Dude, really? Can’t come up with a better noun? Evolution is good!
I’ve followed this thread with interest and thought I would weigh in from my perspective. I will warn that this post is quite lengthy, it’s cold, rainy and we actually had snow yesterday in Buffalo, NY…yeah, yeah, I know…but I was born and raised in western NY, raised my family here and I absolutely love it!
In the end, I sympathize with Brodric. While I understand some of his comments are repetitive but for realativy new owners of PSA gear, I find his experience helpful in determining which pieces of audio equipment I will decide to purchase.
While I understand that Brodric’s experience is at the extreme end of the spectrum, I do think it would be beneficial to have someone from PSA reply in this thread (quality control Manager) with what steps have been taken and what procedures have been put in place to continuously improve testing and general quality control prior to to products being shipped to customers. I understand this may have taken place in private communications. In my opinion no product should leave a manufacturing facility with the status of PSA without being 100% tested and a full quality control process be administered.
I own (2) pieces of PSA gear (DSJ,P12) both of these have been trouble free with the exception of a lot of difficulty loading Snowmass but the fact that PSA develops these upgrades and makes them openly available for FREE negates any concern I have over that issue. It is truly amazing to me that they provide this service to their customers. I was also aware that Power Play was not up and running prior to my purchase of the P12, it seems like a nice feature but I most likely would not use it much and this thing is killer! Huge improvement to my modest system. The DSJ is by far the best, most versatile dac I have owned (mytek Brooklyn, OPPO, exesound)
It’s clear PSA has extremely talented engineers and designers, the entire team from Paul on down appear to be passionate about what they do and I’m sure customer satisfaction is at the top of their priority list each day. I have no doubt that thier goal is to design and manufacture innovative, reliable and great sounding audio components. The fact that this forum has participation from key members the PSA team, where you can here their passion come through thier worlds is very impressive.
I will strongly consider PSA for all of my future component purchases due in large part to the great customer service and the drive and passion of the PSA team. That said there is (as it should be) a place to discuss openly and freely issues and areas that need improvement. I think fewer excuses and fewer people “taking sides” would go a long way here open, honest, civilized communication should be the path.
I advise filling a glass (or bowl) with you favorite substance and firing up those amazing systems and do what we all love to do…listen to some high quality music on high quality audio gear!!!
Thank you for your time,
-JP
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Yes, the free upgrades are great.
Overall, I remain a fan of PS Audio and Paul, even after all the hassle of the many trips to my local importer/ dealer caused by unreliable products.
But after my issues with 5 PSA products and reading all the issues with BHK products, I am glad I stayed with Plinius amplification: not a single issue in 10 years.
And after the DMP software experience, I will stick with Roon/Nucleus; no Octave for me.
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PS as an ex McKinsey consultant, my (free) advice to Paul:
- continue the amazing innovation and fantastic sounding products
- continue the world class customer service
- improve QC and reliability : at this price level, it is a must !
- focus on your core competencies (hardware, not software)
- avoid over the top fluffy marketing
- avoid putting down your competitors (e.g. respected speaker brands like Sonus Faber and B&W)
- don’t spread yourself too thin (sources and amps and speakers and servers and cables and …)
Just my 2 cents.
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As an ex-R&D Director in a medical diagnostics firm it was clear to me from the beta testing reports that the DMP was not ready to be sold. I don’t own one but I do have a Directstream Sr. which I love. With Paul’s enthusiasm which I believe to often be overstated I’m sure there is a strong temptation to shift product but it ultimately costs in terms of reputation and hesitancy of past customers to take the plunge on moderately expensive products. I believe PS Audio to be responsive to their customer’s problems and his has bought them brand loyalty.
I wish them well with Octave but I fear they are not playing to their strengths. I had a short stint leading a software project and it is damn hard
I think that people should be able to express their negative experiences in his forum but after awhile the poster is no longer effective in pointing out problems and it appears to be grinding it in the ground. I think Paul sometimes responds somewhat harshly as to be expected-PS Audio is his baby and he is rightfully proud of the company and its loyal employees.
Peace out,
Mike
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Information, promotion, advertising: …heavily biased - self-serving, above criticism, gratuitous propaganda.
Too much sickly OTT hyperbole.
Build the product and let the public tell you how good or bad it really is!
