Most products we think of as integrateds are compromised. They’re typically collections of known technology cobbled together in one chassis and made to work as well together as is possible. And the key to today’s riff was those last few words, “made to work well together as is possible”.
Engineers get excited when they’re challenged to build a great standalone product. It’s their chance to shine, to show the world what they can do when given a specific task: a phono stage, a power amplifier, a preamplifier. The purpose of the product is clear.
Too often those charged with extracting the essence of separates to then bundle into a lower cost amalgam do so without excitement. Their goals are often centered around merely meeting expectations.
Not so at PS Audio. When our team set out to build Strata, we took a completely different tack. Strata represented a chance to put all that we know into a synergistic system. A chance to eliminate interconnection weaknesses and compromises—remembering the best one can hope for in an interconnect is to minimize damage. A chance to voice an entire system so that the sum of its parts exceeds any one function within it. A chance to control the user’s end-to-end experience.
It is a rare day when we get the chance to manage an entire system’s performance. Rare indeed since we cannot know if customers are mixing and matching our separates, nor have any say in how those separates are interconnected or powered.
Strata changes that dynamic for the better. A chance for PS Engineering to be judged not by the technologies or componentry within, but the end results when connected to headphones or speakers. A chance to put music first.
Look for further announcements late this month.
