Almost a year after announcing it on Kickstarter, and after filling all the initial Kickstarter orders, Neil Young's PonoPlayer is finally available to buy at about $400. On display at CES 2015, the PonoPlayer is one of a new crop of high-resolution players like the Cowon Plenue 1 and the Sony ZX2 that offer far better sound than MP3 players and even CD's. It is designed to play music ranging from low-quality MP3s to files larger than FLAC (Fully Lossless Audio Codec). By adopting digital formats like the MP3, and the lossy compression of the music streamed by subscription services like Spotify, music lovers have sacrificed audio quality for the convenience of portability and mass storage. The Pono is meant to provide them with high-resolution audio, and while the reviews are favorable, some even gushing, there are
some reviewers who are dubious about the science behind the device.
CNet's Brian Tong posts a glowing video review from the floor of CES 2015 where he highlights features like its own app, Pono World Music, where you can purchase music in the FLAC format, also the community aspect where listeners can interact with others in the "Pono community." Tong is enthusiastic about the triangular shape, the dual audio jacks and balanced audio output allowing listeners to plug directly into their stereo. He ends his review by calling Pono one of those "killer products to look out for, bringing back audio the way the artist wants you to hear it."
Mario Aguilar of Gizmodo is considerably less impressed, asserting in his
review that the science behind Pono's superior sound quality is bogus and recommends not buying it. Specifically he doesn't think the digitally encoded high sampling rate and bit depth, at much higher rates than CD quality standards, will be audible to the normal range of human hearing.
The rationale behind high-resolution audio is that by maximizing the sampling rate and bit depth, you also maximize audible detail and dynamic range in the music you're listening to. This sounds great on paper, but in practice it's an absolute fantasy.
The CD-quality standard—which Young and HRA proponents say isn't sufficient—wasn't adopted randomly. It's not a number plucked out of thin air. It's based on sampling theory and the actual limits of human hearing. To the human ear, audio sampled above 44.1 kHz/16-bit is inaudibly different.
Nevertheless, Young's Kickstarter campaign was so appealing it apparently surpassed its goal of $800,000 in a day or so ending up with $6.2 million in pledges. I'm having no luck embedding videos so here is the link to the video that got people so amped up on Pono.
https://d2pq0u4uni88oo.cloudfront.net/...
Aguilar, however, states that all the testimonials from music professionals like Tom Petty, Steven Stills and Nora Jones, and various laymen are only so much placebo effect, and that the scientific research required to prove Pono's capabilities was not done by Young and Co.
Though Young and Pono have failed to produce double-blind studies on the benefits of high-rate audio or their music player, inquiring minds have taken the time to do it. In a 2007 paper published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, Brad Meyer and David Moran outline the results of a study in which they presented a large sample of "serious" listeners with a double blind test comparing 44.1 kHz audio from "the best high resolution discs we could find." The goal was not to show which was better, but simply to find out if people could even tell the difference.
"None of these variables have shown any correlation with the results, or any difference between the answers and coin-flip results," they write in their conclusion. Later they note, "Further claims that careful 16/44.1 encoding audibly degrades high-resolution signals must be supported by properly controlled double-blind tests."
Range of human hearing aside, nobody would argue that Pono is a digital music player capable of reproducing high-resolution (24-bit/192kHz) music, which is also compatible with FLAC, ALAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AAC (unprotected) formats -- something most other MP3 players can do, and some do high-res, too. Its price is very competitive and its unique shape very user friendly.
CNet's Ty Pendlebury writes: "Though its design may have an eye on the past, the PonoPlayer is no "retro" device. It features a touch screen and a total of 128GB of storage (64GB onboard and a microSD slot with 64GB card)." Another company selling point is that "the player is easier to hold in one hand, while it's also able to sit flat on your desktop or home stereo system and keep the display visible."
In an interview with KPCC's John Horn, Young responded to the question of why the MP3 format became the industry standard if it was so inferior to analog and vinyl.
