Neil Young readies Pono music service for expansion Part 4

Discussion in 'Audio Hardware' started by stereoptic, Oct 24, 2014.

Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.
  1. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    How do you know you're not hearing the difference in mastering but are instead hearing the differences between sampling frequencies?

    I have actually sat in the control room of my own recording studio and directly compared 96kHz recordings with 48kHz recordings made from the exact same mix, and there was no difference with my microphones (Sennheiser MKH 40s, Sound Devices preamps).
     
  2. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    This is the kind of response that's just borderline gobbledegook verging on the golden eared. No offence.

    We know how hearing works. It's a done deal. We know the structure of the ear, it's frequency range, the lot. There will be anomalies as you'd expect over not quite 7bn people, but for all intents and purposes, it's job done.

    The biggest difference between what you hear and what I hear isn't detecting a difference between Hi res formats against a cd counterpart using the same mastering. It's the descriptive ability we use to convey that. Or lack thereof. It sure as heck isn't down to some gift you have someone else doesn't that couldn't be learned.

    Reference to brain waves, well, come on...
     
    Last edited: Dec 22, 2014
  3. Brother_Rael

    Brother_Rael Senior Member

    The headphones probably give a more accurate rendition of the piece.
     
  4. Russell Weston

    Russell Weston Forum Resident

    Location:
    Ridgecrest, CA
    How dare you bring sense, reason and science into this!!!
     
    Vidiot likes this.
  5. Steve G

    Steve G Senior Member

    Location:
    los angeles
    look I'm the first one to admit that I'm no scientist and I don't have any golden ears either. But there is other scientific (or what looks scientific to me) research on other parts of listening, such as this: http://www.jneurosci.org/content/26/1/273.full.pdf - I don't think it's gobbledygook but maybe it is, like I said I'm no expert. I just have never seen any study like this regarding hi res audio/vinyl/CD/nyquist etc. There's more to hearing than just your ears - science agrees about that. I would think someone would do a study and analyze the responses to different kinds of sound input. Also I would think there would be genuine scientific research using the old-fashioned scientific method where you'd have a bunch of subjects and have them listen to all kinds of data such as live instruments, noises, different kinds of recordings, etc., and not tell them what you are specifically testing for but find out what they can and can't hear. Look, I'm nobody to argue against polling, and Nate Silver is pretty amazing, but I think you can't really call it the scientific method, where you get a bunch of data and look for trends. They have done these taste test things and proven that nobody can tell a good wine from a cheap wine, nobody can tell a Stradivarius from a Chinese violin, etc. Maybe those things are true but maybe there is something about the way people test when they are being judged by the test as well. Do they come back on different days and find out what people CAN differentiate. Maybe they can't tell grape juice from orange juice in the right circumstances! That's why you need to have scientific research. In fact it's possible that hi res audio is just not important enough for the world to cause any real scientific research, but beauty is, right? I HAVE seen casual references to this kind of research about listening to vinyl in other articles but it was so casual that I couldn't tell if it was real, since I haven't seen the papers.
     
  6. Rockinrob

    Rockinrob Forum Resident

    Location:
    Tampa, FL
    I actually did this too. I now track at 24 bit 48 khz, and it sounds killer

    Correlation != causation
     
  7. Heart of Gold

    Heart of Gold Forum Resident

    Location:
    Turin,Italy
    Al
    Also Ryan Ulyate (Tom Petty ' s Hypnotic Eye).It sounds pretty good.
     
  8. mongo

    mongo Senior Member

    Oh look!
    Another SHF thread gone off the rails on hi-res bit-depth, sample rate vs CD.
    Whooda thunk :D
     
    wolfram and Grant like this.
  9. Mr Bass

    Mr Bass Chevelle Ma Belle

    Location:
    Mid Atlantic

    You are right but isn't Neil Young sort of to blame given this is a Pono related thread? After all Neil was the one who said that the soul of music was lost by CD sound and stated that high rez was the promised land for digital (leaving aside vinyl)?
     
