Ars Technica:
“You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you’re gonna have a special dinner or something?” Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. “And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you’re doing… you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it’s like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?
“The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music.”
I’m not an “audio snob” so I have no need for the Pono Player but is it of interest to any of our sharp-eared Loop readers?
Nope. Can’t see why. Maybe if it looked nicer, or had a better quality DAC/amp in it than an iPhone or iPod, then maybe. But I don’t think it does.
I’m sure it will appeal to professionals, such as musicians and audio engineers, but that’s a niche crowd. The vast majority of people, even if they could hear the nuanced differences, would not be able to appreciate them.
I remember seeing them discuss this on some news magazine type TV show (maybe Pogue on CBS Sunday Morning). They get in a car and start driving down a dirt road with the v.o. saying “OMG! this sounds incredible!” That’s when I knew it was crap. It’s one thing to not compare the sound in a studio if one is not available, but in the fidelity of a moving car? Just say you’re selling your name and be done with it.
That reminds me. Need to pick up another case of Three Buck Chuck merlot today.
Pogue did an excellent review and it appears that regular humans cannot distinguish between an iPhone and the Pono.
I love how people who spout this kind of criticism always take shots at wine too. It’s like they have to denigrate stuff they don’t like. (FWIW, yes, I’m a wine geek, no, I’m not a wine snob. And yes, there are differences in wines).
As for the Pono player? No. I can get 24/96 or 24/192 gear if I want to. I don’t see the need for a different format. As for the market? Most people don’t have and don’t care about audio quality enough to tell the difference. What I wish is that people who insist any bottle of wine over $10 is a scam would STFU and just drink what they like rather that continually snarking at others … and people who don’t care about high end audio would do the same.
Obviously it will fail because the Sandisk SD card they included doesn’t store digital sound in it’s purest form.
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/hificritic/vol5_no3/listening_to_storage.htm
And that’s with a resounding “/S” for sarcasm, please don’t take this comment seriously.
Audio engineers want higher resolution for editing, to give them the headroom. But for listening to final product – there’s a reason they went with 16/44.
The wine is a bad analogy. But facts are facts, there hasn’t been a single human ever able to prove they can hear the difference of high-res (24/96 or 24/192) over 16/44. Ever.
I dunno.
Wine is equally well blind-tested, and about the same way: when they don’t know how much it costs the more expensive stuff tastes the same as cheap stuff to pretty much everyone.
Yes, it’s not true that there are no bottles of wine that are worth [to whom?] more than $10, granted.
But it is true that “more expensive isn’t better” in general, and that in blind tests people can’t tell.
Nor are expert wine-tasters and their scoring actually consistent or reliable or repeatable when blind tested (see also the famous French Wine test of decades back).
So, well, it actually is a lot like audiophile claims and marketing.
Contra Mr. Gregory I care about ‘high end audio’ in that I care about getting great sound.
I do not care about snake oil claims that defy physics and claim that 24/192 “sounds better”.
Pono should be pushing their [per the review linked] superior DAC and preamp stages as what might matter, because that’s real.
slow clap
Can you tell if HiFiCritic is serious or playing a very cool game?
I can’t, though I’d prefer to assume they’re mocking Audiophilia.
The linked review claims it has a superior-quality DAC and preamp.
Which is plausible.
I’m more shocked by the terrible UX and industrial design than by the snake oil.
You can’t lay it flat? No pause button? Buttons that you can’t turn off so it’s useless in a pocket?
The people can’t tell regarding wine misses the point – that it takes some expertise to differentiate and that the differences are very often not linearly related to price. A $50 wine may well not be 2x as good as a $25 wine… but it may have subtle differences that one person will care about and another not.
This is complicated by two other things: First, the fact that wine (unlike sound) can age and change and typically better wines evolve more interestingly than less expensive, simpler ones and second, that this isn’t always true. Sometimes wines are more expensive for reasons of rarity or prestige vs quality.
Actually, it’s complicated by a third factor – winemaking has gotten MUCH better over the last 25 years or so and there are a ton of really good wines under $30 or so.
Now, back to audio – studies are interesting but how they’re conducted can affect thing. Short samples of music or long passages? Double blind or single? Precise volume matching? (even 1/2 a db can make a difference)?
