BOOK REVIEW

The owner of a very famous audio company has flouted both local and federal US laws, been on the run from police and spent time in prison.

To look at the smiling, almost cherubic face he wears when he presents his regular YouTube videos for PS Audio, you’d never guess that its co-founder and now sole owner,

Paul McGowan, once flouted both local and federal US laws, has been on the run from police in several countries, attempted to smuggle ‘drugs’, did drugs, spent time in prison and once let his little sister take the punishment for one of his own misdeeds.

The above are all things I did not know that I learned from reading his autobiography, but considering that it’s titled “99% True”, and is forwarded by one of my own favourite Mark Twain quotes— ”I have been through some terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened” —I don’t know how much of this autobiography I am supposed to believe. As for him telling us tales of his sexual prowess in his teenage years, I certainly believe that, but I really didn’t want to know! I rather suspect that if Paul and his wife Terri had a daughter (they have four sons), those tales might not have been included.

I was rather expecting this book to be primarily about PS Audio, but it’s not. Indeed although McGowan glosses over his career in the armed services, which he mostly spent being a DJ on various armed services radio networks, we don’t really find him designing or building anything of any real import until page 160, where he sets out to design and build what he claims was “the world’s first polyphonic synthesizer” which he called the ‘Infinitizer.’ This was pretty ambitious for someone who in his own words, “knew nothing about the inner workings of synthesizers, and very little about physics, musical theory or electrical engineering.” In fact he couldn’t even play a musical instrument. Nevertheless, he says he “copied, borrowed, absorbed and assimilated every scrap of relevant information about electronics, physics and music” and drew up detailed plans for a ten-key synthesizer.

Building the Infinitizer proved problematical, because neither McGowan nor his wife to be, Terri, had any money, and could not obtain a loan from a bank, even with a letter from Walter (now Wendy) Carlos offering to buy the first Infinitizer to roll off the production line. It’s at this point that McGowan’s drug habit came in handy, because the father of one of his ‘pot-smoking friends’ happened to be a local supermarket magnate, and McGowan was able to convince him to stump up $10,000 for a half-share in his new Infinitizer company. You’ll have to read the book to find out exactly what happened to the Infinitizer project, but I can tell you that it ended badly, without a single playable instrument ever being built.

McGowan was working as a program director for radio station KXFM at the time he was working on the Infinitizer (in fact it appears that he’s worked two jobs his entire life, and also worked seven days a week for his entire life), and the station was in trouble with the Federal Communications Commission because “its turntable pre-amplifiers were too noisy” according to McGowan. The station’s owners, Paul Hallock and Leonard Kesselman, knew McGowan has designed a synthesizer, so they asked him to design and build new pre-amps for KXFM that would satisfy the FCC.

“I copied a circuit from a book and cobbled together a phono preamplifier built inside a Roi-Tan cigar box and powered by two nine-volt batteries,” writes McGowan. KXFM’s station engineer, Jim Mussel, approved McGowan’s pre-amp, but said he wanted an opinion on its sound quality from a “respected local stereo guru” who owned a company that sold waterbeds, and had an installer called

Stan Warren who was a sound buff. Stan liked the sound of the preamp. He liked it so much that he suggested he and McGowan should go into business building prettied-up versions that used mains power, rather than batteries. He even had a name for their new outfit: “Paul and Stan Audio, PS Audio for short.”

It was 1974. The two spent the year improving the looks and sound of the preamp to the point where it was “close in sound quality to the one built into Stan’s Audio Research SP3” and took out an ad in the April 1975 issue of Audio magazine. (They wanted the advert to be in Stereo Review magazine, but it wanted money up-front, which they didn’t have.) The two advertised a ‘PS Audio Phono Preamplifier’ for $59.95, complete with a money-back guarantee.

Two months later they had 200 cheques for $59.95 which they promptly cashed so they could buy the parts they needed to build the preamps, because they had not built a single production unit... only a prototype.

They couldn’t go into production prior to the cheques arriving because (see earlier, about the advert) they had no money. In fact they not only had no money, they also didn’t have an office, a factory, fabrication machinery... nothing. You’ll have to read the book to find out what happened, but they received help from an engineer friend of Stan’s (Rick Cullen) who became a minor partner in the business, and from

Bill Abplanalp, who would not only become PS Audio’s first employee but also still works there to this very day.

By 1984 PS Audio was a success story, of sorts, because despite having ten employees and more than a million dollars a year in revenue, Paul says he and Stan were constantly arguing and every few weeks had to go without their own pay in order to cover payroll and rent. The result of this was that Stan left to form his own company (Superphon), leaving McGowan as the sole owner of PS Audio. At almost the same time, McGowan met Arnie Nudell, of Infinity, who not only gave him some business advice, but also introduced him to Ken Kessler, Bascom King, Noel Lee, and Sidney Harman.

As history shows, Nudell and McGowan formed a new company, Genesis, and McGowan sold PS Audio to Randy Patton (ex-Sumo) and Steve Jeffery (ex-Harman).

So if McGowan sold PS Audio, how come he now owns the company? And what did he do on his trips to Australia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taiwan, and how did he end up in the cockpit of a Boeing 747 doing the final approach into runway 13 of Hong Kong’s infamous Kai Tak airport? And why did the late John Bedini tell him he was going to die from radiation poisoning? It’s all here, in a book McGowan says was “almost a national bestseller.” My only regrets after reading 99% True are that McGowan spends too much of it telling us about his own personal life, too little of it telling us about PS Audio and that apart from a single author shot, there are no photographs at all. For those, you need to go to his website at www. paulmcgowan.com. It would have been nice if, somewhere in the book—preferably sooner, rather than later—he had mentioned that.

And that, dear readers, is 100% true.

Lioncrest Publishing

ISBN 978-1-7335833-0-5 $38.27 (Hardback)

$9.99 (Kindle)