to hear @Chief bonehead has a different job than he thought, good luck with the fishing!  I hear the trout fishing in the mountain glacier water fed rivers here in Alberta is good ... or Salmon/Halibut off the west coast, come on up and enjoy the scenery (in the summer!).

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15 hours ago, wvu80 said:

He is an engineer, the kind who designs electronics.

No, he's not.  His CV is somewhere on his site, and it's all marketing and sales, zero engineering.  He's the epitome of the modern snake oil huckster.  The only thing he engineers is steaming piles of poo.

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1 minute ago, Ski Bum said:

No, he's not.  His CV is somewhere on his site, and it's all marketing and sales, zero engineering.  He's the epitome of the modern snake oil huckster.  The only thing he engineers is steaming piles of poo.

 

He doesn't do electronic design now, but I think from the videos I've seen in the past, I think that's how he started, and of course I could be wrong.  I follow his Youtube vids for fun and I don't remember all the details.  If you've watched them before, it doesn't take him long to wander off the path of whatever he's talking about.  That's part of his charm.  😎

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That's the problem.  Some folks in this distinctly postmodern age find him charming, many even believe in his nonsense.  They even want to attribute to him qualifications he's never earned. 

 

He has no engineering credentials at all.  He's just a typical phony baloney Boulderite, liar (see the OP), charlatan, huckster, relying on every trope in the audiophool religious belief system to sell magic wires and other overpriced, low-value kit to suckers.  His business ethics are those of PT Barnum (it's a moral imperative to separate fools from their money). He could make his living selling any number of questionable new-agey BS with the rest of the Boulder nincompoops, he just happened to gravitate to audio.    

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11 hours ago, glens said:

I was merely musing when I came up with this post.  I left it sit for some time and looked at it again.  I can't decide whether to post it or not so I will, but with this note that you can feel free to not even read it if you're pressed for time.

 

-----

 

Well, I had a few browser windows open, each with several tabs, was going through them to "clean house" a bit, and found one open to https://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/air-gaps/.  Might as well add this to the BS list as well.

 

He's got flac files sounding different from wav even though after reconstruction they're numerically identical.  This is what he says, not my take on what he says.  Evidently it's because the reconstructed (but identical!) bits have become polluted during the course of reconstruction.  Bits are bits.  They're either a one or a zero.  A "distorted" "1" is still distinctly different from a "0", whether or not that "0" is "distorted" and so long as the combinations are maintained in order the information they represent can be perfectly recovered.  Now in this case the word "distorted" is mine.  He actually uses the term "pollute."  But we're used to hearing changes-from-original being called distortion.

 

So he's got polluted and jittery 1s and 0s feeding a DAC and wants to clean that up for us.  Isolation between the digital crunching section, with all it's noisy digital manipulation, from the digital to analog conversion section will surely take care of this.  Not.  Firstly, it doesn't matter if there's jitter heading toward the DAC.  Everything is re-timed when it hits there anyway.  (Do you suppose that the packets of data traversing the Internet, be they text, images, or audio, always arrive in perfect order and perfectly timed?  Absolutely no guarantees and missed packets get re-requested, re-transmitted, and re-ordered-when received all the time!)  And it must have slipped his mind that the DAC itself involves digital manipulation with all it's noise and pollution, so perfect isolation between digital and analog sections can not be achieved.  Isolating the noisier from the more-critical section's power supplies and grounds is just plain old good design.

 

But maybe some of his fancy power cords and/or power regenerators will magically fix all the pollution that's left!

 

Yeah, flac and wav CAN sound different. 

I have an opinion on why I think this is true (besides having experienced it) and have heard reasonable explanations regarding increased power usage due to more processing but I'm likely not educated or trained to the level to satisfy those here who are so quick to throw things on the BS pile.  Some folks just really wear me out.  With them, it's all or nothing... yes, or no,  truth or BS.  I'm glad if that world view works for them.  Not aiming this at glens specifically, to be clear.  

 

I believe what I've heard from Paul McGowan has been accurate (note that I said accurate and not correct) more often than not and mostly agrees with what I've experienced.  He has built some nice sounding equipment.  Whoops!  I forgot it all sounds the same... my mistake.

 

Paul McGowan was wrong in his comments about Klipsch and I believe was guilty of grossly over generalizing.  Personally, I think a retraction was in order but I'd rather go fishing than worry about that.  

 

By the way, with my current setup I cannot hear any difference between flac and wav.

Between the two, there was never a dimes worth of difference though anyway.

 

 

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You can encode gigabytes worth of wave files to flac and back again, multiple times over, and end up with exactly same strings of ones and zeros as at the start.  Even if two or three bits got somehow flipped in all that activity, each occurrence would be such a fleeting event upon playback that if even noticed it couldn't possibly be anything anyone could say altered the character of the overall sound.  It's just impossible.

 

Now if the computer hardware in general was vastly underspec'd for the simple task of simultaneously performing all its assigned duties including the "real time" D to A conversion, like if maybe using a 386-25MHz system with insufficient memory and memory speed or something (though I'd be surprised if even that wouldn't suffice to decode flac on the fly, if one could be found) then that still wouldn't be the fault of the hardware; rather that of the implementor.

 

Just sayin'...

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7 hours ago, muel said:

Paul McGowan was wrong in his comments about Klipsch and I believe was guilty of grossly over generalizing.

 

The following vid reflects how a long held belief about high efficiency speakers in general and Klipsch in particular can be changed by living in the present and having an open mind.

 

 

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