PONO Hands-on Review

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by Bowie Fett, Nov 15, 2014.

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  1. Metralla

    Metralla Joined Jan 13, 2002

    Location:
    San Jose, CA
    Umm, ok.
     
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  2. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    I don't know. The necessary additional CPU power and additional battery power (a more powerful CPU would need more power) would certainly raise the price of the player. Consider that Astell&Kern players have an EQ, and I believe the EQ will do high-res, and their cheapest player is $900 (and also includes wi-fi and bluetooth).

    I'd also consider a 5 band graphic EQ to be useless. 10 bands gets to be potentially useful. I would much prefer a parametric. If the choice is a 5 band EQ I would rather have no EQ. The kind of EQing I do with headphones requires more precise frequency choices than what a 5 band EQ provides.

    And considering that most people have no idea how to properly adjust an EQ. They'd just use it to boost the bass or treble into digital clipping and end up taking the pono out of the music. So overall for a consumer device like this where audio quality is a feature it is probably best to not include an EQ.
     
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  3. SpookyGriff

    SpookyGriff Forum Resident

    People complaining that they can't spend 400 dollars on a PONO they can custom EQ and destroy/worsen the already-placebo-level quality
    :rolleyes::laughup:
     
  4. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    I'm not complaining. I'm happy that the player is only $400 and not $600 or more in order to have EQ, crossfeed, wifi, bluetooth, and all that other stuff.

    There's nothing placebo about having good electronics and a good headphone amp in a player. If you consider high-res to be all placebo you can put 16/44.1 files on the player and evaluate its sound quality based on that. There is no requirement that you only ever exclusively play high-res on it. And no requirement to even ever play a single high-res file on it.
     
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  5. SpookyGriff

    SpookyGriff Forum Resident

    400$ for 128 gigabytes, does that math seem quite right to you? In 2014?
     
  6. T'mershi Duween

    T'mershi Duween Forum Resident

    Location:
    Y'allywood
    You should probably fling your monkey poop somewhere else, Mr. Threadcrapper. Your feeble argument has already been addressed ad infinitum...
     
  7. erniebert

    erniebert Shoe-string audiophile

    Location:
    Toronto area
    No bluetooth?
     
  8. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    Yes, the math works out quite fine to me. The price going towards good sound quality rather than excessive internal storage. It accepts microSD cards. It comes with a 64GB card. 128GB cards are available. Larger capacities should be available in the future, and the PonoPlayer is supposed to be able to support them. With swappable microSD cards you've effectively got infinite storage. I don't mind swapping cards. A classical music card, a jam bands card, a classic rock card and I'm good.

    I don't consider excessive storage on a portable to actually be a benefit. The UI on a portable is not well suited to scrolling through and dealing with a large number of files or albums. It becomes inconvenient in use once the library gets too large. I actually consider 128GB to possibly be too large if you're loading 44.1 files on it. I have a 80GB iPod Classic full of mp3 files and I consider that to be a bit too much for convenient scrolling and selection of what I want to play. The last thing I want is a 500GB portable player.
     
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  9. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!


    For now, the files, both redbook and hi-rez are only available to those who have their Pono players. Next year, once neil Young gets his 2.5 million songs on the site, they will open it up to the general public, and it will be the U.S.'s first redbook lossless download store on the web. Quboz is next, and I even came across Deezer, so, with HDTracks, that's gonna be four stores. I'm wondering if Apple is going to join the revolution.

    I took a look around Quboz yesterday with the Tor browser, and in comparison, Pono looks clean and easy to use. Except, Quboz has streaming capability. Remember that the Pono Music site is still in beta.
     
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2014
  10. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    In UK money, that's probably just under £300. So yes, that's okay.
     
  11. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    Onkyo's HF Player app offers an excellent EQ function which has either a bunch of presets that the company had some industry types put in, or you can customise to your heart's content. You become you're own mini-mastering engineer! Details below:-

    http://www.uk.onkyo.com/en/articles...zer-192-24-playback-on-ios-devices-96729.html


    [​IMG]

    You just move the dots on the line above, or you can add more or remove some. It works very well in practice and is a neat way to see how EQ affects the sound when adjusted.
     
