Explain Pono to me

Never said, "hate." I said "negativity." It's not even debatable that this debate has been driven largely by passionate negativity against a product that none of the critics have ever heard.

Pono exists, it just hasn't been released yet. It's a totally bizarre criticism to say it's "promised much and delivered nothing." It's "delivered nothing" in the same way that the next Avengers movie has "delivered nothing" - it hasn't been released yet.

Anyway, I could keep going with this, but I really think this is a futile argument. Some people are really, really dug into the negativity for no apparent reason, and that isn't going to change. Plus, I can't even afford a $400 portable music player, so I won't be in line in October anyway. I just hope that it's a good product and those who choose to enjoy it and those who don't are happy with their choices.

 

Extending the straw man of the next Avengers movie, there have been previous movies (if you count all the Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and Hulk movies) that can be attributed to a consortium of companies (now all under the Disney umbrella) . So fans of that genre have very, very high confidence that the announced movie will be delivered when advertised to be released based on past releases.

Pono has no such track record yet. Hence, skepticism in light of what they're going to have to accomplish in a very compressed time frame.

 

Well, if you don't have an automatic recognition of the silliness of intractable and passionate negativity toward something that none of the critics here have ever heard, I'll not waste any more time trying to explain it to you. It's beyond mere skepticism.

 

"Some people are really, really dug into the negativity for no apparent reason"

I don't think that's correct, i.e., "for no apparent reason". I suspect it was the hyperbole of Neil Young that brought about most of the negativity. A great artist no doubt, but with compromised hearing due to age and cumulative damage from playing loud live shows spanning several decades is telling everyone how awful music sounds now and how much better his solution will be. It's all too much. Existing formats and playback solutions can and do sound great, provided the music is mixed/mastered well and released that way.

If through this process (namely, their DL store), better quality masterings are made available on a much wider basis, great. It'll be progress and I'm all for it.

 

And if Neil's ears were the only ones involved in the project, then that would make more sense. Not likely, is it?

 

I'm not sure of the point you're making. He's been the front man and by far the one with the loudest voice.

 

What a Pono DAP sounds like has zero bearing on Pono (the company's) ability to deliver on its commitments in the time frame promised.

 

The point I'm making is that the quality of Neil Young's hearing is irrelevant to the quality of the product, unless people just resent a old guy who probably doesn't have 100% perfect hearing expressing an opinion about sound quality. It's a pretty slim branch to perch on if you ask me.

 

I see. So even if it's a great product, they suck because they missed a deadline, or a couple deadlines, or a buncha deadlines. That's what all this is about.

Q: Please explain Pono to me.
A. Pono is a company that DIDN'T MEET ITS DEADLINES! THAT'S ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW!

 

A: A company attempting to ship a product in October, 2014 funded by a Kickstarter campaign started in March, 2014. At the SXSW show in Austin, TX (which coincided with the Kickstarter launch), representatives from Pono did not even have a working portable prototype based on the announced Ayre-based technology in a portable form factor. They gave demonstrations with a desktop DAC / headphone amp that they claimed "represented" the technology that was going to be in the actual Pono device.

I never said Pono didn't "meet its deadlines". But I still stand behind my original assertion that the odds for success are not good based on how little they actually had when the committed to shipping product in 7 months. And something that doesn't yet exist can't possibly be "great" in the present tense. "Will be great", perhaps. I certainly hope so, but I think the odds are long.

 

I don't think you have to be negative to observe -- objectively -- that SACD was a flop, DVD-A was a flop, Blu-ray Audio has yet to set anybody on fire, and high-res downloads (like HDTracks) are only appealing to a tiny niche market.

I've said many times that I think giving fans access to reasonably-priced lossless downloads -- or high-res downloads -- is a good thing for everybody. But: I don't think it's going to be commercially successful, not in terms of a mass-market product. I see the potential market as being smaller than the current vinyl market, which (last I checked) is 5,000,000 units sold per year. Bear in mind that the music industry used to sell about as many records as that every few days. Apple certainly sells that many lossy files in less than a week.

It takes a lot longer than 7 months to take a brand-new product from prototype to finished production release, especially for a company who's never made anything before. I think Pono has grossly underestimated how difficult it is to introduce a new hardware product to a market that may or may not exist. My bet is that the early products will be fraught with software problems, they won't be able to make them fast enough, they'll sell out in two days or less, and they'll go the rest of the year without being able to ship them, leaving a lot of customers in the lurch. There's been 1000 small computer-oriented companies that have suffered the same fate over the last few decades. Hell, Apple can't ship Mac Pros fast enough, and they've been in the business more than 35 years.

It's very telling that several Pono executives departed last year, which is something they don't publicize very much. I think the company is unstable and they don't have a firm handle on business. I do believe Pono's intentions are good, and while some may not believe me, I really hope they succeed and I hope HR downloads take over the industry. But the cynical side of me says that the wave has already crested and the vast majority of people don't give a crap.

 

I've said nearly everything that you've said here at one time or another, and that's not what I'm regarding as "negativity." There's plenty of really negative, surly, borderline ugly comments that get made about Pono in nearly every thread that's mentioned. I don't think you'll have a go far in this and other threads to find them.

Look, I'm not trying to be the cheerleader for Pono, I won't be able to afford one when they're released so my personal interest in this is slight indeed. I'm just kinda surprised at the volume and occasionally the tone of the negative comments. You'd think Neil Young personally offered to punch people in the face.

