The Absolute Sound’s High-End Audio Hall of Fame 2022’s Inductees

The idea of honoring those men and women who’ve been instrumental in creating the high end has its roots in TAS’ series of large-format books, The Absolute Sound’s Illustrated History of High-End Audio. While researching Volume One, TAS writers and editors developed a renewed appreciation for the achievements of the pioneers who laid the foundations of this great industry. To honor these visionary engineers, entrepreneurs, and journalists, we decided eight years ago to create a High-End Audio Hall of Fame.

For the inaugural round of inductees in 2014, we asked our writing staff to submit a list of candidates. The criteria were simple: Who had the greatest impact on audio’s evolution from laboratory experiment to consumer product? Who shaped the high end most profoundly, either through technical innovation, business acumen, or a combination of both? Since we wanted to focus on those men who built the high-performance consumer-audio industry, we omitted the technical pioneers—Edison, Berliner, Blumlein, de Forest, Williamson, et al. (We celebrate them, and other great inventors, in TAS’ Illustrated History series.) Each year we will add three more individuals to The Absolute Sound’s High-End Audio Hall of Fame.

The following six pages showcase the lives and seminal accomplishments of the most significant contributors to high-quality music reproduction in the home. Today’s high-end audio industry would be unimaginable without them. —Robert Harley

David Hafler  (1919–2003)

Golden Age Pioneer

By Dick Olsher

David Hafler was a major force in transforming what was a fledgling electronics hobbyist market in the late 1940s into a high-fidelity audio industry. It would be fair to say that Hafler was more influential in those early years in developing consumer hi-fi components than anyone else.

A native of Philadelphia, he stayed close to home and earned a mathematics degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1940. Following military service during WW2, he reconnected with Herb Keroes, a childhood friend, to found the Acrosound transformer company in 1949. Acrosound successfully promoted and popularized the Ultralinear output stage, the TO series of output transformers becoming very popular with Williamson amplifier constructors in the 1950s. But when it came to business plans, Hafler and Keroes were rather incompatible. While Keroes was focused on mass-producing transformers, Hafler’s vision was to produce a quality audio product on a small scale. In the end they parted company in 1954. Interacting with numerous customers Hafler saw a clear need for offering complete amplifier kits on a cost-effective basis. In 1954, Hafler happened to connect with Ed Laurent, a talented engineer, and together they went on to form Dynaco—flawless timing at what turned out to be, in hindsight, the dawn of tube audio’s golden age.

The business model in those days emulated Heath’s mail-order kit business using the Dynakit brand. The chassis and printed circuit board were outsourced from suppliers which made it feasible to run the company profitably with a small staff. Of course, Dynaco went on to become a remarkable audio business success. By the time the company was sold in 1968, the staff had grown to about 150 employees.

Dynaco’s first viable amplifier design was the Mark II. It sold for $69.75 in kit form, complete with cover and all component parts. The pre-assembled printed circuit board was said to ensure fool-proof assembly in less than three hours. Capable of delivering 50 watts continuous and 100 watts peak at under 1% THD, it became an attractive and popular match for the inefficient Acoustic Research (AR) acoustic-suspension loudspeakers. In a bit of marketing savvy, Dynaco partnered with AR at audio shows and participated in a joint product demonstration at New York’s Grand Central Station. Anyone with time to kill between trains could walk in and audition an AR loudspeaker driven by Dynaco amplification. As a consequence, Mark II sales volume quickly reached 1000 units per month. It was followed by the Mark III in 1957 which offered 4-, 8-, and 16-ohm taps and the KT88 beam power tube for a mere $10 more.
Kit products were taken very seriously at Dynaco. With Bob Tucker on board, extensive field testing was performed using unskilled assemblers under Bob’s watchful eye. He would assemble kits himself in order to write each manual. And the manuals were continually tweaked to address problem areas. Hafler was right to claim that Dynaco had it down as good as Heath and better than EICO and other kit companies. Initially, kits were more popular than assembled units. Eventually, kits became less popular as many customers didn’t mind paying a premium for assembled units. And as Hafler put it, there was always the insecurity by kit assemblers that they weren’t getting optimal results. In those cases where assembler ran into problems, usually because of faulty soldering techniques, Dynaco offered an inexpensive factory repair policy. For about $10, any kit problems would be fixed. Two service techs were employed for that purpose as well as for other service jobs.

