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PS Audio: a Video Factory Tour

Immediately following the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show, our resident videographer Jana Dagdagan and I visited PS Audio in Boulder Colorado. The company's founder, Paul McGowan, gave up his Saturday to give us a tour of the factory.

In Jana's video, we start with the "Hall of Fame" in the vestibule, visit Paul's office/studio, PS Audio's engineering, production, and shipping departments, and end up in Paul's dedicated listening room, "Music Room One," where he has a pair of fully restored Infinity IRS V loudspeakers set-up.

In the next two videos we shot in Boulder, I talk to…

Dealer Event in Florida Thursday Evening

Thursday March 1, 6pm–8pm, Suncoast Audio (7353 International Place, Unit 309, Sarasota FL, 34240), is hosting an event featuring presentations by Walter Swanbon, the US Harbeth distributor, Vince Galbo from MSB Technologies, Kevin Hayes from VAC, and Jett Logan from AudioQuest. Suncoast will be raffling off a free pair of Harbeth speakers—must be present to win—and products being demmed and discussed will include the MSB Select II DAC and new MSB Reference Transport, the new AudioQuest Storm Series Power Cables, and the 40th Anniversary Edition Harbeth Monitor 40.2 speakers driven by VAC…

Book Review: <I>Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan</I>

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan
By Elaine M. Hayes. 419 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins, 2017. Hardbound: $27.99. Available in eBook and digital audiobook formats.

This is the second biography of Sarah Vaughan (1924–1990), whose towering vocal talents took her to the top rung of the jazz ladder, beside Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald. The author, trained as a classical musician, puts far more emphasis on the singer's recordings than Leslie Gourse did in Sassy, her 1993 Vaughan biography. Hayes's grasp of music, and her definitions of the musical terms she uses, make this…

Listening #183: Stenheim Alumine Five

Five years ago, I reviewed the Alumine loudspeaker from Stenheim, a Swiss company founded by four former employees of Goldmund SA (footnote 1). I noted the Alumine's surprisingly "high sensitivity and easy drivability," praised its performance for being "clean but neither sterile nor colorless," and admired, in my geeky way, the coated cellulose-fiber cone of its 5" midbass driver, which is made in Chartrettes, France—just southeast of Paris—by a company called PHL.

One year later, almost to the week, I bought my first vintage Altec loudspeakers: a pair of 1967 Valencias, in which a…

Listening #183: Stenheim Alumine Five Page 2

Fortunately, I had help installing the Alumine Fives: Gideon Schwartz of Audioarts, the Manhattan retailer that also serves as Stenheim's US distributor, visited my house in early November, and between the two of us we got the speakers unboxed and moved into place in my new listening room. After a few rounds of listening and fine-tuning, each Alumine Five had wound up 42" from the front wall and 27" from its sidewall—both distances measured from the center of each front baffle—with the cabinets toed-in toward the central listening area, about 8' away, although not so drastically that I…

PS Audio's Paul McGowan talks about DACs, Speakers, and Why "Code" is a Necessary 4-Letter Word

Earlier this week, we posted a video blog with PS Audio's founder and CEO Paul McGowan giving Jana Dagdagan and me a post-CES tour around the Boulder, Colorado company's factory. That tour ended in Paul's dedicated listening room, "Music Room One," where he has a pair of fully restored Infinity IRS V loudspeakers set-up.

Following the tour, I sat down with Paul in Music Room One and in a wide-ranging conversation, we talked about amplifiers and loudspeakers, DACs and audio systems, and the state of high-end audio. We touched on audio retailing, permission vs push marketing, and even…

Music in the Round #90: Merging+Player PL8

Merging Technologies' original NADAC Multichannel-8 ($11,500) is an impressive device. (NADAC is an acronym for network-attached digital-to-analog converter.) It has eight channels of high-resolution D/A conversion, and two more for its front-panel headphone jack; a cutting-edge Ravenna Ethernet input (based on the AES67 Audio over Internet Protocol, or AoIP); and, to my delight, a real volume-control knob on the front. It handles all resolutions up to 384kHz PCM, DXD, and DSD256, and, in addition to the Ethernet input, it will accept AES/EBU and S/PDIF digital inputs up to 24 bits and 192kHz…

Music in the Round #90: Merging+Player PL8 Page 2

Still, I'm not deaf to the siren songs of cable companies, or the many audiophiles whose praises pepper their ads. Yeah, I want more, but I'm skeptical that there's any to be had, and I sense that very-high-priced cables amount to audio jewelry. Nonetheless, recently I succumbed to temptation and took a flyer on some wire.

Revelation Audio Labs Prophecy CryoSilver Reference DualConduit USB 2.0 Digital Link ($649/1.25m): Revelation Audio Labs' Prophecy DC cables came with my Baetis Prodigy-X. server, and I was impressed with their construction. I then discovered that RAL had a USB cable…

Music in the Round #90: Merging+Player PL8 Contacts

Sidebar 1: Contacts

Merging Technologies, Le Verney 1070, Puidoux, Switzerland. Tel: (41) 21-946-04-44. Fax: (41) 21-946-04-45. Web: www.merging.com. US distributor: Independent Audio Inc., 82 Gilman Street, Portland, ME 04102-3034. Tel. 207 773 2424. Web: www.independentaudio.com

Revelation Audio Labs, Inc., 2 Pine Cone Drive #354061, Palm Coast, FL 32137. Tel: (386) 627-8630. Web: www.revelationaudiolabs.com

Signal HiFi Inc., PO Box 38, Roslyn Heights, NY 11577-0038. Tel: (917) 957-8508. Web: www.signalcable.com

Aqvox Audio Devices, Steilshooper Strasse 118,…

Music in the Round #90: Merging+Player PL8 Recordings in the Round

Sidebar 2: Recordings in the Round

Del Tredici: Child Alice
Courtenay Budd, soprano; Gil Rose, Boston Modern Orchestra Project>BR> BMOP/sound 1056 (2 SACD/CDs). 2017. DDD. TT: 133:44.

I'm thrilled to tell you about this release. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been a lifelong fascination for composer David Del Tredici, who in 1980 won a Pulitzer Prize for Part 1 of Child Alice. Since then he's written a stream of similarly inspired works, though they seem linked less by any continuous narrative than by a rich and continuous stream of creativity.…