Neil Young readies Pono music service for expansion Part 3

Does the car come with the signed poster ?

 

????????

Best Wishes,
David

 

A script.

 

I spent some time looking around the 'net and couldn't find anything definitive. That doesn't mean it's not out there, just that I can't find it.

But it's probably in Neil's (and Pono's) best interests that the car audio details of Neil's 1978 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz stay hidden. And I would wager that a Fiio X5 played through it would elicit just as many "unsolicited" raves as the Pono did.

 

Thanks for taking the time to reply - appreciated

I'm just intrigued that if they are actually listening to something in Neil's car, that the 'Pono' organisation (whoever they may be) aren't making more of it. I don't want to be cynical about 'Pono' and do want to believe that there is integrity behind the whole strategy - just seems odd that we don't get to know what the actual hardware being used is.

Best Wishes,
David

 

If they publish details about Neil's car setup (and I think it's very safe to say it's über high-end), the discussion of that overshadows the Pono, which apparently gets something near 100% of the credit for the audio listening experience people get in Neil's Cadillac. So it's doesn't seem odd to me that the details of that audio system are somewhat hidden.

 

I'm a Pono supporter and look forward to getting my Neil Young signature edition Pono player on October.

That said, I'm a little frustrated by Pono's focus on file size, as if the only reason why CD sound is so disappointing is because there aren't enough bits to capture all the musical information contained in the original master tapes. The sad truth is that CDs are capable of sounding much better than they do, and the reason why so many CDs sound lousy is because they are deliberately mastered that way. For those who don't know what I'm talking about, just google "loudness wars".

If given the choice, I'd rather buy a CD that has been remastered from the orignial master tapes by a mastering engineer who knows what he's doing (like Steve Hoffman or Kevin Gray) than a hi res file mastered by an anonymous mastering engineer from an unidentified source tape. I plan on attending Pono CEO John Hamm's talk at Axpona, and I hope he'll answer the following questions I have about Pono:

1. Will Pono exercise any quality control over the digital files that are sold through the Pono Music Store. If Pono is unable to reject files that have been poorly mastered, will they at least have some way of clearly identifying those files that have been newly remastered for Pono and/or meet objective quality criteria (e.g., use of the original master tapes, no noise reduction, no dynamic range compression)?

2. Will the Pono Music Store provide consumers with the following information for each file - when the file was created, the name of the mastering engineer and mastering studio were the file was created, and the format and generation of the orignal source tape?

3. Will the music files sold through the Pono also include artwork files that contain high resolution scans of all the original album artwork as well as the original liner notes, lyrics, personnal info, etc.)?

 

I see your point but the whole thrust of that initial marketing video was that it was 'Pono' they were listening to during their drive with Neil as chauffeur, so was Neil just using one of the regular players anyone of us could buy and just linking it in to his car setup with a simple phono cable?

Best Wishes,
David

 

I'd hope if it was linked with his car stereo he was at least using Bluetooth. If not a digital interconnect.

 

Bluetooth doesn't sound very good unless it's using aptX. I think for Neil to present it as "what the Pono sounds like in my car", it would almost have to be an analog interconnect.

 

As far as I know ... Steve and Kevin don't master current releases. That would be a problem

 

Stadium Arcadium? Icky Thump?

 

Vinyl Master only? 2 records in a decade? I buy 2 new albums a week

 

Indeed, it is a problem. But it's one for which Pono offers no solution. What's the point of selling music as 192/24 hi res files if (1) the orignial recording was poorly produced (paging Rick Rubin) or (2) the recording isn't properly remastered.

Am I the only one who has noticed the irony of Metallica's support for Pono?

 

Ah yes, the infamy of Death Metallic is quite enduring...

 

Here are all the 335 comments that the creators of Pono have stated on the kickstarter page so far. You may find answers to some of your questions.

https://www.kickstarter.com/profile/1003614822/comments

 

Here's an answer from the FAQ at ponopeople.org
http://www.ponopeople.org/viewtopic.php?id=95

Keep in mind that Neil was also using very prototype hardware that likely doesn't resemble an actual Pono. Add to that the magic and mysterious comparitor gizmo and we really don't know what the hardware was that the people were getting a listen to.