Dynaco took pride in offering good sound at an affordable price. Hafler felt that there wasn’t a direct correlation between price and quality, especially when quality is defined as accuracy. He was involved in all tube designs, while Ed Laurent did most of the conversions from preamp to integrated amp and much of the mechanical design. Ed was also responsible for designing the first ST-70 prototype. On occasion, outside help was solicited as in the FM-1 and FM-3 tuner designs, when Stewart Hegeman was brought in for some of the design work.
With the advent of stereo in 1959, Dynaco launched its first stereo amp, the ST-70, available as a kit for $99.95 (cover included). A review in the 1959 December issue of High Fidelity magazine concluded that its performance was only matched by manufactured amplifiers costing far more. It consisted, in essence, of two Mark II circuits on one chassis, and closely emulated Hafler’s U.S. patents for a high-fidelity amplifier and output transformer design. Hafler understood that a low distortion spec along with flat frequency response over the audible bandwidth did not necessarily correlate with audible performance. His major design concerns were transient response and stability under feedback conditions, especially when driving difficult loads such as electrostatic speakers.

By his own admission, David Hafler considered the ST-70 to be his favorite by virtue of its unbeatable combination of sound quality, cost, and a power delivery sufficient to meet the needs of, as he put it, “about three quarters of the market.” Over the years, sales of the ST-70 reached over 350,000 units which qualifies it as the best-selling high-fidelity amp of all time. A host of music lovers and audiophiles were introduced to the joys of tube sound via the ST-70. It provided a welcome relief in the 1970s from the harshness of early transistorized designs. Even Audio Research Corporation offered versions of the ST-70 during the 1970s, their final effort being the ST-70-C3 mod that only recycled the chassis and transformers. It was released as a kit through Old Colony Sound Lab in 1977. The ST-70 continues to impress even by modern standards by virtue of its believable spatial impression and its sweet and liquid rendition of musical textures. That this legendary power amp continues to be upgraded and rebuilt even today is a testimonial to its enduring appeal.

The PAS-2 tube preamp and Mk. IV mono power amp, basically half of a Stereo 70, were introduced in 1960. The ST-35, a 17.5Wpc EL84-based amplifier was introduced in 1963, followed in 1964 by the SCA-35, Dynaco’s first integrated tube amplifier. Although not as well-known as the ST-70, the ST-35 was probably the sweetest-sounding amplifier in Dynaco’s product lineup and offered gorgeous midrange reproduction. It featured the Z-565 output transformer which was designed specifically for the ST-35. By now Dynaco was becoming an international phenomenon with sales in Europe and Asia. Dynaco and McIntosh were the first U.S. audio companies to crack the Japanese audio market in a significant way; Dynaco actually outdid McIntosh on the basis of units sold.
In the mid-60s Dynaco responded to customer demand for solid-state gear by releasing its first transistorized designs, the Stereo 120 power amp and PAT-4 preamp. Ed Laurent and his team did much of the initial design work with assistance from Erno Borbely who was imported from Norway. Unquestionably, Hafler was a most persuasive fellow with an excellent eye for engineering talent. Borbely went on to design the Dynaco FM5 tuner and completed the Dynaco 400 power amp design work that was initiated by none other than Jim Bongiorno. The 400 was Dynaco’s entry into in the high-power amplification market, capable of delivering well over 200Wpc. It was considered to be the best solid-state amp available at the time, and at a discounted price of $420 it represented a remarkable value. Dynaco’s solid-state kits became popular partly because of their preassembled circuit boards which were wired and tested at the factory. Not only was this a major labor saver, but it greatly reduced assembly errors.

