CRITICAL THINKING
fine wine or fine food. Some of the skill is innate, and whatever isn’t can be acquired if the listener puts in the effort.
McGowan said that the two biggest things in listening to recorded music are tonal balance and imaging. Some people are more sensitive to the tonal balance of recorded music. Most people, he said, are very sensitive to imaging. Tat “image,” which is imaginary in the most literal way, is something that most listeners are not likely to get while listening to stream- ing audio on smart speakers and over earphones or earbuds.
“If you were to walk into our listening room [at PS Audio] today, and I sat you down and put on something, the first thing that you’d probably notice that you’ve not heard before … none of the sound comes from the speakers.” Te speakers in the listening room, he said, are “seven-and-a- half-foot-tall towers in front of you, and yet no sound is coming from them. And the idea of a great stereo is this imagi- nary soundstage where you can literally hear that, well, that guy’s about there, and the other one’s just to his left about over there. But [the speakers] actually sound like people playing in the room.”
Tis image of the music being played over “these big-ass speakers” is not something that you get with headphones on. “You have to hear it on a properly set up pair of speakers.”
Tis is all imaginary. It’s your brain taking stereo sound heard by your two ears and interpreting it. “Te soundstage is 10 feet deep and it’s 20 feet wide, approxi- mately. And then I put on another piece of gear and, all of a sudden, the sound- stage shrinks, the actual size of this image that you’re getting literally shrinks, or the musicians seem bunched together, as opposed to spread apart.”
That is only part of the magic that McGowan loves about high-end stereo equipment. One thing it cannot and may never do is have the same fullness and pres- ence as live music. You can tell live music, anyone can, regardless of the source, “even someone strumming a guitar,” McGowan said. “Or I can be walking down the street and somebody is playing a piano in their house, or even an electric guitar. And I can tell.”
A DIFFERENT LEVEL OF QUALITY Back in the day when McGowan’s former partner was selling stereos out of a water- bed store,
the quality of most stereo
equipment wasn’t as good as it might have been. McGowan said the manufacturers didn’t know sound but they did know their customers. McIntosh, the venerable high-end audio company, never had very good sound, he said.
“If you could say anything about me, it’s I’m one of those crazy diehard entrepreneurial guys who cannot imagine failing.”
But he gives McIntosh credit for know- ing its audience. “Tey’re a company that puts bling first. And they really under- stand who their market is.” Tat said, however, “Tey put very little effort into how it sounds.”
If you go back to that serendipitous phono preamp that McGowan built for the radio station, and think about what it was
doing—or, actually, undoing—you start to get a glimmer of what McGowan and his audiophile brethren are on about. If you want the music to sound like the best version of was recorded, then the sound of all of the manipulation that’s done between then and the eventual listener must be transparent and disappear. Tat’s what PS Audio does.
When CDs came onto the scene, he said, they didn’t sound very good, but that was because “a company like Sony that doesn't care about sound made it, and Philips.”
PS Audio embraced it. “It sounded like crap … compared to vinyl, but I knew, technically, that that was just because it was in its infancy.” Indeed, PS Audio was one of the first companies to look for the pure heart of CD—it took out the factory electronics of a Philips Magnavox CD player and replaced them with audiophile electronics. Current PS Audio gear builds from that legacy of trying to create the purest audio. Te prices of PS Audio gear reflect the high end. Tey sell an ampli- fier called Sprout that doesn’t top $1,000, but the price of the rest of their gear could buy you a respectable used car.
Their customers are, like McGowan, audiophiles. In a sense, it’s a demographic that never really changes. PS Audio’s customers are somebody’s dad. Maybe grandad. “Our median age is probably 55 to 60,” he said. “Te question every few years comes up, well, what’s going to happen to your audience when we all die, because we’re all old guys?”
Te brand is such that “you get to a point where a small percentage of people have enough disposable income that they can start playing with their hobbies. And a small percentage want something better. You see it in wine, cars, photography, and audio’s no different.”
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