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Not my experience at all. All the speakers I’ve used the last 30 years at least have drivers designed and manufactured in house : Quad, PMC, Harbeth, Dynaudio. Think Rogers before that. They also, certainly the last two, do the polymer research. Focal are all in house, even I think Linn, who in the Exakt 350 combine a passive mid and upper with an active servo bass, like the AN3. They also spend a lot of time and money on cabinet design, with the exception of Harbeth who stick to the already well researched thin wall boxes. Harbeth’s Alan Shaw was asked if he would do a floorstander, but said the cabinet would take far more time to research than he had availAble, and seeing his current designs sell faster than they can make them, why go on such a drastic departure? There are a lot of things about the AN speakers that do not make sense to me, but I would be glad to be proven wrong. I did get irritated by claims that they are going to be world-beaters, before they had even been built.
Ok, there might be quite some making own chassis…I’m not anal about that…it’s just not a main concern of myself with speakers.
I also really liked the Harbeth from what I heard…they disappear behind the music by not providing any characteristic jumping on you except coherence, which I love from my own speakers. The Harbeth are just a little smaller in their covering range than I prefer, otherwise or as a second pair of speakers I’d be happy to own them. Exactly coherence in tonality and prat as well as not only big enough but also small enough imaging when demanded will be the main challenge for the multi way and even more multi chassis linesource AN I guess. But there are great speakers of many kinds.
Actually, I believe your thoughts about driver manufacturing might be a bit outdated. Most manufacturers, though they like to suggest other wise, cobble together their drivers from third party sources—which is actually what we’ll be doing. Some manufacturers
use companies like Scanspeak out of Denmark (for example) and they in turn purchase third parts German cones and frames from third parties as well. Or Dynaudio, or any number of driver manufacturers who round up parts from all over the world.
It’s easy to jump to conclusions. Which is what many seem to do when there’s no other logical answer to something.
When you write "with what steps have been taken and what procedures have been put in place to continuously improve testing and general quality control prior to to products being shipped to customers. I understand this may have taken place in private
communications. In my opinion no product should leave a manufacturing facility with the status of PSA without being 100% tested and a full quality control process be administered” it makes the assumption that this is not true and that we, as a company, are
working on getting to that point of 100% tested.
Do people think we just might produce products where only a percentage are tested while the others fly by untested in the hopes they’ll work? There is a process in manufacturing called AQL which is used for retesting finished products. So, imagine
you bring in so many finished widgets from another factory. You select a percentage of those finished and tested widgets and retest them. Maybe that’s what the thought process is.
However, that’s not how products are manufactured when you manufacture from the ground up like we do. Or any other factory I am aware of. It is illogical. When you assemble complex devices you cannot know if they are assembled correctly without
100% testing. Of course we 100% test every item that comes through our hands. We 100% test every sub assembly and every final assembly.
Where they differences lie is in the testing process. We cannot test 100% of every possible parameter. Even NASA cannot, or Boeing. If they could there would still be failures. It is the nature of assembling complex systems together.
Our production and quality assurance teams meet twice weekly in rather intense meetings. Every single failure is covered. If there is a pattern detected we either make a manufacturing process change or we add to to FST (Final System Test) of the
unit, or we modify the FST of the sub assemblies, or we change the tolerance of a part.
Our failure rate is below 1% and our DOA instances are significantly below 0.1%. Those are figures I am personally proud of. It’s better than many others in our industry. However, our record, like the records of every company in the world, are
not perfect. Perfect is impossible when building complex systems.
We achieve these low failure rates for products because of a lot of hard work. We have a full time production engineer whose only job is to ensure compliance with the QA team (of 10 people) and to monitor the entire process. We have computer records
of every single FST on every product we have ever made. If a problem occurs in the field we can (and do) pull up the record of that unit to find out how it got into a box and what might have happened along the way.
We read about the 1% and ascribe a much higher number to the whole.
That is simply not correct.
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You can add to the list ATC, whose midrange driver has been developed over a period of 40 years or more.
Also Audio Note, a company I consider bizarrely run, but make great sounding sensitive and unfussy speakers. They also make a lot of their electrical components, especially their capacitors and attenuators are sold to the trade. Audio Note also sell some of their drivers, costing up to $3,000 each.
You may be correct that it is outdated to design your own drivers, but the companies that do (like ATC, Harbeth, Dynaudio, PMC, Focal and Quad) are all highly successful in both professional and consumer products (Quad not in pro, Dynaudio are also big in automotive). They have all been focused on speakers for 3 or more decades, equally active and passive. There are probably many others that I do not know much about, such Adam in Germany in Piega in Switzerland, and I was listening to Sonus Faber this weekend, again, they’ve all being designing drivers for decades.