But ultimately what annoys me are the kind of people who feel they need to reduce everything to numbers in the search for some faux objectivity. Like those who claim something defies physics, say. 🙂
I love watching audiophiles argue. It was possibly the best feature of my Stereophile subscription, way back when anyone thought I was still pretty.
Audio quality in the digital age is entirely a numbers game.
Wine, on the other hand, is not. However, it has been double blind tested to exhaustion and the results are that wine is nearly impossible to distinguish when the price and brand are unknown.
I’ve got one these devices. I’m not a audiophile, I do not have any fancy speakers or any that stuff. That said, I really like my pono. It really brings bass and drums back to my ears again. Maybe it’s just that this is an excellent player or maybe it is the HD flacs. I’m using this either with bose qc 20i (very nice) or the mofi headphones (awesome).
One downside is with this device you really can hear the dynamic range and brickwalling issues. I mean some of the material cannot be listened loud long periods, it gets really tiring to ears. Before purchasing HD material it might worth to check http://dr.loudness-war.info
Anyway I this the best tasting “snakeoil” that I’ve drunk.
Meh
That is meaningless marketing-speak because since Pono supports 24-bit playback and iPhone supports 16-bit playback, they can easily say it has a “superior quality DAC.”
That still leaves open the question of whether the DAC in Pono is good enough to make its playback actually sound markedly better than an iPhone.
https://goo.gl/48ywje&dewax
https://goo.gl/FfDfbu&yfav
The problem is, all of today’s consumer headphones and speakers are designed with 16-bit 44.1kHz audio in mind. Replacing your iPhone with a Pono is only step 1. If you play the Pono through the same old cheap consumer headphones/speakers that most everybody has — and which were designed for 16/44 playback — then that is like upgrading a DVD player plus SDTV setup by replacing the DVD player with a Blu-Ray but not upgrading the SDTV to an HDTV. The extra quality you have gained from the 1920×1080 pixel Blu-Ray playback cannot be seen on a 640×480 SD TV.
I make music at 24-bit 96kHz and I would love for the consumer to have a 24-bit 96kHz playback solution so I don’t have to dither down a mix for them that sounds different than the studio material. But the truth is, right now, you are generally speaking going to be better off if you continue to use your iPhone as a playback source and you spend your Pono money on the very best headphones and/or speakers you can afford. If you want to up the quality of your iPhone playback, switch from AAC-encoded songs to Apple Lossless -encoded songs, which means ripping CD’s into Apple Lossless yourself, unfortunately, in most cases. I still buy music on CD for exactly that reason.
You can take your favorite album in 16/44 CD or Apple Lossless format and play it back on the highest-end speakers and you’ll literally hear things you didn’t know were there. You might have been listening to that CD for 10 years, but on really high-end speakers you will hear hidden audio quality that is already there in a 16/44 CD. So the bottleneck on audio quality is not 16/44 versus 24/96 or even lossy-compressed AAC/MP3 versus lossless or even the digital-to-analog converters in your iPhone. The bottleneck on audio quality is the headphones and speakers.
The first step towards 24/96 “HD audio” playback for consumers is for headphones and speakers to improve dramatically. They need to have built-in 24/96-capable digital-to-analog converters that are specifically designed in concert with the headphones/speakers themselves to provide much better sound, and they need to have digital connectors (probably USB/Lightning) to the playback source. That way your music player simply passes along a 24/96 digital audio stream and the headphones/speakers are solely and entirely responsible for the audio quality. Then you can audition 5 kinds of headphones with your iPhone and choose the headphones that give you better sound, even with your current audio material. Once the consumer has much better headphones/speakers, then music producers can provide much better-sounding 24/96 mixes and the consumer will actually be able to hear the difference over their 16/44 mixes.
To go back to the DVD+SDTV versus Blu-Ray+HDTV analogy that I made earlier, if you are only going to upgrade one part of your DVD+SDTV setup, upgrade the TV to an HDTV. It will show you a better picture from your existing DVD player, and then later, when you replace that with a Blu-Ray, you will already have the HDTV that can benefit from the improved output of your playback source.
