PS Audio founder and CEO, Paul McGowan, writes a daily blog: short, informative, fun, often controversial, but always interesting. Subjects range from personal stories, how to setup your system, news of the day, streaming, vinyl, tubes, transistors, loudspeakers, holographic imaging and more. Kind of like the Car Talk of audio. Not much is sacred, and there’s rarely a mention of our own products.

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Paul's Posts

Solving common problems

Paul McGowan

Take a look at the schematic representation of a transformer. What you are seeing is the input to the transformer, on the left, and the output of the transformer, on...

What do we have in common?

Paul McGowan

Balanced audio cables were invented many years ago for professional applications such as radio, television, film and recording studios. No consumer products had them. They were for the pros. And...

Regaining our balance

Paul McGowan

If a single ended cable has one conductor and a balanced cable two, what is the reason for their difference? Noise. Or, more appropriately put, the lack of it. A...

Chocolate or vanilla?

Paul McGowan

I will return to explaining balanced audio tomorrow. Most likely. Over on the PS Audio forums there's been a bit of controversy. It's the ongoing debate of PCM vs. DSD...

The Cannon Connector

Paul McGowan

Yesterday we went over the simple RCA single ended cable construction. Today we see what's inside a balanced XLR cable. The simplest description of a balanced cable is two single...

Getting everything straight

Paul McGowan

Ok, I couldn't resist the subject title. Sorry. And no, we never refer to single ended and balanced as such. I just couldn't resist. Here's a picture of a single...