 

I'd agree that there's more good than bad in Pono, but I think a lot of people (including me) were baffled that a guy as rich and famous as Neil Young couldn't find a way to get venture capitalist investors interested in putting money into his new company. I think the reason why is, they're convinced it won't make any money. It's unsettling to me that Young himself doesn't seem to be putting money into it (unless somebody has information I don't have), and is instead getting his fans to do it.

But I think his motives are good and better sound from digital music files benefits everybody. As I keep saying, there is no downside here... although it would be sad if Pono joins the large pile of crashed-and-burned technological efforts in a few years and does not succeed. If it becomes "The Betamax of 2017," I'd be very down about it because I think the concept is good. But I have a lot of objections about the design of the player, its cost, its relative lack of storage, and so on. I'll be very curious to see whether all of this is affected on June 2nd when Apple starts their Developer Conference in San Francisco, just to see if the rumors about the changes on the iTunes Music Store will happen. At the worst, Pono can say "we forced Apple's hand in providing high-res downloads," but I think that will be a Pyrrhic victory for Young & Company.

 

I think there's probably a much bigger potential market for the player (if not the files), bigger than niche if certainly not mass. I've never owned an iPod or digital player other than my computer just because I have no need for one (already have actual stereos everywhere I spend any time), and I'm perfectly happy with records, CDs, and radio as music sources. But I, and lots and lots of other people who aren't into "hi rez" per se, as a medium, do already have massive amounts of FLACs lying around (mine are mostly, er, fan-sourced live recordings). I would be very interested in buying a good-sounding, hi-fi compatible, car-compatible, well-made, super high capacity FLAC player. The ones already out there are kind of meh, but this sounds like an improvement if it materializes.

I know lots of people sponsor Kickstarter projects in the hopes of getting their hands on things and can get rather grumpy if said things are behind schedule, but there are others of us who are more interested in just supporting projects that we think deserve support, because it's good to support deserving stuff, for, you know, science, and cultural improvement, and karmic offsets and sh!t.

 

To further demonstrate Vidiot's point...

http://www.realhd-audio.com/?p=2750

 

That is very sad. On the other hand: if you have a dozen or so albums like The Beatles, and they each make potentially $250K in HD, that's $4 million bucks. Even people as rich as McCartney won't pass up four million bucks for essentially doing no new work, just promotion and mastering.

 

Paul likely is/would be even more enthusiastic than that, since his Archive releases, and most recent albums are available as HiRez downloads. If Apple (iTunes) does actually go HiRez, their exclusivity for Beatles downloads would be a nice marketing opportunity.

 

I'd be very, very curious to ask Paul McCartney if he can hear the difference between high-res and regular CDs. I believe he said back in the 1980s that he actually liked the vinyl for a lot of the old stuff, but I dunno where he is now. Somebody shot an interview in his home in Scotland, and I think it was noted that his living room stereo was nothing really fancy or expensive, very casual.

 

It's what they call a small horse in Australia.

 

Is Neil the original brother from another planet, abet with Ft Knox abilities?

 

Consider also the possibility to fail content which was originally recorded and perhaps mastered at a higher fs (PCM, DXD, even DSD), then downsampled using sample-rate conversion SW or HW which employs intentional 20-something kHz bandlimiting in the digital filtering.

There are always choices made in design tradeoffs which balance ie aliasing vs ringing; think for example of different signal processing philosophies in handling the shaped high-frequency noise of DSD.

It's sad to see the number of "knowledgeable computer audiophiles" (and "audio journalists") making declarative statements that a certain file sold as say 24/96 hi-res is an upsampled-CD "fraud" because "I've tested the hi-res file using SuperFantasticAudioSoftware and there is no frequency content above 25 kHz."

The reality can be somewhat more complex...

 

I'll simply play my lp's and cd's and SACD's. No computer, no internet. EZ and it sounds great! I have three portable cd players and cassette Walkmen, yes, they are quite big, but thats ok with me. I took the portable cd player and phones whilst I was at the dentist. Helps!

 

I've been reading up on Pono lately and feel like understand both the hardware and the store side of this enterprise reasonably well. But before learning about it I watched Neil Young pitching Pono on The Colbert Report. I had really been looking forward to watching Mr. Young show the product, but was very disappointed because in response to Colbert's questions about how the player worked and what made it better, Neill only offhandedly commented that every other player just gave 5% of the music. He later repeated that a second time, but gave no further explanation at all. Now, Colbert has all sorts of mathematicians, physicists, and deep thinkers on the show so it's not like he or the audience can't handle a simple technical explanation. Maybe there's some truth to the 95% claim, but with no explanation it just sounded like snake oil.

What bothers me more is reading that only 1-2% of the selections on the Pono store are expected to be HD. So I guess that 98% of the time, you still won't get that missing 95%.

To me the biggest potential advantage might be having a really good, (presumably) high power headphone amp built into the player. That said, it would be nice if the Pono site included an output power rating in the specs. It seems that either Pono is not very transparent about their technical features, or not very good at promoting themselves to the customer base.

 

Hi res loudness @ it's finest.

http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/view/80182

 

Looks like the Redbook numbers. Throughout the Pono roll-out, Neil Young has been careful to avoid saying that Pono in and of itself will motivate the major labels to make better masters (Redbook or otherwise).

The one thing I give Pono a lot of credit for is exposing the major record labels for the greedy, low-fidelity slinging oligopoly that they are.