  10. formu_la

    formu_la I'm not a robot

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    Actually, now there are CD and SHM-SACD releases with exactly same mastering, so everybody who cares can experiment if he hears the difference.
     
    Billy Budapest likes this.
  11. Steve G

    Steve G Senior Member

    Location:
    los angeles
    I would caution, however, against doing a simple hearing test/taste test, and instead listen over longer periods of time: listen to the whole album or a whole opera, and then listen again a couple of days later. See if one format keeps you involved longer. Try it again in a couple of weeks. It's best not to stress out about the details to the point where you don't even know what you are hearing. Listen at different times of day and so forth. See if one or another format draws you in. Don't even think about which one you are listening to, if you can avoid it. Listen to different kinds of music - listen to things recorded DSD or things recorded on tape in the 1950s. There are all kinds of sounds and sound events and you should approach it with the most open mind you can, which is always a good way to enjoy things anyway. At the end of the day, the worst that's happened is you've spent a lot of time listening to music.
     
  12. Drew769

    Drew769 Buyer of s*** I never knew I lacked

    Location:
    NJ
    EXACTLY. You really need to do extended listening, nod get a sense for what engages you. After a while, the differences are as apparent as night vs day. The one thing I consistently notice is the amount of space in vocals, often with echo that is much more apparent then on mp3 or even 44.1/16 versions of the same music. There is roundness to instruments, depth to voice. What your body hears or feels is not always quantifiable through science.
     
    formu_la and Billy Budapest like this.
  13. Steve G

    Steve G Senior Member

    Location:
    los angeles
    Maybe not but I'd still be interested in seeing some real research. Other people on this thread seemed to get upset when I mentioned brain scans, but like you could do research over a couple of years - put various people in a nice environment and say "this is what their brain looks like after one hour of listening to ___". "two hours", "three hours" etc. Don't tell them what the source is. Do some tests on nice speakers and some on lousy speakers. All kinds of times of day, etc. Maybe one day play them a particular song or piece of music and then the next day play it in another format. See which one they like better, and if they say "let me hear the first one again" then let them hear it. Loads of different variables. Then you might get a sense if there is something there to research further. There is nothing wrong with the scientific method. I would be interested in a test like that. You can never REALLY compare because there is no "neutral" version. If something is recorded on DSD then a 44.1/16 version is altered and if something is recorded on 48/24 then a DSD version is altered and if it's recorded on tape then everything except the tape version is altered. It's physically impossible for it to be otherwise. But someone needs to research this stuff - different air temperatures, different ages of people - just collect as many data as possible and then look and see if patterns start to emerge.
     
  14. formu_la

    formu_la I'm not a robot

    Location:
    Toronto, Canada
    I agree. That is how I started to hear a noticeable difference.
     
  15. Stereosound

    Stereosound Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    Taken from a post on Pono's Facebook:
    Amoeba Music shared a link.
    2 hours ago ·
    We have a few of the new high resolution, portable PONO Music players in-store at Amoeba Hollywood & online at Amoeba.com! The ‪#‎pono‬ supports all digital music files, including high fidelity audio, for unparalleled sound quality.
     
    Grant likes this.
  16. JeffMo

    JeffMo Format Agnostic

    Location:
    New England
    I love music.
     
  17. Stereosound

    Stereosound Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    An End of Year 2014 Message from Neil Young to You - Our Supporters
    December 30, 2014

    [​IMG] Happy 2015. As 2014 comes to an end, Pono is on the threshold of success. I would like to thank everyone, our supporters, Kickstarter and new, our financial backers dedicated and few, and our Ponopeople. I am very proud of our small Pono team and what we have accomplished. The dedication and skill they have shown in getting us to where we now are is awesome. We have almost 20,000 Pono players in users hands and thousands of new orders to fulfill in the first months of 2015. We have an online music store emerging from beta and a desktop app ready to begin serving our first generation of PonoMusic lovers.

