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Canadian loudspeaker company PSB International celebrated both its 25th anniversary in July and the 10th anniversary of the introduction of its Stratus series. (I review the latest version of the flagship Stratus speaker, the Gold i, elsewhere in this issue.) Started by Paul Barton and two friends in the summer of 1972, PSB Speakers was named after Paul and his high-school sweetheart Sue (now his wife). Paul & Sue Barton Speakers is now part of Lenbrook Industries, which distributes NAD, Marantz, and Bang & Olufsen in Canada, and which in turn is part of the Canadian conglomerate…
Atkinson: What was PSB's first commercial loudspeaker?
Barton: I'm embarrassed to say! It was a 12" two-way. [laughter] The company no longer exists, but Canadians who read Stereophile will probably remember a company called Radio Speakers of Canada. The speaker used one of their 12" woofers with a 1" Philips dome tweeter.
Atkinson: When did you start a relationship with Canada's National Research Council?
Barton: The National Research Council of Canada—NRC, as it's called—is a government-funded group of institutions that employ about 1000 Ph.D.s in all of the sciences,…
Barton: Because the first-arrival sound is predominant. Sound power compiles a lot of measurements to give you a picture of what the speaker's total energy output is. Picture the speaker in the middle of a sphere and microphone measurements being made all over the surface of that sphere. In a room, in varying degrees depending on how well the room is damped, some of the energy from all of the directions around the loudspeaker will eventually reach the listener at some point in time. The intensity of that will be very much determined by the surface of the room itself and the directivity of…
Barton: Exactly. It must have been a strange configuration, as you don't often get off-axis peaks at high frequencies as much as you get a bad blend between the directivity of the larger driver crossing over to a much smaller driver.
Atkinson: The speaker that has been my favorite for a while, the B&W Silver Signature, is a two-way with an 8" woofer. So what you have is a little bit of off-axis flare at the bottom of the tweeter passband. But the woofer appears to be rolled off a little early to give a shallow depression in the on-axis response in exactly the same region where the…
Atkinson: If you look at the measurements of speakers in Stereophile, so many two-ways will have a big crossover notch for a standing listener.
Barton: Absolutely! You know, you've just got to sit down, listen, then stand up. It's one of the greatest subjective speaker tests you can do. If the speaker sounds very similar in both cases, either the gods were in favor or the engineer was conscious of that. And that people's ears dominate the room from the seated position to the standing position, not from the seated position to the floor.
Atkinson: I was somewhat surprised to see…
Atkinson: The Stratus Gold i is a stereo loudspeaker, yet as with every other speaker company, home theater is obviously having an impact on your product mix. Do you see surround systems ultimately replacing two-channel stereo? And if so, do you have to design speakers somewhat differently?
Barton: Well, you have to create an SKU that offers a wider variety of applications now because of home theater. I don't think the stereo business is growing, but I don't think it's diminishing. But PSB's growth, as is the case with all speaker companies, is driven by home theater right now. And…
From the days of Les Paul's chum Mary Ford, through Amanda McBroom and Jennifer Warnes, right up to Patricia Barber, audiophiles have been fascinated, and sometimes obsessed, with female vocals. I nominate to membership in that select sorority another Patricia, in this case O'Callaghan, whose third CD has just been released worldwide by her new label, Teldec.
O'Callaghan, a handsome young Ontario native, has a voice that is strong, clear, and agile, combining a silvery-sweet upper range with a lower register just made for sly innuendo. Although her primary genre is cabaret, she's not…
Teldec has organized the electrons for O'Callaghan to have a website of her own, which includes soundfiles of some tracks from Real Emotional Girl—certainly enough to let you figure out whether it might be your cup of tea. There's also tour information. My intuition tells me that Patricia O'Callaghan's live shows are likely to be memorable.
As I Was Saying...
If you did a hasty cover check to see which magazine you were reading, here's a brief explanation.
I have been a music and audio journalist on and off for 18 years, ever since the first issue of Digital Audio magazine (…
The audiophile in the plaid shirt and gray Dockers had his hand up. Moderator Jonathan Scull handed him the roving microphone, and the Stereophile writers on the podium at HI-FI '99's Sunday afternoon "Ask the Editors" session shifted in their chairs. "This one's for John Atkinson," came the windup. The other writers relaxed; I started to sweat. Then the pitch: "How come Stereophile issues are so small these days?"
And as you can see from the letters in this issue discussing the 124-page July Stereophile, it is indeed true that the magazine's covers are closer together this year. But so…
At a series of strategic planning meetings that took place in Santa Fe at the end of June, Petersen VP Jackie Augustine, who's in charge of the company's High Technology Group (of which Stereophile is part (footnote 2)), decided to increase the amount of editorial content in Stereophile when necessary, starting with our August issue. Under the guidance of our new senior editor, Jonathan Scull (again, see this issue's "Letters"), the magazine's team of reviewers will be pursuing a more proactive strategy with respect to the components we choose to review. And the year 2000 will see further…