         
|
|
 We generally let our products speak for us, but if you have some added curiosity about us, here are some details about us and our lineage. Our founder and chief designer, Paul Barton, began designing speakers more than a quarter century ago for a Grade 10 Physics project — not entirely surprising, since long before his teen years he'd been an electronics whiz kid "infatuated with recording things and playing them back." His engineering bent coupled nicely (for speaker designer purposes) with his abilities as a violinist, which earned him appearances with The Kitchener Symphony and The National Youth Orchestra, and prizes at many competitions. By the time he was sixteen, his two passions had converged permanently, and he was building speakers first for friends, then for an audio store, and then for college students in Waterloo. Things formalized in 1971, when he founded PSB. It didn't take long before his speakers started winning the praise of customers and critics. Thanks to his immersion not only in playing the violin but in soloing with full-scale orchestras, he brought both a close-up knowledge of the sound of live music and a stubborn (if quiet) insistence on making the reproduction of its subtleties his standard for speaker design. By now, he has a long succession of highest-quality, critically acclaimed speakers to his credit, and has earned the soubriquet (which he wears lightly): "The Dean of Canadian Speaker Designers." He has also developed the devotion to performance and value that we talk about elsewhere in these pages ("Our Philosophy.."). The two have become so inseparable that in a competition to select new monitor speakers for the Canadian Broadcasting Company, the CBC not only chose PSB over 30 other candidates, but concluded in their engineering report that the sound of the PSB systems was equal to or better than products costing twice to four times as much. Much of Paul's success at what he does is in the details, which he has worked out over and over for each successive speaker at Canada's renowned National Research Council facilities in Ottawa. One of the first to use the anechoic chamber and other facilities there, Paul has combined exhaustive research into the correlation of measurements and audible performance with even more exhaustive testing of modification after modification of every speaker-in-process. Step by step and speaker by speaker, he listens, tests, and listens again, until he is absolutely satisfied — and until PSB's marketing staff achieves the perfectly tuned oscillation between ecstasy over the possibilities of a new speaker and despair over when he will finally sign off on its design and production. It's the unchangingly rigorous process behind every PSB speaker from the flagship Stratus Gold-i to the Alpha Mite, and the results are more than worth the trouble. PSB and The Lenbrook Group In the mid 1980s, PSB became part of the Lenbrook Group of Companies (www.lenbrook.com), a diversified business development firm with long experience marketing and distributing electronics-based products ranging from high-end audio component lines such as Bang & Olufsen, KEF, Marantz, and NAD to wireless communications products from companies like E. F. Johnson, Motorola, and Uniden. Founded in 1978 by the Simmonds family and a group of dynamic employee stockholders, Lenbrook has significant business relationships with some amazing organizations which include AMP, Goldpeak, Kash N Gold, Wilson, Datumtech, Sevin Rosen Funds, ComSpace, Bell Mobility, Disney, Solarex, etc., etc. In the early 1980s, Lenbrook founded Clearnet, now a public company with substantial holdings by Lenbrook, Motorola, and Nextel, which is currently constructing the next generation of digital wireless communications networks across Canada. The Lenbrook Group's depth and expertise in marketing specialized electronic products, their widespread distribution in North America, and their growing presence overseas add up to an ideal match in which Paul Barton can concentrate on design and manufacture with confidence that PSB products will successfully find their market. And now, with Lenbrook's purchase of NAD Electronics, there will be a clear path for a synergistic connection between PSB's performance/value combination in speakers and NAD's "pure and simple" embodiment of the same qualities in audio and home theater electronics. Lenbrook's corporate web site (www.lenbrook.com) provides a comprehensive overview of its varied interests. Anniversary Timeline | Guestbook | Warranty Registration | Terms of Use | Image Protection |