PONO Feedback? Anyone have one yet?

The 2 drive phenomena is a "feature" of the SD/MMC spec. Sorry about that. It's pretty standard - my Samsung S4 with microSD slot is the same. If you have an SD slot on your laptop you might find it faster to prepare the cards out of the player.

 

Maybe. But if it was done in 1977 I sure would like to see them retry it in 2014. Electronics has moved on a lot. As in - a chip of that era had 100K transistors. 1 Billion is standard today. Plus they are faster and have more gain for analog design as well. Choice of passives is better today. Matching is better.

I am not saying take away the analog or the original CD mix. But some of us think that something new and maybe better can be done.

 

They can't even get their act together enough to fix the track change anomaly problem they have now. Do you know how much work it is to remix a song? multiply that by a whole bands catalog and that by however many bands there are in the Pono library. Umm, the word swamped comes to mind.

 

I read an article about Pono the other day where it was stated that one label has finished converting all their masters to hi-rez. My guess is that company is Warner, as Warner has tried to stay on the forefront of the digital era. They also had the first music store with lossless FLAC files for sale for a good year, or so. From what I see, Universal has been aggressive converting their vaults, and, of course, Sony/BMG is lagging behind. They don't even have as many catalog titles on iTunes as the others.

On the Pono site, which you can look around yourself, you can't tell what is hi rez yet, probably because the store is not yet ready. But if you see duplicate album covers, you can bet those albums will have a hi-rez counterpart.

 

The question is, how much of an upgrade are these hi-res files, and do I want to buy everything over again?

 

I don't want to sound patronizing, but I think you have quite a bit to learn how it's done, and why.

To remix an analog recording would remove the "magic fairy dust" that made the recording special. Even digitally, you cannot reproduce the sound they got with the original gear used, nor can you exactly copy the special moves that were made. In other words, it would not be the same album. Let;s not even mention how much time and money it would cost to digitally remix an album, and that is even if the artist would allow it.

I know there are a lot of remix fans around here, but a remix engineer can't resist putting his or her signature sound on things. Some can't resist changing something. There are remix fans who don't mind or care if something is different or "off", but most of us do care. Digitally remixing things has a way of bringing out little details that were never meant to be heard.

 

I am not a fan of remixes. Give me the original pressing and 99 percent of the time I am happy.

 

Recorded music was a $16 Billion industry last year, worldwide. They can afford a bit of swamp. I don't know how much better it will get if they just use the 2 track. We will see. No one suggesting they will do it for everything, but they could just set a threshold like albums that sold over a million or some other criteria.

 

You can get some very nice HiRez remixes on some great titles. Look at what Steven Wilson is doing. I'm definitely gonna rip those to the Pono.

He appears to be the only one though. Well, it's better than nuthin'.

 

The previous post says that only those who received a pono can see the res. But not sort by it. I could not see any multiple albums. A few albums had a grey bar that said "remastered" down the left side. No explanation.

 

The answer (as always) -- it's gonna depend on the original tapes and the mastering.

I bought bunches of DVD-A's for 5.1 listening. Now I can rip the 2.0 versions on each of these discs onto the Pono. Some definitely sound better than others. Some of that is the quality of the original recording (Grateful Dead's American Beauty sounds kinda flat on the Pono, even at 24/96) and some of that is gonna be the transfer (the Donald Fagen and Steely Dan stuff is stellar). So it's a mixed bag.

 

Pono doesn't get that $16 billion.

 

Touche.

 

For now. Like I said, we will have to wait for the store to open to the public in January. The place isn't finished. Note that it says "Pono Beta" at the top of the site. The writer of the article that post got his information from was not very well researched.

The reason I noticed it is because I have been using Pono to grab 600 x 600 album covers.

 

It's also not up to Pono to remix anything. That's up to the artist and the label. It takes time and money, and a lot of negotiation. Some people have the idea that someone can just go in at will and remix anything they want. It doesn't work that way. Even Steve Wilson has to do a lot of jumping through hoops to get something done.

 

Can someone with a Pono see if it will play 5.1 WAV files? (Obviously they'd fold down.) My FiiO X3 does (tho Fiio literature doesn't mention it), so I'm curious if other 2-channel players can too.

 

One opinion of Pono vs Ak240
http://parttimeaudiophile.com/2014/11/19/review-pono-music-player-part-1/

 

Very interesting - he used the AK240 as a comparison.

 

It all seem rather promising, but I still look forward to reading a test focusing more on the sound and how it holds up when used as a DAC of sorts in a serious hifi system.

 

I'm learning stuff. I never cared about these portable hi-rez players before.

It's crazy though, all this Neil Young media blitz keeps reminding me of my childhood. I grew up in Echo Park and I remember Billy and Ralph from Crazy Horse. Billy lived across the street from me. I played with his kid some. The constant word around the hood was how Neil paid Crazy Horse butkus. All the while Neil took the profits and snorted it up his nose. Now he comes back to us as some kind of audiophile god.

 

If you want higher quality it is pretty easy to get 1200x1200 from the iTunes store. Just open the link to the album in a web browser and then copy the thumbnail link. Change the 170x170 near the end of the url to 1200x1200 and there you go. Sometimes for older releases they are upscaled but for the most part very good quality.

 

What's the Crazy Horse pay check got to do with Neil advocating good sound quality? I fail to see the connection...

 

Nothing at all except for my psychology.

 

So that's how it's done! Thanks!

 

Curious. I bet I can find way more horror stories from artists back in the all analog days who said, "What you hear is nothing like the great sound we got in the studio after we mixed it," as opposed to an artist who says something like, "Boy, I'm sure glad they muddled up our sound during mixing and mastering, otherwise you'd hear all of our clunkers."

Or, perhaps view it this way: is what we hear from let's say, the Beatles, closer to what they heard in the studio, or closer to a product of their time when they were mixing and mastering for cheap car speakers and Magnavox console turntables?

I'll tell ya this much, sometimes I think we get too hung up on the "sacredness" of original sound recordings over the last 100 years or so, when 700 years before that music only existed on paper, and people really grooved to the novelty of new interpretations of their favorite pieces whenever someone could get a few fiddlers together and have at it!