  12. Ham Sandwich

    Ham Sandwich Senior Member

    Location:
    Sherwood, OR, USA
    Looks like a neat EQ. More adjustable than a graphic EQ, but not a parametric.
    Here's a note on the site:
    So even iDevices may struggle with the CPU needs for such an EQ doing high-res. Apple devices have fast CPUs. A portable player using a lesser CPU isn't going to be able to it, especially if doing the EQ processing at a high quality.
     
  13. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member


    It works fine for me. I use app with all functionality on my phone available (Sony Xperia Z1 Compact). I use it at work mainly and all my main listening is done at home on the stereo, so while the files I use are all good soundwise, I don't need to be too precious about whether it's DSD, flac, WAV, etc. The sound quality is very good and the means to tweak the EQ is a greater benefit to me personally than maintaining a particular format. Either way, it's another feature where Onkyo are ahead of the game I think and responding to user's needs.
     
  14. Greenears

    Greenears Active Member

    It's not about the CPU, it's about the Floating-point Coprocessor. If you try to implement that on a fixed-point integer CPU it will be very inefficient. A quick peek on The Google alleged Apple A8 FP performance of about 3.1 GFLOPs multicore averaged across a range of benchmarks. That's not chopped liver but nothing compared to the approx 100 Gflops dedicated floating-point DSP chips used in Pro mixing gear. So you are going to have to compromise on a mobile platform. I would prefer the EQ to be done by the pros. Yes I know it's not a perfect world and you may need to clean things up for the music and gear you have. But thinking about this EQ is best done offline, even for end-users just run the EQ and save the file. It's all digital anyway.
     
  15. TarnishedEars

    TarnishedEars Forum Resident

    Location:
    The Seattle area
    Exactly. High-end systems sound great with mere CDs too. They just can sound even better with well recorded high-res content.
     
  16. Master_It_Right

    Master_It_Right Forum Resident

    I'm waiting until someone does a side-by-side with a FiiO X5. I guess I'm more interested in the actual music sold on the Pono store. Hopefully it will be mastered better than what's out there. Supposedly they are asking $15 for a CD-quality download. If it's not better mastering, what advantage is there over buying a CD?
     
  17. SpookyGriff

    SpookyGriff Forum Resident

    ;):p

    You gotta pay extra all for those frequencies humans can't hear.
     
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  18. rbp

    rbp Forum Resident

    Apple will buy the revolution if it is considered a threat.
     
  19. SpookyGriff

    SpookyGriff Forum Resident

    A bunch of bull hyped by marketing people to suckers to take advantage of their human naivety and lack of knowledge about audio processing?

    In short, lots of money to be made while giving nothing in return?

    You better believe Apple is gonna be all over that.
     
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  20. bangsezmax

    bangsezmax Forum Resident

    Location:
    Durham, NC, USA
    . . . says the guy who hasn't heard it. I double dog dare you to hear it through a good stereo and say the same thing with a straight face.

    Nobody who HAS heard it has said it's all hype. Smoke on that nugget.
     
  21. bangsezmax

    bangsezmax Forum Resident

    Location:
    Durham, NC, USA
    It's so cute when you rant with such big words!
     
    Grant likes this.
  22. Grant

    Grant Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me!

    That was when Steve Jobs was around. It's a different company today. If Jobs were still around, he would have seen the future and went lossless first.
     
  23. SpookyGriff

    SpookyGriff Forum Resident

    This is the chart they're using to shill this crap and you expect me to take your word for it?

    [​IMG]

    You do know that after 320 kbps you scientifically cannot hear any difference in resolution, right?

    This chart is laughable to anyone who understands audio codecs, it's absurd.
     
  24. rbp

    rbp Forum Resident

    Nah takes up too much space on an iPod. Hi resolution is not Apple's target (for now anyway).
     
  25. bangsezmax

    bangsezmax Forum Resident

    Location:
    Durham, NC, USA
    You're a persistent threadcrapper, I'll give you that.

    But you haven't heard it, so you have no idea how it sounds. An uninformed opinion spoken loudly and persistently is still an uninformed opinion.
     
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