About the same time, Hafler decided to enter the loudspeaker market. He had always felt that loudspeakers were a good business to be in and one that was complementary to Dynaco’s product line. He had been travelling regularly to Denmark because of Dynaco’s distribution of B&O products, and it was there that he connected with the SEAS company. That led to the development of the A25 loudspeaker by SEAS, featuring a damped bass-reflex port that was dubbed as aperiodic tuning. The fiberglass stuffing in the port lowered the “Q” of the system thereby reducing impedance variation near resonance and resulting in improved bass quality at the expense of bass extension. By the late 60s, when it was selling about 1000 A25 speakers a week, Dynaco broke away from SEAS to start its own production. In the 70s, the A25 at $94 retail, often discounted to $60, was unbeatable based on price. Cleaner and more open sounding than the competition at this price point, it defined what an entry-level loudspeaker should be. Nearly a million units sold over its production history—a testament to its enduring appeal. For a more refined sound with better bass response, Dynaco recast the A25’s drivers into the A35 enclosure, featuring a dual-chambered sealed-box design. The A50 was the top of the line, it weighed twice as much as the A25 and retailed for about double the price, as well. Though as Dynaco candidly admitted, it did not deliver twice the sound.
During the Quadraphonic 4-channel fad of the 70s, Dynaco marketed a Hafler-designed matrix decoder dubbed the QD-1 Quadaptor. It was intended to recover ambient information from conventional stereo recordings. The QD-1 was a passive circuit that synthesized 4-channel sound from a stereo amplifier’s output. The rear channels were fed the out-of-phase ambient information for a surround effect.

By 1968 Hafler had worked for almost two decades at Dynaco, as he put it, holding down two full-time jobs and two-part time jobs. He decided that he had reached an age at which being a workaholic was no longer fun. And so, Dynaco was sold to Tyco, Inc. in 1968, while Hafler stayed on as a consultant for a few more years before leaving in 1974.
By 1978 he was at it again. The David Hafler Company was founded with the mission of translating what Dynaco had done for tube gear to the solid-state arena. He hired Erno Borbely as his director of engineering and in 1979 launched two of Erno’s designs, the DH-101 preamp and the DH-200 stereo power amp, the first power amp with a MOSFET output stage to be marketed in the U.S. The DH-200 used a total of four Hitachi lateral power MOSFETs per channel in Class AB to deliver 100 watts per channel. Both were available as kits or factory assembled. As with the Dynakits, the DH-200 kit came with two fully assembled and tested amplifier modules. Kit assembly consisted of assembling the case and wiring the power supplies, switches, and connectors. Affordability was always a major concern for Hafler. Cost in 1979 was $300 assembled and $200 as a kit. It measured well, was faithful to its specs, and was known for its tight bass and durability. Best of all, it brought a powerful high-end amp within reach of many audiophiles.

Introduced in 1984, the DH-220 amplifier was a refinement of the DH-200 design, using the same fully complementary push-pull circuitry from input to output. It further enhanced Hafler’s reputation for good-sounding solid-state amplification. Often forgotten is the DH-220’s smaller brother, the DH-120. Rated at 60Wpc into 8 ohms, it was able to put out over 115Wpc on transient bursts. What made the DH-120 unique was the addition of an internal “ambience recovery circuit,” based on the Hafler matrix decoder. Additional binding posts were provided to allow the hookup of a second pair of speakers for this purpose. For this to work effectively, Hafler recommended that all four speakers be identical or at least similar, with a nominal impedance of not less than 8 ohms.

The DH-500 power amp arrived circa 1980 and was to become a template for professional studio applications. Rated conservatively at 255Wpc, it was comfortable driving low impedance loads. Known for its effortless power delivery, quiet backgrounds, and musicality, it made a lot of friends in the 1980s.

One of Hafler’s most fascinating amplifiers arrived in 1987. It featured a Class A JFET input stage and a MOSFET-based output stage operating in Class AB, delivering 145Wpc into an 8-ohm load. The XL-280 stereo power amplifier was said to be the first amplifier to be designed using the straight-wire differential test (SWDT). The test removes the original signal by subtracting the output from the input, the remainder consisting of various distortion products. Once the amplifier is tweaked for the best possible null between input and output for a particular speaker load, it could be rationally argued that the audible performance of the amplifier was as accurate as possible. The XL in the model’s name stood for Excelinear, a concatenation of sorts for “excels in linearity.” Hafler felt strongly that the SWDT gave the amplifier designer a tool for improving the sonic performance of his designs. In the XL280 he aimed for a wide-bandwidth, low-distortion design before the application of overall negative feedback. Components were selected, bias currents were tested, and phase compensation was added with the goal of obtaining minimum sound output with the SWDT. In going this route, Hafler managed to kindle quite a bit of controversy, in essence waiving a red flag in the face of subjective audio reviewing.