We got there because people became really impressed with convenience and a number of features available on smartphones and on devices made by Apple. And they were pioneering devices and they were great. It’s fantastic what Apple’s been able to accomplish. However, it was not envisioned by Steve Jobs that the MP3 was going to be a standard for music. And I don’t think it is a standard for music. I think it’s the low bar for music. Although it has been exceeded on the lower level recently by streaming and other things like that.
People should listen to music no matter what they listen through, but if you want to hear all the music, there hasn’t been an opportunity to do that. And now there is. Freedom of choice is very American and I think that it’s a very good thing for music lovers to have freedom of choice. And this gives music lovers a chance to actually come together as a group, as a community worldwide. Because they’ve had nothing to rally against or around for years.
[There's been] a little vinyl resurgence — you might point to that. But let’s face it: this is a convenience-oriented society and vinyl is not a convenient thing. It’s a niche and it’s a great niche and it’s a wonderful thing and I hope people continue to enjoy vinyl and it continues to grow because it’s a good thing. However, a lot of people that buy vinyl today don’t realize that they’re listening to CD masters on vinyl, and that’s because the record companies have figured out that people want vinyl. And they’re only making CD masters in digital, so all the new products that come out on vinyl are actually CDs on vinyl, which is really nothing but a fashion statement.
When asked if Pono reproduced an analog sound, Young was definitive in saying it does not, but rather produces the "best digital sound." He calls it "the mother of all formats. You could play a CD quality file, you could play an MP3 quality file."
As to whether Pono really is better and if there really is a need for a viable alternative to the MP3, Young had this to say.
Well, you know, it’s up to the user, but now there’s a choice. That’s what I'm saying. There’s a choice. People who love Pono music can get Pono music. They didn’t even know they loved it before because it wasn’t there. So, when people say, "Well, people have been satisfied with MP3s for years, I mean, it’s a standard of the industry." What else did they have to compare it to? Nothing.
In response to another question, Young adds:
We used to have big speakers to play [music] on because it didn’t sound bad when you played it back on big speakers. Big speakers reveal how bad MP3s are. That’s why we don’t have any of them in the marketplace, because what’s being fed into them doesn’t sound good. But at [the Consumer Electronics Show] last week, we have all kinds of people in the audio business with their earphones and with their stereo systems and their big speakers and everything, all playing Pono, so people can hear what it is that they have. The highest-end earphone company, Odyssey ... from them right down to the bottom of the pile, they’re all using Pono, playing back, saying, "Listen to how great our earphones got."
It is interesting to note that Pono is a Hawaiian word that has a rich definition. According to
Wikipedia it is commonly rendered as "righteousness" and can mean a whole lot more such as
Goodness, uprightness, morality, moral qualities, correct or proper procedure, excellence, well-being, prosperity, welfare, benefit, behalf, equity, sake, true condition or nature, duty; moral, fitting, proper, righteous, right, upright, just, virtuous, fair, beneficial, successful, in perfect order, accurate, correct, eased, relieved; should, ought, must, necessary.
Toward the end of the interview, John Horn tries out the Pono by listening to Bob Dylan's “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall."
You can hear the pick flexing on the guitar.
Yeah. Can you hear him breathing?
He sounds a little congested. I think he has a runny nose.
He might.
This is as if you were in the studio as he was recording the song. Is that the idea?
Yes.
Have you listened to your own music this way?
Yeah.
Do you catch yourself saying, "I messed up there. I didn’t know I blew it there." Those little mistakes?
No, I knew I blew it. I knew I blew it.
Now whether Young blew it with Pono, ultimately the listener, the consumer will decide.
What’s going to have to happen for people to adopt the Pono? Do they just have to listen to it?
That’s it. Bingo. That’s why it’s not a fast thing and we’re not in a hurry. We’re not in a hurry to dumb ourselves down to make it better or easier for people to get to a lower-priced product, because we’re defining what it is and it’s not that outrageously expensive that people can’t buy it. So, if they want it, they have to pay for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s a lot more quality.
http://www.enjoythemusic.com/...
http://www.cnet.com/...
http://www.theguardian.com/...