PonoMusic player by Neil Young

[ErikTheNorwegian]

Pono

[psycho0815]

i dunno. i get the point of having a dedicated store for high quality lossless audio files, but i don't get why i need that on a portable player. in most scenarios there will be other factors like ambient noise and crappy headphones, that will have more of an effect than mp3 compression.
Also there's that:

I'm an audiophile. Explain what is so special about the PonoPlayer technology?
The PonoPlayer was designed with a “no compromises” approach to sound quality. We partnered with the engineering team at Ayre (www.ayre.com) to include some of their world-class audio technology in our PonoPlayer. The Ayre team describes their contribution to the PonoPlayer design as follows:

•   The digital filter used in the PonoPlayer has minimal phase, and no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made (including music) always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural" and harsh.

•   All circuitry is zero-feedback. Feedback can only correct an error after it has occurred, which means that it can never correct for all errors. By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry with wide bandwidth and low output impedance, there is no need for unnatural sounding feedback.

•   The DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip being used is widely recognized in the audio and engineering community as one of the best sounding DAC chips available today.

•   The output buffer used to drive the headphones is fully discrete so that all individual parameters and circuit values and parts quality can be fully optimized for the absolute finest sound quality. The output impedance is very low so that the PonoPlayer delivers perfectly flat frequency response and wide volume range using virtually any set of headphones.

sounds like technobabble to me, but i'm no audio expert. Also if you so "no compromises" about it, wouldn't it make sense to sell some proper headphones with that thing?

[geppa.dee]

Comments about the Pono, published last November by someone that understands this way better than me :
http://www.dansdata.com/gz143.htm
(Spoiler... "audiophoolery" as a word is respectfully left out... but argued...)
The followup, http://www.dansdata.com/gz145.htm , is also quite a funny read, although less OT.

[codeboy2k]

This is clearly audiophoolery.. I doubt that Neil Young's ears are good enough anymore to distinguish between FLAC and MP3 at 192Kbps.

You don't need FLAC on a portable device, and as pointed out, external (i.e. environmental) noise will overpower any useful extra bits of audio information available in the format.

By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry ...

What the fuck is ultra-linear? is that better than linear?

[Macbeth]

Isn't PornoMusic usually recorded on VHS or some ancient 70's cine film, and it all goes "boom chica wow wow"

Why would anyone want to listen to that on a portable player, and lossless as that? 

[Rigby]

Analogy time.

When my wife watches TV and sees commercials for exercise machines, I am quick to tell her that they don't work if she expresses interest.  She asks how I could possibly know that, and I respond with something like "if any of them worked, they wouldn't keep coming out with new ones."  If ANY of these machines worked as they expect you to believe they do, you would not see new machines invented, but rather refinements on the working design.

It's the same with audio stuff.  Every so often, a new thing comes out that claims to be sooo much better, blah blah, so on and so forth.  That's what the product previous to this one claimed, and the one before that, and the one before that.  In mathematics, what we should be seeing is called a limit.  1 + 1/2 + 1/4 + 1/8 + 1/16 on to infinity = 2.  Incremental gains toward the goal.  We should be heading to a specific point and each generation will make slighter and slighter improvements over the previous generation until we get to a point where our fallible human ears cannot tell reproduction from reality. 

We know we're after perfect sound reproduction, so there should be, by now, zero discernable difference between high quality audio gear, IF they are all true to their claim of perfect audio reproduction.

In truth, none of them are, they all add the distortion that sounds good at the time and claim perfect reproduction.  Warmth and midrange and all that ultra-whatever nonsense is just distortion added to make it more pleasing.  This is fine, I'm OK with this, but just SAY THAT THIS IS WHAT YOU'RE DOING.  You're not perfectly recreating anything except all the marketing tactics invented by others before you.

[Rigby]

Ok, what's the sample frequency and bandwidth?

Wasn't CD marketed as the format which could not be exceeded, as heard by the human ear?

Until I have 128 ears and can hear 128 tracks independently I don't see what a "master recording" could get me over CD.  I have human ears, which are very limited in terms of frequency response and fidelity.

[Marco]

What the fuck is ultra-linear? is that better than linear?

A good opamp headphone amplifier will probably trounce it in THD.

[Rigby]

What the fuck is ultra-linear? is that better than linear?

It's like linear, but ultra.  Geez, I can't believe I have to explain that.   

[tszaboo]

It also has ess 9018 dac, which is nice. Probably one of the best thing currently on the mobile market.

[MatCat]

Having been in recording studios I can tell you right now the quality of sound is far beyond anything a CD is going to give you, and my hearing sucks.  There is certainly a market for a player that is capable of high fidelity sound, and I doubt much that anyone that does buy one of these is going to use crappy headphones with it.

Would I buy it?  Probably not I am not that big of an audio snob, but I can tell you there is certainly room for quality over MP3s and CD, storage capability has finally caught up to make a player using lossless quality a possibility.

[Rigby]

Ok, but what are the specs on that audio?

Seems to me that you were using better headphones/monitors than you would elsewhere and you attributed it to the quality of the recording rather than the quality of the drivers.

[rollatorwieltje]

It's easy to improve the sound quality these days. Most music is completely crippled by the record label to sound as loud as possible. Virtually no dynamic range at all. So if they offer albums that are not compressed to death they may actually have a valid product. But they just made themselves look silly with all those wank stuff about the player.

