PONO - Where Music Lives

One thing I hated about "Her" was how he had to wear that earpiece ALL THE TIME. If I had to wear earbuds all the time I think my ear would just die.

Earbuds are worst for tinnitus, closed over the ear cans are second worst, open over the ear cans are best. Or so they say and my own tinnitus reaction has borne this out.

Neil Young's proprietary new headphone, where the mastering engineer sits on your shoulder and sings the song lovingly into your ear.

"Unsuspecting Teens Try Pono": http://vimeo.com/91084885

(I assume "teens" is a tongue-in-cheek reference to the "unsuspecting teens try a walkman" thing, since most of these people are clearly in their late 20s - 30s)

"Unsuspecting" "teens"

Needless to say that video is the most transparently unconvincing piece of marketing I think I've ever witnessed.

i'm seriously so in love with the fact that on the eve of pono's kickstarter success, neil released an album that literally has the fidelity of a 1928 78s recording

that's my dogg right there

...why does that video make the hipster in me want to start hating vinyl ?

Choosy teens choose Pono

http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/you-can-now-invest-in-neil-youngs-ponomusic-20140813

New campaign will allow public to invest in the high-end music player for as little as $5,000

Phew.

This has been dragging on too long. Just put out a reel-to-reel machine you can wear on your back and be done with it.

Man I would totally do this but I already invested all of my future failed businesses fund in a company that makes vending machines for steampunk hats. You can choose from five different kinds of brass gears!

We don't need Neil finding out about Steampunk.

That most recent album is so close, though, I'm surprised he's not performing it live at uh... Steamcons? Is that what they call it when those people get together?

You guys are crazy. When people see the reaction of Stephen Stills at :44 of the promotional video, this thing is going to take off like a rocket.

Everybody's jerking off to the ever-elusive ponography.

i got to listen to one a couple of weeks ago. sound quality was great on the lossless files and i liked that it had a line-out and 128GB as standard. but i could hear all the flaws in my shitty compressed files, in a way that i don't notice on my £40 sandisk clip zip.

cool, would you consider getting one?

but i could hear all the flaws in my shitty compressed files

are you talking 128s or even decent quality like 320?

oggs on default quality 8) (i'm one of those greedy people who'd rather have 5000 files than 2000 whilst walking around)

(roughly equiv to 128kbps mp3s. that said, i later listened to the original flac that i bought from bandcamp and THAT also sounded shitty. not sure whether somewhere in the recording / upload chain it hadn't been converted down and then up again)

as for whether i'd get one, $300399 buys an awful lot of cds. plus i'd be scared of losing it somewhere, even if it is bright yellow and hard to miss (whereas £40 of mp3 player i'm not so bothered about).

yeah I can't really tell the difference between 320 and 192 most of the time but I can pick out 128 in seconds

I'm waiting for a Pono with a built-in speaker so that I can make everything around me sound better. I suggest they design it to look like this:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-B7tFVbj40gc/ULwgE5rzTlI/AAAAAAAAGEA/glRohpR68MI/s640/DSC01147.JPG*

*Neil Young not included.

what happened to Neil's right hand

Lost in the music.

what is up with this stupid gadget is it out yet, is it vaporware, did yr dad buy one

per his howard stern appearance:

The first batch of Pono players are sold out. "We're going to try and make more in January," he said. "We're starting to build and scale up, but the demand for them was awesome…We're making this for people that want it. We're not making it for people that don't want it, but they may not know then want it until they hear it. It's a gentle revolution. We're not trying to bowl over the world. We don't think success is anything you can tangibly see. It's a smile."

oh god neil young has prosopagnosia

TOP PONO ARTISTS
1. Neil Young
2. Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
3. Pearl Jam
4. Foo Fighters
5. Patti Smith
6. James Taylor
7. Kenny Rogers
8. Elton John
9. Norah Jones
10. Beck

I think that should be enough information for you to tell whether this device is for you.

ha, nice work glenn

Neil should pitch Pono on Shark Tank.

he'd do well because he would not be able to see the horror and disappointment on the judges faces

"We're going to try and make more in January,"

That's good CEOing, Neil, I hope you get around to it.

Will reserve judgement until I can hear "Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)."

I still can't figure out how/why this would work. I was poking around the store and there's tons of albums that I'm sure haven't had the master tapes touched in years

Like what would these be sourced from?

https://ponomusic.force.com/ccrz__CCPage?pageKey=product&oId=of%3A7ab373c879474d4abf3e49cd35c3876e&type=Album&artistId=undefined

https://ponomusic.force.com/ccrz__CCPage?pageKey=product&oId=of%3Aea230df5f6244f71bd38387d380ab3ac&type=Album&artistId=undefined

https://ponomusic.force.com/ccrz__CCPage?pageKey=product&oId=of%3Ae91955fa357b44aca239600e75e9f9c4&type=Album&artistId=undefined

i just poked around the store for the first time and couldn't help noticing that the album cover displayed with neil young's decade is the cd version, complete with the message "a 3-record set on 2 compact discs":

https://ponomusic.force.com/ccrz__CCPage?pageKey=product&oId=of%3Aaad0a2306828429aa46d9c2aaa138fb9&type=Album&artistId=undefined

pono should have pristine analog vinyl album art, no?

