PONO - Where Music Lives

Also I will never not roll my eyes whenever a product is introduced that promises to "put music back in the hands of musicians".

It will play at least FLAC, ALAC, MP3, WAV, AIFF, and AAC (the default/preferred format being FLAC), and I'm not sure if this made it into the final design, but there was also supposed to be a "degrade" feature so you could instantly hear what your high quality file would have sounded like if it was a lowly MP3.

― cwkiii, Wednesday, March 12, 2014 12:52 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Boy talk about some smugass bullshit if so.

― Ned Raggett, Wednesday, March 12, 2014 1:02 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

'Degrade' feature in working prototype axed after focus-group testers found they couldn't hear any difference between a well-ripped 192kbps MP3 and a FLAC, and then questioned why they should buy an expensive, awkwardly-shaped music player with no ecosystem.

why do people get so butthurt about sound quality. oh yeah, derrrrrrp

sleeve do you listen directly from that drive or mount it to your laptop or?? we got a couple of drives to clear space and the music that went to those drives will basically never be heard again, it was this experience that put me back onto good old hard copies again. that's got its own it's-been-moved-to-the-back-of-the-closet problem but nothing near as final as "it was moved to a hard drive which, if you like, you can mount in order to stream it to the living room stereo"

and it's not like "oh i hear this new esoteric high end sounds" it's like i NOTICE things in songs i never heard before. like i was listening to court & spark by joni for the first time on vinyl and i noticed like little shakers and percussion things i'd never noticed before

in the late 80s I did not have enough money for anything more than a boombox so I bought my music on tape. (this turned out to be a real blessing for me, as that tape deck ended up meaning a great deal to my life.) the Nice Price copy of Blue I owned then was my rock & my stronghold and changed me as a person. about twenty years later, I bought Blue on CD and played it through my OK speakers. I heard SO MANY THINGS I didn't even know had been there during all those years of Blue being my favorite record

I just have it connected to the laptop & permanently mounted - basically I never shut the thing down or eject it. I play directly off it.

I have had the effect you describe with all the MP3 stuff from Mutantsounds or whatever that I DL'd 5-10 years ago, I hardly ever listen to it. But it's like a 50/50 chance whether I will pull a CD from the shelf that is right there, or play it off the HD. If it's a record I have ripped, I play the digital probably 85% of the time, why wear the record/needle out for one more hour?

BONO, ENO, AND YOKO ONO DO GOING LOCO DOWN IN ACAPULCO ON PONO

― bizarro gazzara, Tuesday, March 11, 2014 12:17 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well there was once (twice, actually!) a U2 Special Edition iPod with Bono and company's signatures on the back, so we can hold out hope for a Bono Pono....

http://www.everymac.com/images/cpu_pictures/apple_ipod_u2_5g.jpg

how did I miss that bizarro post, lol

I agree w Josh in Chicago's point about Neil being lo-fi. I'm not saying "Neil Young is lo-fi and you are an idiot if you don't think so" but this is the way I just kind of picture him, through my own experience, first hearing his big albums as scratchy second-hand vinyls (thanks, mom and dad!) then later seeing Journey Through the Past as a badly encoded WMV file of a nth-generation VHS rip, then later hearing "On the Beach" b/w "RE-AC-TOR" from a tape dub I found at a thrift store. "On the Beach" in particular is stark and plainly produced.

stark production has nothing to do with fidelity - lo-fi doesn't mean fewer overdubs, sloppier performances, less attention to detail. lo-fi means "the sound is unfaithful to its source." neil young's records have been decently recorded (sometimes masterfully recorded) documents of performances that largely went down in a studio. he's not a no-overdubs guy afaik but he's a "try to get a performance rather than comping takes" guy. but that has nothing to do with sound fidelity. his records actually sound so distinct and so unlike other people's records that it's fair to say he's very very into getting a particular sound and that the one he wants varies according to the material and the spirit of the sessions.

but the idea that neil young's take is "good recording, crappy recording, who gives a shit" is not borne out by the records themselves imo

The thing that's weird to me is that.. like look at the iPhone in your pocket, or your HDTV or video games now compared to 20 or 10 years ago and be so skeptical that there couldn't have been big improvements in digital audio

Backing up mp3s to DVD-R (back when external drives were not so cheap) was something I came to regret deeply. A bunch of those fuckers became unreadable on me.

"the sound is unfaithful to its source."

