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.