In other words, it would have been better for Neil Young to make digital headphones/speakers rather than a music player. Consumers aren’t equipped to hear the full audio quality of their iPhones/iPods and 16/44 audio content yet, let alone hear the full quality of the Pono player and 24/96 audio content.
The only reason they went with 16/44 for the final product was it was 1980, and that was the best we had. That is when the CD was invented.
Then, 20 years later, AAC was invented to take the 16/44 content of a CD and put it inside the smallest digital file size possible, so that it could be streamed over a data network.
Now, it is almost 20 years later again. It is time to upgrade the audio quality from what was the best we could do in 1980. Since 1980, the audio that is used in studios has steadily improved. It is time to share those advances with the listener, who is the whole point of the entire music industry. Otherwise, I would be on the beach with an acoustic guitar, singing by songs into the wind instead of holed up in a windowless studio hammering away at multitrack mixes.
The only reason the consumer cannot appreciate the very significant (not nuanced) difference between 16/44 and 24/96 is that their headphones/speakers are not good enough for 24/96. The problem is the headphones/speakers that the consumer has, not the ears that consumers have.
I know this for a fact because when non-musician, non- audio producer/engineer people come into my studio and hear 24/96 playback for the first time, with 24/96 source material coming through Apogee pro audio converters and out of a set of giant, super high-quality, made-for-24/96 speakers, their eyes go wide and their mouths drop open. They are perfectly able to hear the difference that an end-to-end HD audio setup provides over what they are used to. But they are not willing to give up the mobility of an iPhone/iPod and spend $2000 to get that better audio quality. The consumer mobile gear has to advance in quality significantly (starting with the headphones/speakers) for us to get to proper HD audio playback for consumers. Again, the problem is the gear, not the ears.
No, that is not true. The tests you are thinking of are done with the same set of made-for-16/44 speakers.
The speakers are where the audio is really made, not the music player. You can take a CD of your favorite album, which you have listened to 10,000 times, and play it through a $3000 set of speakers and it will blow your mind to hear all kinds of things you never heard before. The bottleneck on audio quality is the speakers/headphones.
To upgrade the audio quality of a 16/44 music system, you can’t just replace the 16/44 music with 24/96 music. You also have to upgrade the speakers or headphones. If you use speakers or headphones that were designed for 16/44 playback, you can’t expect them to produce the additional audio quality of a 24/96 mix.
If you play a DVD, which is SD video, through a 720p HDTV and a 1080p HDTV, you can “prove” that nobody can see 1080p quality. You can “prove” that the human eye is not capable of it. But if you swap out the DVD player for a Blu-Ray, now you will see that a 1080p picture is much better than a 640×480 SD picture.
I have an Apogee MiC here that I use for songwriting demos. It works at 16/44 with iPhone/iPad and at 24/96 with Mac. Most of my demos are done with iPhone/iPad for convenience when inspiration strikes, but some are done on Mac because it happened to be handy. When I play those demos in a music studio with a true 24/96 playback system, I can easily tell which ones were done at 16/44 and which were done at 24/96, even though it is the same microphone, same analog-to-digital converters, same AIFF files being created. The difference in quality is obvious. However, if I play those demos through a typical consumer audio system, I can no longer tell the difference. The typical consumer audio system cannot yet reproduce the full quality of 16/44, let alone 24/96.
In short: it’s the gear, not the ears.
Humans can easily hear the additional quality of 24/96 — but only if their speakers or headphones can produce it for them. And most of today’s speakers or headphones cannot.
No, wine is a horrible analogy. HDTV is much better.
What is going on with the Pono player today is like someone 10 years ago upgrading their DVD player to a Blu-Ray, but keeping the same old TV they have been using since 1995 and saying “I can’t see the difference, this Blu-Ray HD video thing is a scam!”
Of course, if you also upgrade their SDTV to a 1080p HDTV that is suitable for Blu-Ray playback, suddenly, they can see the additional quality, and they no longer want to even look sideways at an SDTV.
If you don’t have fancy speakers or headphones, you can’t hear the difference between an iPhone and a Pono.
The speakers/headphones are where the audio is really made. Your ears cannot hear the digital bitstream, they can only hear the vibrations of the air that are created entirely by your speakers/headphones.
First, let’s stop with the video analogies. It’s also a horrible analogy.
Second, you are right in that good quality speakers make a much bigger difference.