As Sonus Faber says:
“Drivers: Sonus faber’s philosophy is very simple, it is however almost impossible to copy as a competitor because it demands so much of the designer and is inherently costly. The “sound” of a loudspeaker is in many ways the sound of the driver designs employed within. Sonus faber expends enormous amounts of time and energy developing drivers. In much the same way that, for example the heart and soul of a Ferrari is the engine, so too is the heart and soul of a Sonus faber the exquisite drivers. Development may take several years to perfect a driver design for a given application, but the end result is well worth it.”
In the old days, manufacturers used to buy drivers from the likes of KEF and Wharfedale. Maybe the approach is different in the USA, I don’t know. Maybe the likes of Scanspeak and SEAS make like easier for new entrants, who are unlikely to have the skill, experience and money to develop their own drivers. Perhaps the accumulated knowledge is what the same brands retain most of the market share for decades, whereas electronics manufacturers change in favour much more quickly.
Years ago Porsche tried to widen their appeal with a cheap 924 using a VW engine. It drove and sounded like a Porsche with a VW engine. it didn’t last long.
What I do know is that none of these companies cobble anything together. Many others may do. It would be extremely foolhardy as their products often remain unchanged for many years, often decades, and the drivers may be manufactured largely or totally unchanged for 20 or 30 years.
I seem to recall my experience was of RCA connectors detaching. I presume they are attached by hand with a spanner or wrench. I actually prefer things that are made by robots.
I do a number of product liability claims, and in my experience faults tend to be generated when there are scheduling or supply issues and it is usually down to human error. I also had one where an auto manufacturer was trying to save a few dollars on parts and the cheaper version failed. It was installed in something like half a million units.
Oh yes, he did! At least that part was not fiction 
Better to let sleeping dogs lie after the war video dub deflection… I view this Forum as PS Audio’s home turf for feedback and invaluable source for perspective buyers, which I count myself as one. At the risk of being labeled, I can say of my eight PSA products, all arrived in perfect order, all in use today, and all perform without issue. Nothing more to say on the BHK Pre that hasn’t been covered and I’m happy to read Paul’s stats on the 1% repair rate, as perspective buyers may read, (as I did on the BHKpre) a user complaint, that may keep them from buying a unit when the issue is minimal in “most” cases. One can only empathize with those among us who find their lives have led them down the path of war. My father landed on Omaha Beach that fateful day in 1944, and then six years later felt the end of a bayonet in hand to hand combat in North Korea. Never once discussing his two war service in the years I knew him, he was just bigger than life, an unsung hero, like so many of his generation… Tolerance and understanding go a long way in public forums… this is one of the best. peace
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Thanks for your insight. Much appreciated.
That is my conclusion too. It seems that great SQ at a “moderate” price point does come with some compromise and that PS Audio thinks this is ok. Well, as long as support is able to fix the problems, it’s up to the users to decide wether it’s ok with them too. In my case, it depends on my next DMP experience. At this time, I am working with Barry as a beta tester to help finishing the DMP firmware. So I’m still confident that this will end up well.
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The AS service within the USA does appear to be exceptional. One of the biggest negatives appears to be the overseas experiences. The OS-ASS doesn’t match the domestic results and its an ongoing issue.
I totally agree, the SQ for the Buck ratio is what attracts me to PSA.
Have to pay a lot more to get same SQ in a fancy case.
I also sympathize with the out of USA service issues. I bought a dead
Power Plant Premier and had sent it back for a second life. The unit came
back and has been working flawlessly since, service department was
very efficient. Great experience overall. I am also lucky with my other
PSA gears as I don’t have any problems with them.
Brands need good local distributors. Distributors can only take a limited number of competing brands. I heard of PS Audio when I saw the products at an audio show and met the distributor. I then bought a power plant. He’s obviously not doing much of a job as I never see or hear about reviews and he doesn’t bother to exhibit at the main UK show, which is extremely well attended.
I’m just grateful I haven’t had to have any servicing work as he told me units have to be shipped back to the USA. I don’t think I’d take that risk again. All my hifi is from the UK except Devialet, which is not exactly far away and they offer free door-to-door collection. Just ordered now power products, those are coming from the USA but the dealer support is superb and even I can’t break a cable … yet.
Some DMP owners waited in vain for over TWO YEARS for their PS Audio product to work properly before giving up the faith, and it still doesn’t work properly. A 2 year wait exudes display of patience to my way of thinking. And as for value for money. That depends on whether you think a product that doesn’t work properly is good value at $6K, that they then flog off for $4K in a model run-out fire sale, for which you now might buy on the used market for $3K.
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