Although the XL280 did not garner universal praise, it did have its strong advocates. Being stable into low-impedance loads, down to 1 ohm, meant that it could easily drive difficult electrostatic loads such as the QUAD ESL-63 with exemplary authority. The much more powerful XL600 arrived about a year later. A real beast, it could pump out 360Wpc into 8 ohms, and up to 900Wpc into a 1-ohm load. In 1987, the Hafler company was sold to the Rockford Corporation, where chief engineer Jim Strickland continued the Hafler tradition.

Hafler has been regarded as the Henry Ford of high fidelity. His life’s work was immensely instrumental in popularizing hi-fi globally. He cared about audio to the point of, for example, buying Acoustat out of bankruptcy in the mid-1980s just because they were too good to lose. Looking over his 50-year legacy makes his vision crystal clear—that progress does not necessarily follow from increasing complexity or cost. Hafler’s thesis centered on the premise that simple products often sound best. Affordability was always an important aspect of David Hafler’s components. He took his obligation to customers seriously and was adamant about offering technically honest, cost-effective gear and never tried to go the cost-no-object route. It’s hard to imagine what the audio scene would look like today without Hafler’s legacy in the mix. It’s for that very reason that TAS is delighted to welcome him to its Hall of Fame.

Andrew Payor, Rockport Technologies

(b. 1959)

Engineering Genius, Uncompromising Ethos

By Robert Harley

All high-end companies reflect their founders’ values, aesthetic, and personalities, but perhaps none to the degree that Rockport Technologies exemplifies Andrew Payor’s vision for how loudspeakers should be designed and built. Although Payor has been creating loudspeakers since 1985, Rockport Technologies is roughly the same size it was three decades ago. That slow growth curve is by design; Payor has chosen to preserve Rockport as a small craft-shop rather than expand it into an industrial operation.

Payor has maintained Rockport’s boutique status largely because he’s a perfectionist who demands hands-on involvement with every loudspeaker that leaves his shop. For example, he personally tunes every crossover to the set of drivers that go into a loudspeaker, assuring optimum—and identical—performance from every speaker. All drivers, no matter their design or origin, exhibit slight performance differences from unit to unit. To compensate for these variations, Payor builds the crossovers with a little extra inductance (extra turns of wire on a coil) and a slightly less-than-optimal capacitance to provide the flexibility to trim their values once the crossover is mated to a particular set of drivers. I once visited the Rockport shop and saw this process firsthand; Payor sits on the floor with the crossover in front of him, reducing the inductance by removing a few turns of wire from a coil or adding a small-value capacitor to increase the amount of capacitance until the speaker measures perfectly. Every speaker. Then, each pair of speakers is auditioned and evaluated by Payor and at least two other people in Rockport’s state-of-the-art listening room before it is packed for shipment. That, folks, is dedication.

Moreover, Payor balances work with his family life, and is perfectly happy living without the headaches that come with running a large company. Payor is more comfortable with a soldering iron or a CAD program than looking at a spreadsheet or marketing plan. Reflecting that approach, Payor sold Rockport Technologies in 2019 to Josh Clark, with Payor remaining at the engineering helm.
Clark shares Payor’s perfectionist ethos and has partnered with him, handling the business side of the company while also acting as design and engineering protégé to Payor. Clark’s mission is to carry on Payor’s work well into the future.

If the American and European high-end audio movement of the 1960s and early 1970s was a reaction to the mass-marketization of audio, Rockport Technologies is a reaction to the scaling-up of the high-end industry that began in the mid-1980s. Rockport is kind of “high end within the high end,” creating esoteric, innovative, engineering-driven products that push the boundaries of the state of art.

Just one example of Payor’s marvelously creative engineering mind is his approach to cabinet construction. Rockport’s upper models are built not from flat panels glued together, but from pairs of inner and outer skins, one made from carbon-fiber and the other from fiberglass, with a dense resin encapsulated between them. This “molded composite” technique, inspired by high-end boat-hull construction, creates an enclosure that is not only extremely stiff, dense, and inert, but is also the ideal shape for the drivers’ wave-launches. An added benefit is a seamless monocoque structure with no joinery. The characteristic swept-back baffle and rounded shapes of Rockport loudspeakers are a case of form following function. Payor developed this technique in 1991 for the Procyon and has been refining it ever since.