Hahahaha Whiney how did you miss the hype over Light in the Attic's Alien Ant Farm reissues

Whiney are you ok
Are you ok

are you okay, Whiney

"We're going to try and make more in January,"

Waiting for the release of Pono: Volume II.

As he poked around the Pono
It was switched from line to phono
He came into the web site
He left beside himself, somethin ain't right

Does anyone know anything about this site? I'm slightly intrigued but probably at those prices I'd just buy physical albums

http://www.hdtracks.com/

i think that's the go-to site for audiophile 24 bit downloads, that was one of the things ppl were saying about the PONO store is that it was basically just trying to be HD Tracks which was already pretty robust

the thing that sucks about the audiophile industry and that rhetoric is that it's created this impression that it's all this crazy, ridiculous multi-thousand dollar thing that's not attainable for regular folks when the reality is the opposite! we're in a golden age of affordable great sound equipment....
for a few hundred you could get some great self-powered speakers by a quality manufacturer and an entry level DAC that would knock your socks off! heck for, around 1000 or 1200 you could outfit a great turntable, amp, and speakers! it's really never been easier or cheaper than it is right now and the difference might surprise you...
hell, i'm listening to $30 Monoprice headphones right now at work that would destroy expensive ones from the 80s or 90s...it's insane!
― gimme the lute (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Tuesday, March 11, 2014 12:15 PM (7 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i would love a series of no-nonsense recommendations for relatively inexpensive but excellent audio components that i could buy one at a time toward the end of having a relatively inexpensive but excellent audio system to play LPs, CDs, MP3s, FLACs... and listen to the radio.

if you go on the internet there's simply so much info, and I have little sense of what sources to trust. it seems for every piece of gear there's one person saying this is a godsend and another saying it's a piece of junk.

i'm suspicious of HD tracks, can anyone tell the difference between your standard FLACs and 24-bit FLACs? i mean, you'd have to have a pretty incredible sound system to even begin to notice the difference, no? i'm not yet completely convinced I can usually hear the difference between a good V0/320 MP3 rip and a FLAC rip. at least not on my stereo system (much less on my laptop).

anyway...

i'd love good recommendations for...

- a good DAC for my mac laptop
- a excellent turntable for under $500

now, my receiver/stereo has phono input, do i still need/want a standalone phono preamp?

sorry i know this is the PONO thread but people seem to be talking all things audio.

HD tracks are mastered directly from analog masters, right?

aren't most or at least many digital masters much less than 24bit in the first place? meaning you wouldn't gain anything to hear them in 24bit. that's certainly true of the first few generations of digital masters (which include things like 1980s fleetwood mac albums IIRC).

and alien ant farm is exactly what i mean (set aside the issue that an alien ant farm song will never sound good even if it was from god's speakers to your ears)... it was probably recorded using some late 90s digital format that isn't anywhere near up to the sonic capacity of a 24bit file.

FWIW i can usually tell the difference between e.g. 128 MP3s and 320 MPs... but beyond that it gets harder. of course it's hard to compare unless you are literally comparing e.g. a 320 MP3 and a FLAC rip from the same exact CD. if you're listening to two different masters then the differences are probably from other than the different formats.

Can someone explain to me whether/why HDTracks would be preferable to just getting a CD and ripping it to your computer at the highest rate? Does "directly from the analog masters" mean better than CD?

I think they offer better than 44.1 KHz/16 bit (CD quality) audio as an option, which would require going back to the original master tapes and making a new transfer at a higher quality.

Also lots of people don't want to own actual things these days and would rather pay through the nose for bits.

HDTracks files in higher resolutions (usually 24bit/96KHz) are invariably sourced from the SACDs, although a few dedicated masters are cropping up. 24 bits means that there is less background noise than a CD, and sampling at 96KHz rather than 44.1KHz means that a wider range of frequencies are are captured. However (a) the lower noise floor is of no practical use since you're very unlikely to listen to music loud enough to hear it, and (b) CDs capture the entire range of frequencies human ears can detect, so reproducing frequencies outside of that is fairly pointless. It would like a TV that displays IR and UV - terrific technical exercise, but utterly pointless in the real world.

Audiophiles will tell you that the harmonics of the non-audible frequencies interact with the audible frequencies and so to get an accurate reproduction of the music "in the control room", you need these extra frequencies. Saying that, no-one has ever been able to tell the difference between CDs and high resolution audio in an blind ABX test, and the well-regarded audiokarma.org forum prohibits discussion of the benefits of high-definition audio because there's no evidence that the difference is detectable, even if you're listening REALLY hard.