    This effort has been at the hands of the people. From our amazing beginning at Kickstarter, Pono has been supported and lifted up by music lovers worldwide, with orders from dozens of countries. Our music lovers want their music to sound great and they are saying Pono delivers the best sound they have ever heard.

    We are young. Make no mistake about that. We are small. We know we have a big job ahead. We have heard the naysayers but none of them have heard us. We deliver what we promise. Our listeners testify online, day in and day out, about the amazing Pono experience, the genuine Pono smile. That is because we know what we want to do and we are doing it; delivering music to music lovers as it was intended to be heard, getting the best available from the record companies while constantly pushing them to give us more; more quality and quantity.

    We are asking the artists to step up and deliver what they have made. Give it to the people the way it was intended. Give us your masters. The time is here. The people want the best it can be. Pono is the mother of all formats. Pono can play it all from the lowly MP3 to the highest resolution masters created in the studio. We are not tied to any one way of playing back the music. We play it exactly as the artist created it, with no compromise to fit a format or proprietary box developed by a corporation to grab a share of the revenue, and all music lovers can feel the difference Pono makes.

    If you are an artist, Pono your music now. We are the place to be, the place where you can be sure your creation will be heard correctly and perfectly, as you recorded it, with all of its magic intact. Get us your masters and let us bring them to the world of PonoMusic. Your creations are safe here, respected for what they are and preserved for history in the highest possible quality. Talk to your record company and Pono your masters. Let the people hear you. Be Pono!

    Pono people come in all shapes and sizes and from all walks of life.

    The biggest joys for me are the genuine Pono smiles; the looks that come across new listener’s faces as they hear more than they have ever heard from their favorite songs, songs they have enjoyed hundreds of times before and are now discovering anew. Music is magic. It is the universal language. Pono is here.

    When someone tells Pono that no one needs to have better sounding music, we listen to them. We feel for them. There is nothing more that they need and they are not burdened by curiosity. But we are. We are here to stretch the limits, unleash the sounds of great recordings to be experienced by our Pono music lovers. That is why we search the world for the best files and make them available through PonoMusic World, our online store of great sounding music. PonoMusic World, with more than 2,000,000 songs and growing every day, is constantly adding tracks, upgrading songs to higher resolutions with more depth and quality so you can “feel” the music as the artist intended it to be felt.

    Our portable player is part of the secret, but it is no secret. It is just pure quality sound. We deliver. We invite other companies to make our player and add their features, but with sound only to our specs, so it can be Pono. You can trust Pono. If it says Pono, it is.

    We envision new Pono players and speakers, headphones and buds, we see giant Pono home player systems with terabytes of memory, connected to full robust Pono speaker systems by many manufacturers. We want to help the artists reconnect with their art and audience in a music revolution that presents not just the sound, but delivers the magic of greatness in music, just as it was meant to be. Pono.

    With all that said, we at Pono know it isn’t going to be easy. It is a monumental and historic change. We will struggle alongside the record companies to bring the music industry back to its original quality, while preserving the convenience that has now become standard fare at the expense of our artist’s beloved sound.

    Our Pono users even say we are better than vinyl. We do not say that. They do. That’s Pono.

    Get on board with Pono. Come with the artists on Pono’s happy journey to the rebirth of music. Enjoy what we are doing. Raise your experience. Feed your soul. Pono lives.

    Happy New Year to us all!

    Make it Pono!

    Neil Young

    ponomusic.com
     
  18. Stereosound

    Stereosound Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    Pono opening for business:

    PonoMusic Store Official Launch at CES 2015
    The PonoMusic US store will be opening its doors to the public the week of January 5th during the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Pono will be showcased in multiple locations including in Pono’s own booth at the convention center, the Pono listening room at the Harman exhibit in the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, at the Millenial Woman posh apartment in the Wynn Hotel, at SanDisk’s suite at the Venetian Hotel, and at numerous partner locations including Ayre Acoustics, PCH International, Sennheiser, Audeze, and others.

    If you happen to be in town, please drop by and check us out. We’d love to see you.