It’s impossible to overstate just how innovative this cabinet is or the expensive and elaborate engineering behind it. The enclosure is first created on a computer as a three-dimensional model. The model creates the instructions for a five-axis CNC machine that carves a solid block of aluminum into a female mold in the shape of the cabinet. This aluminum tool is then polished to a very high luster to ensure a good surface finish on the parts. Multiple layers of precisely cut epoxy-impregnated carbon-fiber fabric are then laid into the female mold with a specific fiber orientation to maximize structural rigidity. The successive layers are vacuum de-bulked, and then consolidated at high temperature (265°F) and pressure in an autoclave to form the outside shell of the enclosure.

A second structure, made from fiberglass, is created in the same way, but this time with a “male” mold that will form the inner cabinet shell. The two composite pieces are bonded together—there’s a continuous rabbet where the two parts meet—so that they are, on a molecular level, one structure. The approximately 2** hollow cavity between the inner and outer shells is filled with hundreds of pounds of a very dense structural liquid epoxy which bonds the inner and outer shell together to form a highly damped, extremely stiff beam section. You can see this construction in the accompanying cabinet-cutaway photo.

Payor took this concept to the next level with the Lyra, introduced in 2016; rather than create the inner and outer shells of carbon fiber or fiberglass, the two enclosure structures are made from cast aluminum, with the space between them filled with dense epoxy. The Lyra is an exceptionally beautiful-sounding loudspeaker. As I wrote in my review in Issue 276, “this speaker is unbelievably fast and clean; a transient signal pops up seemingly from nowhere and is over just as quickly. There’s no diminution of the force and impact of the leading edge and no smearing of the decay. The Lyra is so fast that it laid bare differences in amplifier speed that I had never experienced before. . . The Lyra is lush, voluptuous, and colorful in timbre, yet underlying this apparent easy-going sound is a foundation of precision and resolution. The Lyra doesn’t achieve its liquidity by rounding off the rough edges; it achieves it by not creating those rough edges in the first place. . . The musical effect cannot be overstated; the Lyra sounds ‘alive’ in a way that other speakers do not. Yet for all its verve and panache, this is a speaker of great delicacy, capable of conveying the subtlest nuance of texture and shading. It’s also the most beautiful in timbre that I’ve heard, combining high resolution with lush textural liquidity.” The Lyra is a speaker I could spend the rest of my life with and never look back.

To bring the benefits of the Lyra’s extraordinary cabinet construction to a lower price, Rockport this year introduced the Orion. The inner shell is made from cast aluminum as it is in the Lyra, but the outer shell is carbon fiber. The carbon fiber outer shell is much less expensive to finish into a smooth and paintable surface.
Payor is also a pioneer in exotic driver technologies; he was the first to develop, in 2004, the now-common carbon-fiber composite cones, a sandwich structure of carbon-fiber skins surrounding a foam core. All the drivers in Rockport loudspeakers are designed by Payor. The baskets are massive cast-aluminum structures that are unlike any others I’ve seen. The motor structure and suspension are equally innovative. The cones, made from carbon-fiber sandwiches of varying thickness, are created from a type of carbon fiber that is exclusive to Rockport Technologies drivers. Even details like the angle of the taper of the surround where it meets the basket and cone have been optimized.

It’s no coincidence that many manufacturers of electronics and source choose Rockport loudspeakers to demonstrate their equipment at hi-fi shows. These demonstrations have sounded universally great in the dozens of demos I’ve heard over the years. Just this year, our reporter Alan Taffel chose the Lyra, driven by CH Precision electronics, as the best-sounding system at the Munich show—the world’s most competitive venue.

Rockport Technologies, named after the town in Maine, where the company was originally founded (it has since relocated to South Thomaston, Maine) is also famous for the Sirius turntable. Introduced in 1990, the Sirius presaged the modern movement toward mega-turntables. At its introduction, the Sirius was considered the world’s best turntable, and many regard its successor’s performance (the Sirius III) as unmatched to this day. It is an engineering marvel, with a self-leveling pneumatic support structure, vacuum hold-down, an air-bearing platter, and air-bearing tonearm—all of Payor’s design. Rockport continues to service the Sirius record players, all of which are probably still in use.

