PONO - Where Music Lives

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.

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