PONO - Where Music Lives

it depends on the recording. 320 "mastered for itunes" can sound great but it can slaughter other things that were/are not meant for mp3.

lol, baaaaaaad look, Neil.

Taking the microphone, a young man asked: “What’s your cut?” — referring, of course, to Apple’s now-famous 30% cut of sales on the iTunes Store.

Hamm, after a flustered moment, responded that, “It surprises most people that everyone who buys music from the record labels pays exactly the same amount.” At this, several audience members shouted, “What?!”

“That’s a delicate question, isn’t it?” asked Young.

Shortly thereafter, Hamm turned to the moderator, slightly flushed at this point, and said “We can end it.”

“You can answer the question if you like,” Snider said.

Hamm shook his head slightly before Snider closed the discussion.

Pono makes no sense at the math level

https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

Did anyone read this piece that onlydarkness linked to? Don't think I understood some parts. It links to test samples with 30kHz/26kHz and other tones. The author says:

Assuming your system is actually capable of full 96kHz playback, the above files should be completely silent with no audible noises, tones, whistles, clicks, or other sounds. If you hear anything, your system has a nonlinearity causing audible intermodulation of the ultrasonics.

Is the point here that you're supposed to get silence - meaning this kind of detail is useless - or that most people can hear something, showing that few systems are up to it and will introduce distortion? Because listening on an iMac - which I think is capable of 96kHz playback - I can easily hear things going on and I definitely don't have good ears.

audiophilia sure does take the fun out of music doesn't it?

i doubt my crackly old Charlie Parker albums will sound any better in 192/24 and neither do I think Kid A or Immer or Reign in Blood or SHaking The Habitual or any album made before or after this date will sound better in that quality, because I am a human being with ears and a song is a song and a guitar sounds like a guitar. What I mean is that for a start you'd have to be recording in that level of quality, and even if you manage to do that, what are you going to be picking up? A bit of extra hiss from a mic? Sympathetic reverb from a snare? A background cough? IT's like wishing that my acoustic guitar at home sounded "better". I could buy a more expensive guitar, but would it sound more real? Would it make a lick of difference?

(xpost to budget hifi discussion)

i've been reading about a killer turntable that clocks in at $179.
http://www.analogplanet.com/content/u-turn%E2%80%99s-remarkable-179-orbit-turntable-crosley-killer

I take people's word for it that it's junk science but in the same way organic/pasture-raised food is likely of dubious benefit in certain contexts, I think people who still use it exercise a greater care with most steps until the final product, and likewise something created in that chain of higher resolution audio would probably sound different/better, regardless of whether the extra bits of fidelity were necessary.

I could buy a more expensive guitar, but would it sound more real? Would it make a lick of difference?

yes

a better guitar would sound better, but it won't sound any more like a guitar.

I'm just curious where the market is for $20+ digital albums

When I want to demo my highest of hi-fi set ups, I always reach for Neil Young first. Then Steely Dan. But always Neil first, because those albums are like reference quality fidelity.

almost believed you there

Time Fades Away was recorded directly from the soundboard to 16-track using the Quad-8 CompuMix, the unreliable first digital mixing soundboard—against the wishes of producer David Briggs, who referred to it as the "Compufuck" but was forced to yield to the desires of Young. This resulted in a murky-sounding release.

Murky, maybe, but perfectly murky in PONO.

Note: this vinyl rip is in HD (!), but don't tell Neil:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BLv2VviaLX4

I'm just curious where the market is for $20+ digital albums

The big fish that are also the market for F2P games?

play Buffalo Springfield for awhile before every listen to heighten your enjoyment of what comes after

relationship problems? call coked-up Stills and chat for 15 minutes. your relationship is now enhanced.

Prince and Neil Young should collaborate on an instantly outmoded music distribution model.

Harvest is a great sounding record

while 128kbps's do indeed sound like garbage once you hit like 192 I really don't see much point in going higher. Can anyone here in all honesty tell the difference?

Yep, absolutely. I don't know whether that's because I've got better ears than you, or better playback equipment. Where I start to hit my limits is in the comparison between 320 kpbs and lossless files. While I can hear a difference, it's barely discernable.

192 is it for me.

I can only tell the difference once I start playing out on larger pa systems. A portable player? Nah, any detail gets drowned out by the train carriage.

I think better playback equipment makes the difference here, although sometimes that difference might just be due to poor (non-LAME) encoding for the MP3s.