^This is basically all recorded music ever

xp yep, Milton and I bitched abt that on the Data Migration thread I think?

can't really compare to visual media; there was no broad consumer interest in improved audio quality like there was for the jump from SD to HD

so many people are/were content listening to music over the shitty packaged earbuds or bass juicing headphones like Beats; if that's what you're using, 128kbps is a good enough facsimile of CD quality

re: videogames, at least with shooters, there's an argument that the current experience is degraded compared to the tubey past because of the lag in video. tubes again.

I agree re: Neil recording strategy. The guy knows what he wants and gets it. Just saying' it's less to do with fussing and more to do with feel.

http://www.nme.com/news/neil-young/76018

Young said: "I'm a fan of listening loud – I love to listen loud… I like to take whatever it is to the limit." He stated that this was not possible with MP3 and said the music industry also began to slump after its introduction. "Everything started to die – it was because of the MP3 and the cheapening of the quality to where it was practically unrecognisable," he commented, lamenting albums which were perceived to have been made with 'filler' tracks. "The album had no value – only the individual tracks had value," he stated.

He added: "As a guy who'd been making records for many years at that point, I was pissed off – I love every note, on every song, on every record…. They weren't just filler." He then said that the sound of MP3 was 'shit': "We were selling shit, but people were still buying it because they like music (but) they were buying Xeroxes of the Mona Lisa."

Young went on to explain that music adapted to the constraints of MP3. "Instead of being soulful – which it still is – music adapted, it became beat heavy, it became smart, it became tricky. But for me, it was like 'woah, I don't want to do that!'... I started thinking it might be a good idea to do something about it".

He then showed a short film, which saw a host of music world stars commenting on Pono, after listening to the player, including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Patti Smith, Mumford and Sons, Dave Grohl, Elvis Costello, Mike D of the Beastie Boys and Jack White. Click below to watch the video. "This gives it to you as good as you can get it," says Tom Petty, whilst Springsteen comments that it has "a closeness and intimacy that digital recordings can lose very quickly." Elton John says: "I haven't heard a sound like that since vinyl".

if this is everything it puports to be, I'd def be interested in doing a little ponoing

the problem is that everyone wants to shout over each other to have their format be the ONLY format. i listen to stuff on tape, CD, MP3, vinyl, spotify... people need to start being ok with the idea that every format has its benefits and limits.

i think the biggest YOU DUN GOOFED of this whole endeavor is this idea that it's gonna revolutionize music and blah de blah and be the new way we hear things. Really they should release like maybe 500 albums a year in Pono and make it a luxury item for serious nerds, because there's not fucking way this or anything is gonna start eating iTunes' lunch any time this decade

*no fucking way

I can't listen to flacs anymore I just sing in my shower

old man.shower

flac post

Like if it was some cloud where you could forever download your mysterious ponos to your pono player, then again, legs. But FILES just mean people will rip them like MP3s and then nerd hoarders will start their "i only listen to music on pono, i have blah blah terrabiytes of pono" and it will be dumb and boring real fast

He should release Archives II as a PONO-player exclusive, to prime the pump.

think i'll pack it in and buy a Pono

lol "mysterious ponos"

this thing is for dads

I don't see how in 10 years we won't look at FLAC files and think they sound like crap compared to holographic 3d printer music pyramids.

That would be cool if they just started releasing the master tracks, so you can mix your own "Tonight's the Night" in Garageband.

promises to "put music back in the hands of musicians".
The real promise - and you don't have to read too hard between the lines on the PONO website to get this - is it's trying to put the dollars back in the hands of the record companies. I'm not a record company hater (altho I have a lot of respect for DIY and, like, basically samizdat production and distro) or a "the internetz puts indie musicians on a level playing field with U2, isn't it awesome" guy, but this just seems like a blatant grab, another last gasp.

The thing that's weird to me is that.. like look at the iPhone in your pocket, or your HDTV or video games now compared to 20 or 10 years ago and be so skeptical that there couldn't have been big improvements in digital audio

But digital was that improvement. It just happened with audio first because audio is easier and takes less cpu power and memory than video or interactive realtime 3D rendering on a videogame. Actually text was first (remember dedicated "word processor" machines?), then graphics (desktop publishing revolution), digital audio, then digital video. 16/44 really is good enough and there's nowhere else to go except for more dynamic range (unnecessary for a final delivery format since the vast majority of recordings don't even use a fraction of what's available at 16 bit) or encoding higher frequencies that nobody can actually hear.

