PONO - Where Music Lives

yeah "discredited" might be too strong a word. still, this article, linked from the AES home page, sort of lays out where they're at right now:

http://www.aes.org/technical/documentDownloads.cfm?docID=507

it says:

The theoretical and practical influence of filters on sound has long been debated, and a
new test program initiated by Meridian Audio seeks to explore some of the audibility
questions. In an important first paper given at the AES 137th convention, Meridian
authors H.M. Jackson et.al. measured the audibility in double blind tests of
downsampling filters typical of those used in CD preparation when such filters were
applied to a higher resolution stream without decimation and played through a high
quality audio system. Their result disputes that from an earlier paper by E.B. Meyer and
D.R. Moran (J.A.E.S. 55: 775-779, 2007) and provides evidence and a likely mechanism
for an audible distinction between CD and higher resolutions.

so again, perpetuating the notion that redbook cds are as good as we're ever going to get, and that all these people buying high-res files are throwing their money away because they can't hear the difference, is getting old.

i think there was an even more recent paper that shows that trained listeners, i.e. folks who actually know what they're listening for, can reliably tell the difference between normal and high resolution files:

http://www.stereophile.com/content/simple-everything-appears-simple

none of the candidates for presidents - not even jill stein - is talking about this! wake up people!!!

Under Construction

One of our key infrastructure partners - Omnifone - has recently been acquired by a large company. An impact of this purchase is that all Omnifone’s supply relationships are being terminated, effectively immediately. Omnifone has been the exclusive content provider for PonoMusic.

In early anticipation of this change, some time ago we began, and subsequently concluded, negotiations to move our content provision to 7 Digital, the leading independent music content/services platform. This process of transition is now well underway, but not yet complete. Please rest assured that our contractual relationships with all the major music labels remain fully intact and will transition to our new platform.

During this transition, the ponomusic.com store will be under construction and not available. Our music library will be temporarily suspended for purchases effective July 20th. We ask that you please complete any music purchases you were considering, or wish to make, by Tuesday, July 19th.

Our PonoCommunity will continue as normal and we will keep everyone up to date with our progress.

With our partners at 7 Digital, we will determine the timeframe of this transition. Right now, we believe this transition process will take several weeks to achieve. In the meantime, please stay connected to the site and the community and keep listening to and enjoying the music you have. This transition is our highest priority and will remain so until we are live again and providing our customers with seamless access to music in the highest quality available.

On a positive note, this partnership brings fresh opportunities to improve our overall service. We look forward to having new titles to offer you.

Thank you for your understanding, patience, and support.
The Ponomusic Team.

#PonoInCrisis

#Pray4Pono

Never trust any company with "omni" in its name.

Omnifone totally sounds like a made up corporation from an 80s movie

http://www.omnifone.com/sites/default/files/Hero_3_content-choosing.png

huh ol' cd baby is still going

more like cd older now

it's no The Orchard or Tunecore

i've worked for omnifone since 2004 when it was 5 people. the office closes next week. 8(

Ah sorry that sucks :-(

Pono becoming Xstream (also the name of the streaming service on Empire, so that's promising)

But the pono devices have no network capabilities, how will they stream? Or are they not part of this?

Meanwhile, BBC radio 3 is currently available as a flac stream for lossless listening...

I was behind a Tesla with the license plate PONO today. Couldn't tell if it was Neil (tinted windows) due to lack of hat or sideburns. Maybe just a diehard fan.

http://www.nme.com/news/music/neil-young-record-labels-killed-pono-2243030

Does Tidal stream in CD quality? The pono folks may have just jumped to them.

Looking forward to a concept album about this

30 minute jam with "Save the downloads, save the downloads" as a chorus

The rest of the peddle-stuff-to-audiophiles industry seems to have no problems charging 2-3x higher prices.

so anybody get one

We had one at work - we supplied the files for them - and us going out of business is what caused their website to disappear, never to return 8(

damn!

(collapse is covered a few pages back, July 2016)

Tidal streams at CD quality and it sounds really good

What’s “Qobuz”?: https://www.qobuz.com/us-en/music/streaming/offers

been curious about it sound kinda promising

https://www.techhive.com/article/3340383/qobuz-review.html

shelling out for a nicer headphone setup (with proper, separate DAC and amp and all that) caused me to convert all the lossless files i had kicking around to MP3. Cannot detect a difference. Though nice headphones rule.

We had one at work - we supplied the files for them - and us going out of business is what caused their website to disappear, never to return 8(
― koogs,

more importantly, who got the Pono koogs ?

technically i think the company that bought us out, who i can only legally refer to as "Large Technology Company", would own it as it was a company asset. but i imagine it went home in the pocket of our guy with the golden ears who did all the demos and who was let go by the liquidators a couple of months before they found a buyer.

it was nice enough and the design principles were sound, i think (the shape being what it was because that allowed for proper components and a round battery which is more efficient [citation needed]) but i remember the screen looking terrible.