Josh are you claiming that Harvest or Gold Rush or Harvest Moon or most of Neil's records are lo fi?

haha look out

This idea that better sound equipment does not sound clearly and radically and obviously better than shitty equipment or that you need some sort of super human ears to tell the difference is ridiculous

Like listen to a good system you'll be like dag bro those tunes sound off the chain

i mean people take it too far and get crazy for sure, there's diminishing returns at a certain level with anything...like with bit rate there's the difference between 128k and 320k...and there's improvement after that but the difference between 320 and WAV won't be as apparent as the difference between 128 and 320

same with the very nice, affordable system i put together for 700 upthread...HUGE difference between that and plugging your ipod into some shitty Bose sound dock...but go from like a $1500 system to a $50,000 one and yeah it'll be better for sure but the rate of improvement's going to flatten out...

same with a a guitar....like the difference between a laminate p.o.s. $150 acoustic and a nice all wood $1000 guitar is huge....from the $1000 one to some luthier made handcrafted one of a kind $4500 guitar....well, it's perception more at that point....

but that doesn't mean that there aren't very reasonable and apparent degrees of distinction especially going from shitty stuff to good solid quality yet affordable stuff

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

harvest moon doesn't sound too great to me

I dunno about guitars -- would you prefer to hear your favorite artist live on a crap guitar or on a pono with the best guitar?

UMS relentlessly OTM here imo

Harvest Moon -- like This Note's For You, Freedom, Ragged Glory, and Arc/Weld -- was recorded digitally.

It only took Neil five years, and five albums, to realize he didn't like the sound of digital recording.

xxp

man forget sound quality, who's got the hard drive space for flacs

the reverb on harvest moon bothers me.

can pono give me dry gold rush sound on harvest moon? would buy.

Josh are you claiming that Harvest or Gold Rush or Harvest Moon or most of Neil's records are lo fi?

Nah, Harvest sounds great. Gold Rush is hit or miss sonically, imo. Most of his records are pretty hit or miss, sonically, or even outright uneven, recording quality-wise, imo, but it doesn't matter. Same with Dylan. Like, am I listening for every ghosted snare on "Ragged Glory?" The perfect fidelity of the wrong bass notes hit throughout "Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere?" Neil's not about hi-fi overdubs and perfect clarity, and the notion of Neil Young in hi-fi to me is like bringing a top of the line digital recorder to capture Crazy Horse live: you're going to get all that distortion, all those flubbed notes, all those vocals shouted anywhere but into the mic, in glorious pristine quality? Please. That's not what it's about.

Which brings it all back to the ridiculousness of an old guy who surely must have some serious degree of hearing loss and who definitely has a weakness for novelty recording methods and who historically prefers to capture his recordings live, with minimal takes/overdubs, pushing some weird proprietary device/format in 2014. Suckers who shell for this are just as silly as anyone who bought Archives on Blu-Ray and are still waiting around for more downloads.

the notion of Neil Young in hi-fi to me is like bringing a top of the line digital recorder to capture Crazy Horse live: you're going to get all that distortion, all those flubbed notes, all those vocals shouted anywhere but into the mic, in glorious pristine quality? Please. That's not what it's about.

i wholeheartedly disagree with this

man forget sound quality, who's got the hard drive space for flacs

― j., Wednesday, March 12, 2014 3:08 PM (17 minutes ago)

you gotta be kidding me, storage is cheaper than ever

I have like 6,000 FLAC albums on a 3 TB drive with room to spare and many more thousands of MP3 albums that I never listen to any more, the drive cost me $125

hey i'm straight up wondering how many vegetables i can afford to buy this week to sustain my existence, sounds like it would be sweet to be rolling in terabytes like the one-percenters tho, instead playing delete-another-album on my aging 230 gig factory drive, cheaper than ever my ass

pomme de terre-a-bytes

I wonder if I could tempt anyone here to invest in my new portable audio device which I'm going to be calling POTATO

http://i.imgur.com/iYKBTI9.png

I make a point of converting all my downloaded Crazy Horse boots from FLAC to 128 MP3, then manually shaking the hard drive until I start to get all that cool clipping and stuff. Then I blast the boot through headphones, via a DAC, stick little mics in the headphones, then record that in lossless. Then I pay to have them pressed to 45 RPM vinyl, which I play exclusively on a portable Mickey Mouse turntable that I listen to only in a moving electric car.

Hey Josh could you post some more sarcastic straw man bullshit in this thread? You haven't referenced 5.1, Super audio CD, reel to reel, or 8 track yet

My new album's going to be available on 64Kbps MP3 exclusively.

You know, I actually really liked 5.1! I'm not kidding. I had a few 5.1 DVDs - I want to say DM's "Violator," plus some Genesis, and I really enjoyed those. It forced me to hear stuff I'd never heard before. Even T. Rex's "Electric Warrior" sounded good in 5.1. Tony Visconti told me once that when he was mixing the T. Rex for surround, he realized that for all these decades most people have been playing the wrong chords in "Bang a Gong." Someone once told me that they thought stereo is no more "real" than "surround," because they're all studio constructs approximated/reduced from the more infinite sonic scope of the band/instrument live in a room.

more infinite sonic scope

audiophile set theory

i mean people take it too far and get crazy for sure, there's diminishing returns at a certain level with anything...like with bit rate there's the difference between 128k and 320k...and there's improvement after that but the difference between 320 and WAV won't be as apparent as the difference between 128 and 320

yeah that's pretty much it for me, though even on a good system it's hard to tell between -v0 rips and the WAVs. 192 flat rate does still have artifacts here and there.

yo j no offense intended, I used to have to burn everything to DVD cuz I had no HD space

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.