    PonoMusic Store Update
    In 2014, we successfully ingested nearly all of the US content from the big three music labels - Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, and Sony Music Entertainment. There are still a few straggling hi-res albums that will show up in our store in the next few weeks, including some of Neil’s own catalog. Aside from that, our US store content is complete with over 2M tracks, with resolutions ranging from 44.1/16 to 192/24.

    As you know today the majority of the catalog is still CD Lossless masters as that is the highest resolution available. Yet many of our customers have commented on how amazing all this 44.1/16 content sounds. You can purchase and download the original CD masters from Pono without having to purchase and rip the physical CDs. This also helps you avoid the errors inherent in the burning and subsequent ripping processes. So the 44.1/16 content you purchase from us is clean and untainted, providing you the best possible sound at that resolution.

    On the higher resolution front, we already have the rights to the largest 24-bit music catalog available anywhere and our store continues to grow by the day thanks to our outreach to artists and their phenomenal support of Pono. A special thanks goes out to all the artists who have provided us (or are planning to provide us) access to their studio masters. We cherish you all and your music. Our profound gratitude goes to those artists who have trusted us and provided us exclusive access to their music. You are the key to our success and you are Pono!

    Our top priorities for Q1 of 2015 are to, a) open the music store in Canada and United Kingdom, and b) ingest content from indie aggregators and labels (prioritizing 24-bit content). For the remainder of 2015 we anticipate expanding the store internationally.

    PonoPromise for Kickstarter Backers with PonoPlayers
    As you may have noticed, up until a few days ago many albums showed up in our store in multiple different resolutions. As you know, our intention has always been to only offer the highest available resolution of each album and we recently rolled out a filtering mechanism that achieves just that.

    This was harder said than done since there is no reliable metadata from the labels that tells us which releases are indeed different resolutions of the same album. So we had to invent our own algorithm for this, one which is now pretty accurate and will continue to be optimized over time. Here are the general guidelines we use to do our filtering: two releases must be from the same artist, with the same release title (ignoring the parenthesized extensions), with the same exact number of tracks, but at different resolutions. We consider explicit releases as different than clean versions and deluxe releases as different than standard versions. Our algorithm ignores release dates and remastered status when matching albums. So a higher resolution remastered version of an album released say in 2014 would supersede the original version released say in 1999.

    All this is important because those of you who are Kickstarter backers (with a PonoPlayer) are eligible for the PonoPromise – free resolution upgrades of previously purchased albums when a higher resolution version becomes available on our store and supersedes the lower resolution versions. We are still working on enabling our store to deliver you your free upgrades and will keep you posted when this becomes available. The PonoPromise upgrade will be retroactive and apply to any albums that you may have purchased already since we launched our beta store back in October.

    We have heard from many Kickstarter backers who didn’t pledge for a PonoPlayer about wanting to participate in the PonoPromise free upgrade program. Unfortunately, these “free” upgrades actually do cost Pono fees that we must pay to the rights-holders. But to honor all our backers, we’ve decided to allow any Kickstarter backer who purchases a PonoPlayer on our store to participate in the PonoPromise free upgrade program. To qualify you must place a PonoPlayer preorder on our store on or before January 31, 2015. Remember that the preorders are expected to start shipping in February.

    Shipping Update
    We have successfully shipped about 98% of our PonoPlayer rewards and all of the other Kickstarter rewards were previously fulfilled. Unfortunately, there are currently a couple of hundred PonoPlayers with incomplete addresses or missing phone numbers that cannot be shipped until the recipient provides their correct shipping information by emailing [email protected].

    For those player rewards that remain unclaimed, we need to hear from you now. Unfortunately, we cannot sit on inventory for long as it will start costing us additional storage fees. As a result, if we don’t hear from you by January 15th 2015, we will be forced to release the Limited Edition Artist series inventory for sale on our store. If you miss this deadline, we will still provide you a Yellow or Black player so long as we hear from you by the end of 2015. If you are already a Yellow or Black player backer, your deadline for claiming your player is year-end 2015.

