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Product Review
PSI Audio A226-MAIN
3-Way Studio Monitor Tape Op Magazine
October 2025 by Andy Hong
These are the most accurate speakers I’ve heard. Listening to them, especially for extended periods of time, is truly a revelation.
I was lucky enough to host the public unveiling of this model during the opening party for my new home studio in Nashville. Earlier in the week, Roger Roschnik and Fabrice Del-Prete of PSI Audio, along with Jason Davies of Eleven Dimensions Media, their US Distributor, drove down from Illinois, where they had just showcased their other products at AXPONA (Audio Expo North America), the largest hi-fi show in North America. |
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Meanwhile, the first A226-MAIN production pair had been shipped directly to me from the manufacturing facility in Switzerland, but got stuck in Customs due to all the tariff uncertainties. Thankfully, two giant crates finally landed on my porch, just a couple of hours before guests arrived. A hundred engineers, musicians, and fellow studio owners attended the event, and throughout the afternoon and evening, many of them listened intently to the PSI Audio speakers. Some of the guests remained seated for over an hour to audition music that they and others in the room had produced, and I heard the following words when I asked them to describe their experience with the speakers: Detailed, natural, revealing, believable, and comfortable. Surprisingly, a few listeners expected overblown bass – not unreasonable, given the A226-MAIN’s imposing stance – but walked away impressed that the low end was balanced and controlled.
Here’s the perfect place for me to interject my thoughts on speaker design philosophy and our collective obsession over frequency response. More specifically, we’ve been led to believe that the most important measurement of a speaker’s accuracy is its magnitude response, which is the all too familiar graph of amplitude (dB) across the frequency spectrum (Hz). But that only tells half the story, because the other half is phase response, a similar plot that specifies delay (usually in degrees) across the same spectrum – how different frequencies line up in time when they reach your ear. Sadly, most speaker designers ignore phase response in order to maximize the range and linearity of magnitude response (and in the process, they mislabel it frequency response). For example, tuned ports, transmission lines, passive radiators, EQ, DSP, and other approaches are often used to extend the low end, in lieu of increasing the size or number of bass drivers (and correspondingly, the volume of the speaker enclosure). These bass-extension tactics can wreak havoc on the phase response. Moreover, crossovers also introduce phase shift, with steeper filter slopes contributing to greater delay. In other words, a speaker might be capable of reproducing frequencies across its range evenly, but if those frequencies reach your ears at different times, transients will blur, and imaging will suffer.
Here’s the perfect place for me to interject my thoughts on speaker design philosophy and our collective obsession over frequency response. More specifically, we’ve been led to believe that the most important measurement of a speaker’s accuracy is its magnitude response, which is the all too familiar graph of amplitude (dB) across the frequency spectrum (Hz). But that only tells half the story, because the other half is phase response, a similar plot that specifies delay (usually in degrees) across the same spectrum – how different frequencies line up in time when they reach your ear. Sadly, most speaker designers ignore phase response in order to maximize the range and linearity of magnitude response (and in the process, they mislabel it frequency response). For example, tuned ports, transmission lines, passive radiators, EQ, DSP, and other approaches are often used to extend the low end, in lieu of increasing the size or number of bass drivers (and correspondingly, the volume of the speaker enclosure). These bass-extension tactics can wreak havoc on the phase response. Moreover, crossovers also introduce phase shift, with steeper filter slopes contributing to greater delay. In other words, a speaker might be capable of reproducing frequencies across its range evenly, but if those frequencies reach your ears at different times, transients will blur, and imaging will suffer.
