NOTIONS, SOUND AND UNSOUND
lot. “He said, ‘Tis sounds remarkable.’ I said, ‘OK, great.’ And I was thrilled because that meant the radio station would be happy.”
Stan Warren was an audiophile, except, at the time, McGowan had no idea what an audiophile was. He lived in “a little shack in Orcutt, California, and the floor was wooden and kind of bouncy. He had literally drilled four holes through his living room floor and put four stakes into the earth below it and built a table that his turntable could sit on so that you wouldn't have any rumble when you were walking.”
Warren came by McGowan’s house and, impressed with the sound of the preamps, told McGowan that he wanted to give him $500 for half of the company. McGowan had just lost his Infinitizer company and gone through bankruptcy a month or two before, and was confused. Warren said, “ ‘No. Te stereo company. We’re going to call it Paul and Stan Audio.’ And I said, ‘Who are we going to sell them to?’ and he goes, ‘Audiophiles.’ ”
And thus was PS Audio born.
LAST CENTURY'S STARTUP In an era when there was no such thing as a website or a Best Buy or
Amazon.com, how did an enterprising startup gain trac- tion for its product? From the start, McGowan and Warren knew their customer. He was a man. Maybe older. He had discretion- ary income. He was as obsessed with music and sound as were Paul and Stan. He was maybe also the kind of audio snob who worked at a stereo store and would never have allowed the prod- uct in the store. “We never had any dealers. Dealers didn’t want to pay any attention to us. I mean, if you think they were snobs, think about us walking in with a little tiny homemade box that we were trying to sell for $60.” Actually, $59.95, or nearly $400 in today’s dollars. “And they would look at us and go, ‘You’re out of your freakin’ mind. Get out.’ ”
Tey went “factory direct” to their customers. One audio maga- zine allowed them to place an ad on credit. Teir ad read, “Rediscover your records” for $59.95. Tey guaranteed that customers could hook their preamp up to their system and it would blow them away. “If you don’t [like it], send it back, and we’ll give you your money back, guaranteed.” All a potential customer got was an address.
“At first, there were just inquiries,” McGowan said. PS Audio had no brochure, so they just wrote back hundreds of replies. “And before you know it, people started sending $59.95 checks in. We took that money and went out and bought parts and hand-built
80 Army AL&T Magazine Summer 2021
CHIP OFF THE OLD BLOCK
McGowan got his love of electronics from his father, Don. (Photo courtesy of Paul McGowan)
every one of those things ourselves. And just drip by drip, slowly but surely, we built the business, literally, by hand. I mean we did everything. We stuffed the PC [printed circuit] boards, we silkscreened the chassis. We bent the metal, we cut the metal, we punched it.” PS Audio components, nearly 50 years later, retain that original look.
TASTES EVOLVE At first, Warren was the audiophile and McGowan was the entre- preneur and electronics-builder. As McGowan learned more and more about reproducing recorded sound, Warren learned more and more about circuits.
“Stan was our listener. He was amazing. He could just say, ‘Nope, that’s—I can hear that that cymbal’s off,” McGowan said. “I couldn’t hear any of it. So it took it took me a good six months of daily listening and being tutored till I finally went, ‘Oh, of course,’ and then I finally became a ‘golden ear.’ ”
As McGowan learned more, his focus shifted away from the creation of sound via electronic wizardry and flashing lights to reproducing sound at the highest possible fidelity.
McGowan compared learning to understand and appreciate the sound of a high-quality stereo system to learning to appreciate
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