But, it’s been proven time and time again that humans can not hear the difference between 16/44 and higher res audio. There have been several tests done. They were done with high quality equipment, including high quality speakers. Every test concluded the same – they just can’t hear the difference. I’ve done it myself with $15000 B&W speakers and $20000 Classe amplifiers. (no, they weren’t mine). The 16/44 sounded just as fantastic as the 24/192. These tests back up what we know of human ear biology.
But, hey, I’m open minded – point me to some tests that conclude otherwise.
“Audio Snob” is a big demeaning, don’t you think? That’s what happened with that article. The author is clearly biased to begin with. That should be enough. But he also doesn’t clearly talk about the real benefits of the Pono player. Which isn’t just high resolution music. It’s a cheap alternative to other digital audio converters (DACs) that is as good sound-wise as they come. The highest-rated FLAC player had its DAC designed by the same person. Only it costs $1,500 while the Pono is $400.
You have to pair it up with a killer set of headphones, such as the Blue MoFi that Jim D wrote about the other day. I have them, and with my Pono, everything sounds better. Not only high-res FLAC files, but old MP3s and AACs.
Don’t buy the snake oil that there’s nothing to it. It’s like the flat earth society that had their minds made up before they began testing. And then whenever anyone criticizes them, they yell “Science!” in hopes of squashing criticism.
My ears hear a difference with high resolution music. No, it’s not the highs and the lows. It’s the clarity of what you can hear. My ears are more finely tuned then many I suppose after 19 years of classical violin under my belt. The question is, is that difference big enough, or important enough, for you to invest in an audiophile system. Regardless of brand.
The best place to start is the headphones. See what you’re missing with the iPhone headphones and you might see the point.
It has a vastly better DAC than any iDevice.
Maybe you should research it before asking that particular question. The one thing everyone agrees with is the Pono’s DAC is beyond reproach.
Yeah, and Pogue says really dumb things about cameras too. As a professional photographer, I cringe whenever he addresses the subject. He’s usually wrong.
The comparison is apt. Some claim double-blind tests have shown people can’t tell the difference in high res music (one idiot even claimed violinists can’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a cheap violin), and wines as well.
And yet, you know that’s now true. Now if they invoke the word “Science” as if that’s proof of didily squat, what are you supposed to do? Go against what you know for a fact is not true?
I ran across a quote the other day that Glen Fleischmann tweeted:
“I am a person who only cares about logic and reason.” Translation: “I use specious arguments as I think I can see objective truth.”
Yeah, a lot of people keep saying that. And yet, some people claim they can’t see the difference between DVD and Blu-ray.
Could be. But remember one of those test subjects in Pogue’s video was an audio engineer. Did he pick out the Pono as “vastly better” with the good quality headphones? Was the test rigged? No point in having this discussion at all if that’s the case.
Who cares about video? Video is not a valid analogy. Analogies are meant to illustrate a concept – they can’t really prove anything.
Also, this isn’t about people “claiming” they can’t do anything. It’s about hard evidence. There’s plenty to say they can’t tell the difference. There’s none to prove they can. All of these audiophiles out there claim they can, yet not one actually tested properly to prove it.
If there are people who actually can tell the difference, it should be quite easy to prove. Get some high quality audio gear, set up a double blind test, and test it over a few test subjects, and have the test overseen by an impartial third party. So… where’s the proof?
The thing is, you don’t actually know your ears hear the difference until you participate in a double blind test. The brain is funny that way – it isn’t perfect. It can trick us. The double blind test removes that possibility, as well as any bias by the tester.
As a consumer, if you are happy with it, great. Nobody cares. But when a vendor makes those claims, it’s just false and misleading.
You are totally correct. One really needs a good head phones.
I’ve had bose qc20i headphones over year now. To me pono delivers much nicer audio compared to iphone’s spotify/itunes HQoffline files with same headphones.
Playing music loud with mofi’s built-in amplifier on the results are even more clear to me.
I used to work for Pogue and you’re right.
What cracks me up most about this dialogue is that folks are upset at the marketing and ‘GASP’ have a sudden realization, that marketing campaigns are less than truthful/forthcoming.
All that matters is, if it sounds better to YOUR ears, by all means purchase it.