    Lastly, there were a small number of PonoPlayers (about 0.1%) that did not ship before Christmas. We determined that the delay was the result of a software glitch that failed to properly transmit the orders correctly. Our manufacturing team worked through the Christmas holiday to ensure that those units are shipped as quickly as possible. You should have already been contacted directly by our support team if you are one of those affected. We truly apologize for the inconvenience.

    Pono Community
    For those of you new to PonoMusic World and the PonoMusic store, we are working with our moderators to roll out a Frequently Asked Questions document that should cover all of the initial questions a new Pono owner may have about the Pono ecosystem. We will inform you of their availability on the Pono Community.

    Our Last Kickstarter Communication!
    As this is our very last Kickstarter update, it marks the final time that we check our Kickstarter project page. Going forward, please contact us on the Pono Community or by emailing [email protected] regarding any Kickstarter related matters.

    Lastly, thank you for your continued support. Pono is here today because of you and because of this campaign. We look forward to working together to keep the Pono movement steamrolling in 2015.

    Mahalo from the PonoMusic team
     
    Grant likes this.
  19. Master_It_Right

    Master_It_Right Forum Resident

    Hopefully they will also push to try to get better mastering.
     
    Graham likes this.
  20. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    I like this bit "You can purchase and download the original CD masters" but yet I see the ELO remasters being offered :D
    Edit: And it appears cd's have inherit errors while ripping, shucks, all these years of buying and ripping compact discs, (hangs head in shame)
     
    Last edited: Dec 31, 2014
    DBMethos and Master_It_Right like this.
  21. Master_It_Right

    Master_It_Right Forum Resident

    That's what I worry about, that this is just going to be the same remasters, that are already available, regurgitated by the labels.
     
    c-eling likes this.
  22. c-eling

    c-eling They're made of light,We never would have guessed

    Same here, they probably can't figure out how to apply de-emphasis on some of the old ones :laugh:
     
    Robert C likes this.
  23. cwsiggy

    cwsiggy Forum Resident

    Location:
    Vero Beach, FL
    No way that store is ready for CES. Ridiculous... It's barely zeta let alone beta ... I know .. Haters gonna hate hate hate but as for the software bugs and store glitches they really need to shake it off ( sorry - Taylor Swift is on soon on Dick Clark's Rockin Peel Sessions Bandstand New Years Winterlamd Top of Pops thingy soon and I'm so excited! ) I do like my player a lot btw but they have a long way to go. I'm going to assume they will have a major update by Jan 5th.
     
  24. Ephi82

    Ephi82 Still have two ears working

    Location:
    S FL
    I sit here shaking my head at the fact that so many on this forum (which is all about high sound quality music) rip what PONO is trying to do?

    PONO is not the first, but it appears to be the most widely marketed, portable player capable of delivering a very high sound quality experience. They have engineered a player with great DACS and put a very high quality analog stage/headphone amp in it.

    What this means is that music listeners who prioritized portability over sound quality no longer have to make that choice. They can have both. What is wrong with this? Nothing IMO.

    One can battle all day long about whether you can actually hear a sound quality difference between 16/44.1 and 24/96 of the same high quality master, but it doesnt really matter!

    It's a fact that there is a growing demand for higher sound quality masters, and these masters are more often found in higher res formats. If you think CD is good enough, buy the CD version (if available) The "market" will determine if people with spend a premium for hi res in the long term.

    Last, I think Neil is spot on when appealing to fellow artists to see that their music is available through high quality masters. Every musician I know cares about how their music sounds.
     
    Drew769, AZRunner, SammyU and 4 others like this.
  25. onlyconnect

    onlyconnect The prose and the passion

    Location:
    Winchester, UK
    Nothing matters very much; but when vendors ask for more money for higher-res versions of the same music then there is a financial implication. There is also a bandwidth and space implication if we are downloading and storing unnecessarily large files.

    Tim
     
Thread Status:
Not open for further replies.

Share This Page

molar-endocrine