From as far back as I can remember, I had a penchant for pushing buttons.
I can still vividly recall the look of anger on a dozen faces after I pushed the big red STOP button on the escalator at Sears and Roebuck. And even more burned into my little brain was my father's reaction as every face on that elevator first turned to him, then to me, and finally, as my father realized what had happened, his glaring eyes burning a hole in my soul.
The thing is, I don't remember so much the pushing of the button, but rather the unintended consequences of that action.
How does that apply to audio? Consider the unintended consequences of a long audio cable. We all know that a 30-foot interconnect is a challenge to maintaining fidelity over such a long distance. But how many of us realize the impacts its capacitance has on the output stage of our preamplifiers?
I first figured this out while at a reviewer's house while demoing our new preamplifier. When I arrived, I connected the preamplifier to the reviewer's power amplifier through a short RCA interconnect and played the system.
Glorious!
Before I could show off the unit's performance, the reviewer entered the room, saw the setup, and requested I move the preamp to the other side of the room to join the other preamps—far away from the amp and connecting with a long balanced cable. I complied and played that same track of music as before, only to have my heart sink.
Lifeless, closed in, struggling.
I figured it must have been the long length of interconnect the signal had to pass through, but that turned out to be incorrect. The Reader's Digest version of this tale is simple. After an hour of hair pulling and beating myself up, I performed a little experiment. I put the preamp back to where it had sounded glorious, and in parallel with the shorter RCA interconnect, I attached the long length of balanced cable without passing the signal through it.
The soundstage again collapsed.
Turns out that all that cable capacitance was dragging the preamp's output stage down. Doh!
That unintended consequence lead me to redesign the output stage of every preamplifier PS Audio ever built. In other words, those unintended consequences changed forever the way I thought about designing a preamp.
Good stuff if you look hard enough.
As a side note, I notice modern escalators have plastic covers over those stop and start buttons—covers that likely keep little fingers from engaging them.