[MatCat]

The Kickstarter clearly shows the specs as being 192KHz / 24 bits, they even give a lovely comparison of recording qualities:

CD lossless quality recordings: 1411 kbps (44.1 kHz/16 bit) FLAC files
High-resolution recordings: 2304 kbps (48 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
Higher-resolution recordings: 4608 kbps (96 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
Ultra-high resolution recordings: 9216 kbps (192 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files   

[mamalala]

By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry ...

What the fuck is ultra-linear? is that better than linear?

If it has tubes inside:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra-linear



Greetings,

Chris

[mamalala]

The Kickstarter clearly shows the specs as being 192KHz / 24 bits, they even give a lovely comparison of recording qualities:

Which is a bit silly for listening purposes. For one, the human ear doesn't go that far up. Then, you will surely get problems with winding a suitable speaker to reproduce it (even an earphone-speaker). The amplifier might want to have a word here as well. Oh, and please show me the equipment used in recording that can actually make use of that frequency range as well.

On that note:

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Also, while MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, they don't lose stuff willy-nilly. Given a decent bitrate, one will have a very hard time to discern between an original recording and a 192 or 256 kbit MP3 version thereof, at least 99% of the time.

Greetings,

Chris

[Prime73]

here are a few interesting points on the subject: http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/

[tjaeger]

http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

I wish people would quit quoting this guy.  If he actually cared about vorbis quality at the high end, he would have incorporated the aotuv patch a long time ago.

Also, while MP3 is a lossy compression scheme, they don't lose stuff willy-nilly. Given a decent bitrate, one will have a very hard time to discern between an original recording and a 192 or 256 kbit MP3 version thereof, at least 99% of the time.

Actually, if you train yourself to identify MP3 compression artifacts (which is a terrible thing to do and will haunt you for years afterwards), this is surprisingly easy.  MP3 is simply not transparent at any bitrate.  AAC is a different story and did become transparent for me somewhere between 192-256 (IIRC, this was quite a while ago).

[geppa.dee]

This is anew way of both listning, buying and you get accsess TO THE MASTERTAPES IN FULL RESOLUTION.
Not CD quality.. full resolution master tapes..

http://www.dansdata.com/gz143.htm
High bit rate and sample depth are used in recording studios for the same reason photo editors use 48-bit colour and very high resolution instead of 24-bit colour and image dimensions the same as the final target. The larger format doesn't actually sound or look any better than the final - actually, works in the editing progress generally look and sound a lot worse than the final product, which is kind of the idea. But extra resolution and depth gives a bigger range for processing and correction without running out of resolution and creating odd artifacts.

Look for a 24bit color depth TIFF picture and compare to a high quality JPEG render of it (high quality MP3 analog, lossy) or even BMP/PNG (FLAC, lossless). I think you'll like the later two far more...

[Prime73]

It all depends how you look at it. a glance on a tv that shows your pics as a slideshow (as an example) vs 100% zoom on a calibrated monitor where you look closely at every single detail and colour. Same goes for music. most listeners listen audio on relatively low quality speakers/headphones where 128 mp3 sounds pretty good. Hoverer if you let someone to listen the same mp3 on a high end setup - they will notice that it doesn't sound as good as flac.

Look for a 24bit color depth TIFF picture and compare to a high quality JPEG render of it (high quality MP3 analog, lossy) or even BMP/PNG (FLAC, lossless). I think you'll like the later two far more...

[HackedFridgeMagnet]

 nbvck7-\*+

-;p;/0p;/[p;ll;llko-0-0              o


Edit: woops was cleaning keyboard. Now decided I had nothing worthwhile to add.

[mos6502]

PonoMusic was founded by Neil Young in 2011 to create a movement to revive the soul of music, and to recreate the vinyl experience in the digital realm wheedle money out of gullible fools.

Fixed that for ya 

[Nerull]

It all depends how you look at it. a glance on a tv that shows your pics as a slideshow (as an example) vs 100% zoom on a calibrated monitor where you look closely at every single detail and colour. Same goes for music. most listeners listen audio on relatively low quality speakers/headphones where 128 mp3 sounds pretty good. Hoverer if you let someone to listen the same mp3 on a high end setup - they will notice that it doesn't sound as good as flac.

But only if they expect to. If they aren't aware that there should be a difference, they won't hear one. And if you tell them the mp3 should sound better than the flac, they'll hear that too.

Placebos are great that way.

[linux-works]

It's easy to improve the sound quality these days. Most music is completely crippled by the record label to sound as loud as possible. Virtually no dynamic range at all.

and movies, otoh, are 100% the opposite.  which I really hate!

I'm way past the phase of 'wow, loud BOOM.  COOL!!!'.  in fact, loud noises annoy me.  I want dyn range compression, not expansion.  there is a half-assed attempt at trying to have a 'nite watching mode' on dvd players (etc) but I don't think it does a good job.  it would not be hard to have an alternate track (or a diff track) that lets us non-loud-noise people be happy with movie sound tracks.

I'm constantly riding the volume control when I watch movies, daytime or nite-time.

[linux-works]

nbvck7-\*+

-;p;/0p;/[p;ll;llko-0-0              o


Edit: woops was cleaning keyboard. Now decided I had nothing worthwhile to add.

actually, you probably kept the NSA busy for a good half hour trying to decrypt that message.

LOL