I mean we already had 24/96 audio available as a consumer format 15 years ago with DVD-Audio and SACD, but nobody cared because nobody could hear the difference.

Hey, where's Tyler?

the problem is that everyone wants to shout over each other to have their format be the ONLY format. i listen to stuff on tape, CD, MP3, vinyl, spotify... people need to start being ok with the idea that every format has its benefits and limits.

I love this post

i just press my ear against the wall and listen to whatever my neighbors are listening to, i'm not sure what format they use

saving up to buy a glass, i hear it really adds definition to the sound

Hey, where's Tyler?
just hanging out, listening to time fades away on vinyl. so scratchy! i dunno, i believe that there is some truth to the pono stuff (or at least the idea that digital media can be better), i just dread the idea of purchasing a bunch of catalog stuff for the nth time. i thought that the last round of neil reissues on CD sounded amazing. would be great if he'd just get on with the rest of them.

i just dread the idea of purchasing a bunch of catalog stuff for the nth time

Rather. In my case after all these years I'm pretty sure I've bought the vast majority of what I have just once, a much smaller amount twice (vinyl to CD, rerelease with a slew of bonus tracks, etc.). I intend to keep it that way.

i just dread the idea of purchasing a bunch of catalog stuff for the nth time.

I think this is key, and it's essentially what the industry has been chasing since the mid-90s. CDs were such an insane boon for the industry -- "holy shit, everyone's buying everything a second time!" -- that they keep trying to replicate that formula (usually disingenuously -- "whoops, our bad, we left some bonus tracks off that last reissue; but hey, they're all here on this new box set!")

Wk I'm not taking about bit depth or encoding... I'm talking about DAC and playback

This bit rate shit is a red herring... There's better and cheaper great equipment then there's ever been, it's actually cheaper than shitty Bose stuff people already buy!

i thought that the last round of neil reissues on CD sounded amazing. would be great if he'd just get on with the rest of them.

^^THIS

Like you'd be way better off having good speakers and a good amp/DAC & listening to 320 mp3s than having shitty speakers & listening to lossless files...

think i might spring for one of those DACs, thanks for the recs

This bit rate shit is a red herring... There's better and cheaper great equipment then there's ever been, it's actually cheaper than shitty Bose stuff people already buy!

You mentioned video games and hdtv so I thought you were wondering why there haven't been improvements in the underlying digital technology. But yeah, there's already good enough stuff and people don't buy it because people don't give a shit about sound quality for the most part.

Beats is kind of interesting because even though it's Bose-style marketing bullshit, at least it's a marginal step up from white earbuds, and it gets young people used to paying a good chunk of change for audio gear. I saw an article about how other more legit headphone manufacturers have been seeing a big uptick in sales thanks to Beats because people move on from them and upgrade.

It's kind of weird to me that Pono is focused on mobile, since I think some kind of beautifully designed retro-styled home box could be a better niche.

Maybe there will be some amazing new breakthrough in speaker technology eventually, but it doesn't seem like that area sees the same kind of R&D dollars that stuff like TVs and monitors get. But yeah, I feel like overall the basic digital audio technology, the DACs, and decent amps have all been figured out and it's just a matter of marketing to get people actually interested in buying stuff that's not total garbage.

yeah i'll give Beats (and Skullcandy before that) some credit for at least making big headphones fashionable again; I no longer feel like a nerd walking down the street wearing over-the-ear Sennheisers or Grados anymore. I'm on the fence on the likes of Bowers & Wilkins, which seem to be equally about high-end audio and high-end style; I almost expect to see them sold at Nordstrom or Saks alongide wallets and purses.

alongside

I think this is weather related or something. when I was in Montreal a couple years ago I ONLY saw people wearing over-the-ears. as a cali kid I was shocked but it kinda made sense for when in very cold weather, eh. and it made me think that in my normal warmer climes the last thing I want when enjoying tunes is to be all sweaty in and around my earholes, wot

I don't have much to add here, but I love the upthread description of Beats by Dre headphones as "a shithole".

I'll give PONO this clear advantage over Beats phones: nobody's going to snatch your PONO off you on the train.

PONO needs to have a feature where any .mp3 played at less than 320Kbps is randomly interrupted by ear splitting static.

it'd be like Spotify using adverts to drive the move to premium.

Should have been designed after one of Neil's famous giant amp props.