The Pono Player has been making noise in the audiophile space for a few years now. Neil Young has campaigned against audio compression and the Pono Player is his vision of what the music listening experience might be.
I love listening to music and I, like most people I imagine, have settled for compressed music as a standard. I hope this succeeds. I’m curious, but I’m also skeptical. Young is using Kickstarter as his funding vehicle. I think he’s going to need much more than that if he’s going to achieve any kind of market penetration.
You can read the press release on the Computer Audiophile forum. Worth reading the comments there, too, to see how that community is reacting to this.
It’s sad more than anything else. Here are two articles worth reading, written by experts who – unlike Young – actually understand things like sampling theory, compression or double-blind testing:
http://www.dansdata.com/gz143.htm
https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
Let me put it this way: there’s a reason why there never was a blind study that would objectively prove Pono’s superiority.
“compressed music”
compressed dynamic range ≠ compressed data
Unless you know what to listen for – you won’t hear (even lossy) MP3 data compression – mp3ornot.com
Great posts – Václav Slavík
If you want excellent sound quality, look for “mastered for iTunes” tracks on iTunes, and buy better headphones ($250 to $500). Marco Arment has some recommendations on his blog. Something like Pono is nothing but superstition. That said, I highly respect Neil Young’s music and political work.
It’s going to be all about content. For Pono to be better than other options, they’re going to have to go back and re-master albums and get new albums mastered for their version of “sounds best”. It’s going to have to be amazing to get people to re-buy their entire music collections again so the adoption is bound to be slow. I doubt they’ve got the money to stay around as long as it would take to become the new defacto standard, or even a sustainable alternative.
After reading the press release this morning, I thought I’d go to one of the existing ‘high definition’ music sites, hdtracks.com. I thought I’d buy an album (or some tracks) from them that I already own and do my own A-B testing. The first thing I noticed was they they sell a lot of different bit rates and no where near all their content is available in the best quality, so that makes me doubt how serious they are about the whole thing. Secondly, the album that I picked was ‘not available due to regional restrictions’… What? It’s an album that’s available in the US on every other download site. Lastly, I looked at an album that I was allowed to buy and it costs $25. That’s a hard sell if you have questionable benefits.
I could have downloaded their sampler, but I didn’t recognize any tracks or artists on it, so I gave up on the whole idea. Pono will have to have a much better first impression that that if they hope to win people over.
I find the player itself really odd, but I find it welcome in that people really are thinking of the sad state of music quality these days. I applaud Neil Young because he’s a music artist and gets to listen to the masters of his work while his fans get lesser quality audio — often not out of their own choice. I’ll say I’m not an audiophile. I just really enjoy listening to music, and I have some good speakers to listen to it with while I work.
It is true that in blind tests using commodity hardware many people can’t tell the difference between a lossy format and full CD quality. With Apple’s AAC files it’s really difficult to tell the difference especially, but given a song with a lot of bass and with decent speakers or headphones differences between the two manifest themselves easily. However, the perceptible quality isn’t the problem here; it’s the lack of progress. I argue, and Mr. Young does too, that CD quality shouldn’t be the acid test; higher than CD quality should. Why must we be stuck with 16/48 audio today when -most- of our hardware is capable of listening to higher quality. Many of our DVDs contain audio that, while compressed, is often 24-bit. Blu-rays are generally 24-bit; some are lossless; and even a few even have 32-bit audio. We’re “advancing” to digital-rights-managed digital downloads of movies which often have highly compressed 16-bit audio in them that we never truly own when we don’t have to. We’re being fed the lowest common denominator because of our mobile devices’ needs and limitations or simply due to the lack of reasonable competition forcing technology forward.
It really makes no sense to load an iPhone or iPod with lossless audio files, and at least with ALAC they can’t even play 24/96 audio files. iTunes can, however. Macs are capable of outputting digital audio which can be fed directly to a receiver or DAC that’s capable of handling these higher quality audio files. However, without an external DAC of some kind listening to them on the Mac is pointless as well as it is on an iPhone. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be able to buy our music in these formats and have them converted to lower quality for us to our devices that can’t or shouldn’t handle them. iTunes can do this already by checking “Convert higher bit rate songs to x AAC” in your iPod or iPhone’s summary view. However, the feature is buggy because since iTunes 11 it randomly selects tracks it refuses to convert.
The Pono player can hardly be called a portable considering its shape alone, but if it contains a DAC that’s capable of handling higher quality audio coupled with some nice headphones it’s hardly a pointless product. People who really enjoy high quality video games might carry around a Nintendo 3DS on their commutes; people who really like high quality music could carry around one of these. It’s not likely to have any significant market penetration because it’s not really a consumer product intended for most people.
Mere “science” and “actual ABX testing even with audiophiles” says that compression, done right, is not harmful to audio quality.
Unless you have the notional “golden ear” and are using better quality equipment than studio monitors, I call shenanigans.
(I equally have no reason to believe the Pono Player’s DACs and amps are special magic that produce Super Better Awesome Noises, which is very important, given that the best source in the world won’t sound any better if the output stage isn’t equally superior.
I might change my mind if they’d tell me about them, but I see nothing but silence there.
This thing is a bad joke.
If Young wants to help music not suck, he should start a campaign against level compression and the “loudness war”, and do it by example and by getting other artists to join in.
An overpriced proprietary player and format that produce only illusory gains is counterproductive.)
“many people can’t tell the difference between a lossy format and full CD quality”
I think Neil Young’s point is that CD is already poor quality as it’s 16bit / 44KHz. There’s a difference too between the compression format (whether it’s lossy or not) and the sampling resolution and frequency. They are often conflated, but they’re different issues.
There have already been many attempts to improve on the quality of CD Audio… who has used SACD, or DVD-Audio? No, thought not… I don’t see why this one will do any better than preceding “better” formats, even with Neil Young as its figurehead.