Most audiophiles don’t know this, but Payor is the unsung hero behind the iconic Well Tempered Turntable. Invented by Bill Firebaugh and distributed by Jack and Karen Sumner of Transparent Audio Marketing, Payor redesigned the Well Tempered and greatly improved its performance, and then in the late 1980s his shop built them at the rate of 25 turntables a week for five years.
Rockport has successfully trickled down many of its technologies to lower-priced products. All six models in the Rockport line (five floorstanders and a center channel) share a family resemblance in appearance, sound quality, and world-class fit ’n’ finish. Rockport’s most affordable model may not incorporate all the company’s cutting-edge techniques, but it is designed and built with the same vision, integrity, passion, and obsessive dedication that goes into the flagship Lyra. That’s the only way Andy Payor knows how to make loudspeakers.

For his nearly four decades of technical innovations that have advanced the art and science of loudspeaker design, and his uncompromising ethos in the pursuit of sonic performance, we proudly welcome Andrew Payor into The Absolute Sound’s High-End Audio Hall of Fame.

Paul Barton, PSB Speakers

(b. 1951)

Democratizing High-Performance Audio

By Neil Gader

To describe Paul Barton as “low key” might actually be going a little overboard. However, encourage this soft-spoken and unassuming Canadian to chat about his latest speaker design, explaining the ins and outs of a new cone material or a layered cabinet construction or a Linkwitz-Riley crossover network, and what is slowly revealed is a burning passion to push the boundaries of previous efforts—to create a loudspeaker of resounding musicality and, of equal importance, at a cost that puts it within reach of the widest number of people. This is what Barton has done for over fifty years at PSB Speakers, the company that bears his name and that of his wife, Sue. Located in Pickering, Ontario, Canada, and led by Barton, PSB has been engineering and manufacturing loudspeakers since 1972.
Paul Barton grew up in Kitchener, Waterloo, Canada. At a young age Barton showed promise as a talented musician and gifted violinist—not just in his parents’ eyes, mind you, but professionally playing in Canada’s national orchestras, as well. At the same time, he also enjoyed tinkering with electronics and ultimately focused in on acoustic design. His enthusiasm was encouraged by his father, an audiophile himself with a gift for woodworking, who built Paul’s first full-size violin when Paul was eleven years old (Barton still plays it). The father and son team would assemble speakers of Paul’s design in the family’s garage, experimenting with various shapes, sizes, and arrangements of drivers and cabinets.

By high school, Paul was working at a hi-fi shop next to the University of Waterloo. In his spare time, he assembled speaker kits that he would sell to fellow students at affordable prices. The demand for the speaker kits was so high that in 1972, Paul had to recruit two friends to help him out. The kits were a hit, and Paul soon registered a business to produce them, naming the company PSB Speakers, short for Paul and Sue Barton (Sue being his high school sweetheart and wife of over 50 years).

Following high school graduation, Barton entered the University of Waterloo as an engineering student. Since he now also had a fledgling speaker business to run, he garnered the permission of the university guidance counselor to embark on a work/study program that allowed him to attend school while running his company. Barton remarked that one of the stipulations of this program was that the business owner (himself) had to submit an evaluation of the “student’s” progress to the university after each term. As both boss and student, Barton recalls writing something to the effect that “when he’s finished with university, he’s definitely got a full-time job here.”

In 1974 Paul was introduced to Dr. Floyd Toole, the renowned psychoacoustician at Canada’s National Research Council in Ottawa (NRC), who conducted numerous studies to understand how sounds were interpreted by the human sense of hearing at both the psychological and physiological levels. This game-changing moment forever shaped the trajectory of Paul’s career. Later, in fact, PSB speakers became the first speaker company to use the NRC facilities and its vast technical and experimental resources for product development.

