By Paul McGowan From PS Audio

When we first imagine building a system from scratch we’re typically of two minds: unsure of where to start or confident in how smooth and easy the process will be. Both are somewhat false narratives.

For the unsure, I think it’s safe to say we know what would likely make us happy in a system, we’re just sometimes afraid to settle in on all the many choices. There’s literally hundreds of speakers to weed through and dozens of electronic choices (not to mention interconnects).

For the over-confident, life seems to rarely hand us exactly what we see so clearly in our minds. The outcome of complex systems are hard to predict.

I get excited at the prospects presented to me by our customers just starting out on their journey with little more than a budget and end goal in mind. They are ready to climb the crooked ladder.

What’s that, you ask? The crooked ladder is a great metaphor for the small bit of chaos we always experience when first setting up a new system or trying out a new piece of kit. It gets installed, it doesn’t quite work as we want, it takes time, effort, and a bit of skill to straighten everything out so we can climb higher as the ladder straightens out.

Even if you’re just upgrading equipment, the benefits are not always immediate. It may need some burn in, interconnect differences or speaker position tweaking. It’s all to be expected.

If you know the ladder will have a few curves in it, then you’ll breeze right through setup and get to the pinnacle of sound.

ht to James O’kane for the crooked ladder idea.

For more on this story go to: https://www.psaudio.com/pauls-posts/climbing-the-crooked-ladder/