Markus Sauer: Good morning, Paul. How do you like being in Europe.

Paul McGowan: I’m a big fan of Europe. I’m always glad to be here. This morning I took the opportunity for a bit of running. There’s a forest right next to the hotel here. Jürgen (Jürgen Sachweh, of German PS Audio distributor hifi2die4) told me that this is a recreation area. How do you Europeans do it? At home in the US, some development company would have put up new apartment buildings here ages ago, there’s so much money to be made.

When I grew up in Orange County, there really were orange trees there, loads of them. Today you won’t find a single one in the whole county.

MS: Well, Europeans like to afford the luxury of public space, probably because we have so much less space than the US.

Paul McGowan: The other reason I like to be in Europe and especially Germany is because I met my wife Terri in Munich. I was stationed there with the army and met Terri, who is American, while she was on holiday. We liked Germany so much that we had decided to live there once I had finished my army stage. I had a job in Giorgio Moroder’s studio, we recorded cover versions of international hits for the German market and Giorgio had offered me a regular job.

Unfortunately, six months before my time in the army was due to end, I was sent back to Fort Benning, Georgia. The army had found out that I had been growing my hair long. The other soldiers used to wear long haired wigs in the evenings so they didn’t have to walk around with a crew cut off-duty. I did it the other way ‘round, I wore a short hair wig during the day. When I was done with the army, the job with Giorgio was gone, he’d found somebody else.

MS: Paul, why don’t we start the interview with a short précis of your and PS Audio’s history.

Paul McGowan: Well, PS Audio was founded in 1974 by me and Stan Warren, the P and S in our company’s name. We set out to prove that you could have great sound at reasonable cost. That continues to be our goal today. Our first product was a very successful phono stage, later we added pre and power amps.

In 1990, Arnie Nudell (who in his time with Infinity had been responsible for the Infinity Reference Standard, among other things) asked me if I wanted to start a new loudspeaker company with him. Now there was nobody in the world who I’d rather have gone into business with than Arnie, he’s just a great guy. I said yes enthusiastically. So I sold the company, which Stan had already left, to some investors where I knew PS Audio to be in good hands. They continued to run the company successfully for several years.

The new loudspeaker company that Arnie and I founded was Genesis. We started out with reasonably affordable models, the 5200 and 8200. But then the company who did the manufacturing for us and in fact was a shareholder in Genesis, API from Canada, decided that due to our demands for quality, we were more trouble than we were worth. After three years, we were left without a manufacturing facility. To develop our own manufacturing facility, it was easier to start at the top and not have to do large volumes right from the start. That was the birth of the Genesis I. But we always planned to go back to making more affordable speakers as well.

In about 1997 I started looking for a new challenge. With Genesis, I was only responsible for the electronics and the Genesis Digital Lens and could not pursue all my interests. So I sat down with Arnie, who asked me what I wanted to take with me. I said I just wanted the rights to the Digital Lens. We quickly came to an agreement and are still great friends to this day.

At around the same time, the owners of PS Audio, who also held the Threshold brand, had run into trouble and I was able to buy the PS Audio brand name from them for one dollar.

I wanted to do something fresh and new with the reborn PS Audio company, which initially was just Terri and me. In all my electronic designs I had been very conscious of the importance of power supplies for the sonic result. The very first PS Audio product, our phono stage, had a battery power supply. Advances in sound quality that I had managed to make on my products mostly came from improvements in power supplies. So, the next logical step was to clean up the electricity before it even entered into the amps. Thus our power regenerator, the Power Plant, was born. The basic idea was to rectify the AC from the wall outlet into DC and then build up an entirely new, clean sine wave for the AC power. The Power Plant was very successful and the current range of power products is still a cornerstone of our business today.

Starting in 2002 we also made classic audio products again, starting with our HCA (hybrid Class A) II power amp. It was a hybrid because the input stage was Class A, the output stage Class D. The MK II was in the name because Infinity had done a product of the same name. Again, this amp proved to be very popular, we sold several thousand of them. Today we have a full line-up of electronics again. In the medium term, all PS Audio products will be able to hook up to a network.

MS: Did the HCA II have a switching power supply?

Paul McGowan: No. Switching power supplies have relatively high output impedance. They need a filter to keep the HF switching noise out of the audio circuitry. We think that linear power supplies are better for power amps. Switching power supplies are great when you have a constant load, but a power amp must be able to deliver 60 amps peak current in milliseconds. Linear power supplies tend to be better at that.

MS: Okay, that takes us to the present time. What is PS Audio working on right now?

Paul McGowan: PS Audio has the goal of making your music available in a network no matter which medium it is stored in, so that includes vinyl. The starting point for that was me looking into a multi room system which is very successful in the market. One of our products is a D-to-A converter, the DL III. I thought, great, I’ll take this multi room system, which I like very much for its excellent, easy to use user interface, I’ll install it in my home, connect it to my DAC and I will be able to listen to high quality music everywhere. But I quickly found that it just didn’t work like that because the sound quality of that multi room system was very bad. The reason is probably that all multi room systems that I know of are designed by computer people, not audio people.

So we wanted to find out why the sound quality was so bad. It’s partly about timing problems, the famous jitter. But it’s also about spacing problems, how long the bits are. The result of our efforts is three products, two of which – a transport and a DAC - are already on the market, as well as a software program.

The first product is our PerfectWave Transport. We came up with the name by running a competition in our newsletter. We asked our readers for suggestions and offered a prize for the best one. The name we liked best was Perfect Wave.

MS: So your target market is surfers?

Paul McGowan: (laughs) that would narrow it down a bit too much, I guess. Actually, the guy who came up with the name does live in California, but as far as I know he’s not a surfer. He is a professional at finding names for products; he’s already come up with the names for several car models.

The basic idea behind the PerfectWave Transport was to completely decouple the data stream from a physical medium. The PWT was the most difficult project we undertook in this company’s 35 years of existence, a real ball buster.