In Floyd Toole, Barton found a kindred spirit and immediately understood that Toole’s findings provided the formula he needed to design speakers that were organic sounding and non-fatiguing—products that listeners would perceive as alive and natural—and also gave him the tools to understand loudspeaker behavior and how to measure and characterize performance. Barton admits that this relationship amounted to “postgraduate” work, even as he continued to run PSB and develop new products. His timing was also fortuitous. He arrived at the NRC at a moment when the researchers were just beginning to study and understand the relationship between subjective evaluation of speakers and measured performance. Working at the NRC helped Barton improve his ability to correlate technical design with perceived sonic results. Additionally, this period saw a recording industry going through a technological renaissance, which further provided the impetus for PSB to grow and thrive.
To this day Barton credits his musical background and trained ear, which gave him an ability to differentiate complex and subtle sounds, an ability to sense what is natural. In fact, one of the main reasons he began designing his own speakers is because, early in his career, there were no speakers that he considered natural sounding that were also affordable. However, he recognized that subjective listening was not enough. “Perfecting a listening experience, we find, cannot be done by simply listening, but by measuring the loudspeaker and by controlled listening tests—double-blind tests.” Ultimately, Barton states, “natural sound is where I’ve come from, and it’s where I’ve been and where I’m going.” As the final arbiter before a new product is finished, Barton still relies on his own musical background for aesthetic judgements and for assessing what the measurements mean under real-world conditions.

Barton doesn’t necessarily reach for the most exotic parts and drivers in each PSB design. Rather, he often takes relatively conventional and proven parts and materials and applies his own exhaustive methodology and measurement regimen until he’s satisfied that it can bear the PSB logo. Since I’ve heard and reviewed a great many of Barton’s designs over the years, the greatest tribute I can offer regards their sheer model-to-model consistency of tonal balance, voicing, and musicality. This is one of the surest signs of a greatness in a designer—a testament to Barton’s unerring technical acumen and trained ear.

If you were to ask Barton about a particular skill that he most prides himself on, it would be “the ability to do loudspeaker system configuration design.” By this he means designing speakers to minimize unwanted room effects. Barton would single out the more recent Synchrony One and Imagine T2 towers as prime examples of his pursuit to control early room reflections (particularly floor bounce) with a configuration he calls the “transitional woofer array.” Here he devised a trio of strategically positioned small bass drivers at varying mounting heights along the tower’s baffle. He preferred the smaller diameter woofers as they are more agile, faster. The transitional array permits each to operate at very low frequencies, but as frequencies rise the system reduces output to use two woofers and then just one woofer, which crosses over to the midrange driver. With Barton’s three-woofer architecture, “the floor bounce of each woofer occurs at a different frequency”; thus, when the outputs and floor bounce of the three woofers are summed, the response is shown to be perfectly flat. An elegant solution to a thorny problem.

Paul Barton has talked about producing a cost-no-object speaker for years. But there’s a thrifty streak, an inner voice in him, that evidently doesn’t allow him to exploit current market trends, where seemingly the sky’s the limit. He produces the best speaker he knows how to make and prices them accordingly. Is he envious of the upper five- or even six-figure price tags of certain bespoke loudspeaker offerings? Perhaps, but offering them himself just wouldn’t be Paul Barton. “I just like the idea of enabling everybody to hear music the way I enjoy it. Right now, someone is sitting somewhere listening to a pair of my speakers and having a really good time.”

Today, more than 50 years after Barton founded the company that still bears his name, new ownership by Lenbrook International (parent to NAD and Bluesound) has expanded global distribution of the PSB brand beyond North America. Paul continues to play a key role in product development as Chief Acoustics Designer. His work now ranges far beyond stereo to include home-theater systems, powered speakers, custom installations, in-walls, on-walls, and a successful line of headphones. As for future challenges, Barton sees a rapidly changing audio landscape where market trends are looking to scale things down. The future is about simplification and aesthetic integration into the environment—less about systems imposing themselves on a room and more about streaming audio and a reduction in the reliance of wired systems. As always, the key challenge is attaining these goals without too much of a tradeoff in performance. But for Paul Barton some things at PSB will never change. After all these years, every PSB speakers is still voiced in the anechoic chamber of the NRC.

Fame in the high-end industry can be the result of a variety of achievements (technological innovations, outlandish inspirations, exotic moon-shot-level designs), but sometimes it comes down to just being dogged—intensive research, trial-and-error testing and measuring, simply doing the work, over and over again. From its inception, Paul Barton has led PSB Speakers on a quest for realism and musicality. But he set himself an even higher bar, which is to make the results of his efforts available and affordable for all audiophiles and music lovers to enjoy. He has stayed true to that goal for some 50 years. TAS is honored to induct Paul Barton into The Absolute Sound’s High-End Audio Hall of Fame.