27 years ago, in 1997, I repurchased PS Audio from its owner for $1.00. Clearly, at this price, there wasn't much left of the company.
Still, it was our baby and Terri and I were happy to have it back (despite the fact "it" wasn't anything more than two initials famous in the audio industry).
I was free. Free to dream, free to invent, free to imagine what the next line of audio products might be. And dream I did. In fact, it's where the vision I have worked so hard towards over the last three decades originated: build an affordable state-of-the-art end-to-end HiFi line that I would be thrilled to have in my home (a vision we finally completed in 2022 with the addition of Brunhaver's aspen speakers and Octave Records).
The more I thought about it the more I was convinced that's what I wanted to contribute to the high-end audio world—an end-to-end hand curated system from the AC outlet to your ears and everything in between.
Unencumbered by the pressures of most small business, like keeping the doors open, I was free to dream big and start fresh.
As in any good story or novel, if you know what the ending looks like, the best place to start is the beginning—and that would be the AC wall socket.
At the time there was very little on the market for AC power products. If memory serves me, the only two products of any consequence were the Tice Power Block and the MIT Z-Stabilizer along with a handful of off-the-shelf power wannabes.
George Tice had built a respectable series power isolation getup using big isolation transformers that seemed to clean things up nicely while Bruce Brisson's Z-Stabilizer was more of a parallel AC network said to do all sorts of great things.
Sonically, I wasn't happy with the bleaching of sound I experienced with the Tice products but the MIT box seemed to help rather a lot (though I could not measure any improvements).
But, clearly, getting the AC power right had a rather major impact on sound quality, something I already understood from years ago when Stan discovered the impact of using oversized power transformers—a practice we champion even to this day.
More tomorrow.
