THE "NATURAL AND OPEN" CANADIAN SOUND: INSPIRED BY NATURE

In 1974, Paul met Dr. Floyd Toole, a world-renowned psychoacoustician at the NRC, who conducted numerous studies to understand how sounds were interpreted by human hearing, both on a psychological and physiological level. For Paul, who had devoted much of his childhood to becoming an accomplished violinist, it was a "Eureka" moment. He had long wondered how he could consistently reproduce the unique timbres of different violins on a set of speakers, exactly as they would sound to him when he played them.

What Paul recognized immediately as he listened to Dr. Toole's research was that his findings gave him the formula he needed to design speakers that would be perceived as organic sounding to the human ear. In other words, he could create speakers that would not tire a listener for long periods of listening, because the listener would perceive those sounds in the same way as, say, the roar of Niagara Falls or all the subtleties of the soundscapes in Algonquin Provincial Park.

In Dr. Toole, Paul found a lifelong friend and colleague who would influence him and whom he influenced, all in pursuit of a way to reproduce sounds that listeners would perceive as equivalent to what was real, alive, and natural.

PSB SPEAKERS TODAY

More than 45 years after PSB Speakers was founded in a small, rural Canadian town, a few things have changed, including the new ownership of Lenbrook International and the expansion of the brand's global distribution beyond North America. But Paul continues to play a key role in product development as Chief Acoustics Designer, and it is still the case that all PSB speakers are balanced in the echo free chambers of the NRC in Ottawa, Canada, staying true to the brand's core values of creating the most natural sounding speakers that research can produce.