The Irrepressible Paul McGowan of PS Audio

I really enjoy the videos of PS Audio's founder Paul McGowan. Even if you are frugal like me (and after all, the PS Audio Sprout is an amazing unit) you will discover a great deal of insight and information for audiophiles. I especially enjoy his blog posts and his thoughtful replies to questions.

Here's the link to his "Ask Paul" videos and here's a link to his posts.

I found this post, Evidence of Absence very thought provoking and it resulted in respectful and interesting replies. Here's an excerpt:

There’s a famous aphorism that really resonates with me.

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

Just because traditional audio measurements don’t tell us much of anything about how a product sounds doesn’t mean all same measuring products sound alike.

Yes, it’s the old measurements vs. listening debate again, but with a new angle that might prove interesting to some. But, probably not. We’re each so entrenched in our views.

Part of the problem is this. In science, whoever makes a claim carries the burden of proof regardless of positive or negative content in the claim. So, if we audiophiles claim to hear differences in cables and electronics then the burden of proof rests on our shoulders if we wish the rest of the world to concur.

And here’s the thing. Do we actually care? What value would be had when the naysayers are proven wrong?

My own feeling is one doesn't see a state-of-the-art OLED display as a window on the world; it's a good flat panel display but it doesn't fool the eye that you're seeing the world as it is. Technology perfected by refined engineering offers a facsimile of reality but not the real world. But that doesn't mean we don't enjoy the illusion and it's the same for audio.

One of Paul's YouTube's detailed how a state of the art recording system and custom speakers couldn't reproduce the sound of a guitar recorded in the same room. You clearly hear a recording and not the guitar. And I think that will always be true, even if one had a million dollar sound system.

I like this comment posted on the link about by "Sound Mind."

“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”

 When science and measurements don’t correlate with experience then the science is wrong and the measurements based on it are wrong. The solution to understanding the problem should be pretty straightforward … to a physicist or even an smart acoustician. (maybe not to an electrical engineer.) I figured when I discovered it that within about five years, ten at the outside someone else would discover it too. But here we are nearly 50 years later and progress for the scientists has been snail pace slow and for the industry nonexistent. It is still for the most part building the same concept today it built and marketed in 1958. The details are different. CDs and streaming have replaced phonograph records and magnetic tape, amplifiers have new devices like transistors and ICs, speakers have been refined to a degree due to better materials and mathematically modeling mostly for marketing vented box designs which are not the best but in a larger sense there really is no change.

Some experimenters have tried various novel schemes and I’ve watched them to see how well they do. So far the only one that came close that I know about and that seems valid to me on a theoretical basis is Wave Field Synthesis. It is based on a sound mathematical analysis different from my own but seems to end up in the same place. However there are no satisfactory measuring methods for it as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been adapted for playback of commercial recordings, and it is enormously complex and expensive to build and operate. It’s more of a laboratory curiosity just like my own.