(neil young visited us once, was shown through the office whilst we were sat there coding. was quite surreal. said golden ears has, i notice, a pic of him and neil as his linked-in photo)

"Large Technology Company" i guess also owns the record collection we bought and did nothing with (every chart single ever, or something. certainly there were a lot of roxette cd singles in the one box i looked at)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/music-news/11638862/Massive-record-collection-to-be-publicly-exhibited.html

it just sat on the floor of a locked, unused office for a year or so.

(neil young visited us once, was shown through the office whilst we were sat there coding. was quite surreal. said golden ears has, i notice, a pic of him and neil as his linked-in photo)

fancy s/w office visisted by NY is indeed a visual mish mash.

oh, and that story re record collection is just, ummmm, weird.
but hey, your boss had a cool hat to wear.

Tidal streams at CD quality and it sounds really good

Checking it out now (via a trial subscription) -- seems you need to pay $20/mo. for "HiFi" (CD) quality streaming?

That said, the regular ("High") quality Tidal stream does seem to sound slightly better, when played from the desktop app thru my (not great) headphones, than Spotify & YT Music sound. Tidal's audio comes through somewhat quieter than the others, I need to adjust the volume levels to compensate, but there seems to be a little more detail? Idk, maybe it's in my head

Spotify does some level adjusting unless you tell it in settings (advanced?) not to. Also have to manually set Spotify to give you its best quality, iirc

Ah - the best quality that Spotify will let me choose w/out a subscription is "High"... I'm sure "Very High" (Premium only) sounds better. But Tidal's "High" def. beats Spotify's "High" (I just did some 1:1 comparisons).

aside from farting around myself with various services and codecs, this site for live A/B testing is handy.. http://abx.digitalfeed.net

for me it was a total crapshoot for anything over 320kbps

I've now had an opportunity to A/B Spotify at "Very High" quality (by logging in to my wife's account) and Tidal at "High" quality... and I still swear Tidal still sounds. I'm not some Hoffman Forums type; just going by my ears, using R.E.M.'s Out of Time (25th Anniversary Edition) for the test.

*still swear Tidal sounds better

That Qobuz service is going exclusively hi-res, lowering subscription price: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/qobuz-kicks-mp3s-to-curb-hi-res-audio-1203398479/

Would be interested to do the trial and see if its catalog is even remotely comparable to the major services (especially for new releases).

I decided to do the Qobuz trial, just for kicks. It does sound good -- significantly better than YT Music (my crappy-sounding default) -- but probably not worth the extra $5/mo. over Tidal or Spotify (at least when played over my cheap bluetooth headphones).

The bass in some of these streams is actually boosted a little too much for my taste...

Ooh - there's a switch in the settings to bump up the quality to "Hi-Res 24-Bit / up to 192 kHz" (for supported recordings). Damn, that really does sound good. (You can toggle between the four settings as you play a track, to compare on the fly.)

hold the phones.. Bluetooth? surely it's using LDAC then? I've never bothered with it, but I think any other sort of Bluetooth compression is going to severely limit this lossless experiment

I mean, I can definitely hear the difference between at least the top tier and the lower ones (unless someone with real tech knowledge insists that's not possible, and I'm falling prey to severe power-of-suggestion).

I mean yeah it’s impossible for Bluetooth to reproduce that, it doesn’t have the bandwidth to even do CD quality audio, let alone 24 bit.

You probably can hear a difference though because I strongly suspect the services that offer 24bit audio EQ those streams differently to help you believe it does sound better.

Hmm... yeah, the bass doesn’t seem as jacked; highs & mids sound more clear. Maybe YouTube Music is just really crappily EQ’d(?)

MY PONONO

Neil Young created Pono ten years ago with a seemingly altruistic goal: making music sound better. But the project developed a rough reputation, whether it deserved it or not. For @stereogum, I went in search of answers: Did Pono get a fair shake?https://t.co/L3OW303VRT

— Nate Rogers (@Nate_Rgrs) January 13, 2025

> Eventually, the final nail in Pono’s triangular, yellow coffin was when their store’s content partner, Omnifone, was purchased by Apple in 2016 and then promptly shut down, taking a crowbar to Young’s already fragile business.

this isn't how i remember it. omnifone did the provisioning of the music but not the website, the actual store. and iirc the storefront went down months before omnifone got bought out (which was a long, protracted thing in itself, two different buyers, one of whom won the bid and then seemingly disappeared...). but i'm not sure how much us proles were told, maybe the website was taken down because of the difficulties (although other systems were running right until the end)

although this text from the pono website suggests otherwise

PONO - Where Music Lives