 

So Neil has something between a factory radio and "not high engineered with ultra high-end audio components". That leaves a lot of possibilities, considering how subjective the word "ultra" is. Pono's coyness is rather revealing.

 

Nor do we know what MP3 bitrate was used! For all we know, the music could have been streaming quality 64kbps.

 

Thanks for the info. So we're none the wiser really.

I'd like to know whether it was some kind of 'inbuilt' player/hardware or whether it was a portable device linked in ( in whatever way) to the car's regular audio system.

Best Wishes,
David

 

Thanks for the link to "PonoPeople".

 

My guess is that the gear is an engineering development build all stuffed into any kind of an enclosure that it will fit in. Not in any way small like a portable. Very much just prototype engineering ideas put in a box. I wonder if it would have had any of the Ayre influenced design ideas implemented in it?

The details of that car ride and what they were listening to doesn't matter to me. I know it was all prototype gear. A real Pono didn't exist at that time. All I care about is what the final Pono player is and how it sounds.

As for the mp3 vs high res demo Neil was doing. We've all heard high res. We've all heard MP3. We've all heard good DACs. We've all heard bad DACs. We've heard good portable headphone amps and we've heard bad portable headphone amps. Put all of that together and you can make an idea of what this all means for potential sound quality in a portable and whether the difference between mp3 and high res is actually audible in such a device. All I want is good sound, a good DAC with nice layering, depth and soundstage. Something that sounds better than anything Fiio and iBasso could ever manage to do. All for $400 or under. A good portable DAC and headphone amp like that will make even 44.1 files sound better than my iPod and an external portable amp. For me the high res aspect of Pono is just a bonus and a convenience for the few high res files I have.

 

Over $6M raised on kickstarter!
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/apr/16/neil-young-pono-kickstarter?view=classic

Neil Young's Pono music player, designed as a bulwark against the low quality of MP3 files and digital streaming, has completed a hugely successful campaign on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter. At $6.22m, it's the third highest figure raised on the site, after the Pebble smart watch ($10.3m) and the Ouya games console ($8.6m).

"On behalf of Pono, we thank you for helping us give music a voice," Young wrote in thanks. "You have helped to set the stage for a revolution in music listening. Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it."

Pono, which means "righteous" in Hawaiian, is a portable prism-shaped device that holds fully lossless tracks – large uncompressed files that replicate the original master of the song. Young first raised $500,000 in 2012 to design prototypes and build infrastructure, before using Kickstarter, where members of the public each fund a small amount of money, to raise awareness and further funding. He'll now use venture capital to help bring the project to market, sharing equity in the company with traditional investors.

"I can't tell you how scary this is," Young said in 2012 regarding his move into the world of financing. "All I have to do now is navigate the waters of venture capitalism, those treacherous shorelines of commerce, in the HMS Pono."

As well as thanking his Kickstarter investors, he appealed to musicians to sign up to his new project; the Pono player will be joined by a store selling lossless files of their work. "Go back to your digital masters and see what they sounded like compared to what was released. Now, if you want to, they can all be released in their original glory," he said. "You can talk to your producer or record company and learn how to make that available to your listeners on Pono... Record companies, this is an opportunity to rescue the art of recorded sound... This music is world cultural history. All of this cultural history should be preserved for enjoyment of the people in its highest possible form forever."

Young had some starry backing for his project – Kickstarter investors could get limited edition players engraved with signatures from the likes of Kings of Leon, Metallica, Elton John and Patti Smith. But not everyone was a fan. Trent Reznor, frontman for Nine Inch Nails, said that while "anything that elevates music back to where it should be is inherently cool," and that "I have great admiration for Neil Young as an artist," he added that "as a device I can't pretend it doesn't look a bit like a Toblerone".

 

Looks like they are working out much of it as they go.

 

From what I understood from an article or previous post is that they didn't even use a real mp3 as source, but *simulated* what a low-bitrate mp3 would sound like, using the same source but filtered thru an "mp3 plugin" sort of thing. If anyone remembers where I got that info from, please step up.

Anyway, if that is true and I'm not misremembering, then this whole comparison thing is just... ridiculous.