PSB’s New Passif 50 Loudspeaker Is A Culmination Of 50 Years Of Work By

It’s been half a century since the hi-fi industry took off on a mass level. New manufacturing techniques and a post-war economic boom came together to create a whole new market for people who were eager to hear some of the amazing music of the 1960s and 1970s in glorious stereo offered by the LP records of the time. Right there at the beginning of this movement was Paul Barton. A young and rather brilliant Canadian who could have been a musical genius. At the age of 11, Barton’s father made him a violin because the more affordable instruments on sale at the time simply weren’t good enough, in Barton Senior’s opinion, for his son. Young Barton took to the violin like the proverbial duck to water, winning music competitions and even receiving an invitation to join Canada’s prestigious National Youth Orchestra. However, he decided not to follow his music inclinations and turned to his other passion of audio. Taking up a weekend job in one of the new hi-fi shops that were opening across Canada, Barton learned quickly and by the time he was ready to graduate high school, his mind was made up to take an engineering degree. There’s a brilliant video documentary exploring Paul Barton’s life on YouTube. It was at the University of Waterloo where Barton really got into his audio stride. Using his knowledge gleaned from all that time working in the audio store, Barton paid his way through college by making and selling loudspeaker kits to his fellow students. And the rest is, as they say, history. PSB Speakers was born and the brand has never looked back. It’s all down to the tenacity and brilliance of one man who decided to take a step that turned a home business into a global byword for loudspeaker excellence that’s now celebrating 50 years in business. Barton decided that to improve his already popular speaker kits, he should delve into the science of what makes a great speaker. The young Barton approached Professor Floyd Toole at Canada’s National Research Council and was taken under the wing of some of Canada’s brightest and best physicists and engineers. He also gained access to the NRC’s anechoic chamber where he was able to test out his new speaker designs and measure their performance using precision instruments. Perhaps the key to the success of PSB was how Barton managed to correlate the measurements he had taken in the NRC’s anechoic chamber which he then cross-checked with blind listening tests of his speaker designs. These pioneering experiments enabled Barton to see which measurements the listeners enjoyed listening to most. This enabled Barton to blend subjective and objective tests to produce speakers that ended up flying off the shelves. Way back in 1974, Barton launched his Passif II speakers, a design with a 7-inch woofer, 8-inch passive radiator and a 1-inch tweeter. The public loved the design and they became a firm favorite with audiophiles.


All data is taken from the source: http://forbes.com
Article Link: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marksparrow/2022/07/01/psbs-new-passif-50-loudspeaker-is-a-culmination-of-50-years-of-work-by-founder-paul-barton/


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