PSB Speakers

PSB, which stands for Paul and Sue Barton, was founded by Paul Barton who is also the Chief Designer to this day. Located in Pickering, Ontario, Canada, the company has been designing and engineering loudspeakers under the registered name since 1972.

Today, PSB is a well known and respected leader in the consumer electronics industry for audio, creating a broad range of high performance, high-value loudspeakers for music and home cinema applications.
   

Our Philosophy: Performance & Value

To offer high performance solutions at a reasonable cost.

PSB, like any company, points to four attributes for their products: Performance. Appearance. Value. And Reliability. Performance is the main objective in delivering products. PSB evaluates loudspeakers in an anechoic chamber, and compares them with room measurements and listener preferences in various rooms. Value is equally important. Appearance is also very important. Everyone has different tastes and PSB works hard to supply a broad range of sizes and applications (in-room, in-wall/in-ceiling, and in-cabinet styles) to appeal to everyone.

Reliability – it has to work. Along with performance, reliability is equally on the mind of the consumer purchasing audio equipment. With the endurance tests that we put our systems through on a daily basis, with high highs and deep lows, it’s got to withstand. PSB’s psychoacoustics research includes testing the critical interaction between loudspeaker, listener and room acoustics.

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

What Paul immediately recognised upon listening to Dr. Toole describe his research was that his findings gave him the formula he needed to design speakers that to the human sense of hearing, would be perceived as organic sounding.In other words, he could create speakers that wouldn’t fatigue a listener over long periods of listening because the listener would perceive those sounds in the same way they would the nature’s roaring thunder of Niagara Falls to all the subtleties of the soundscapes at the Algonquin Provincial Park.

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