Neil Young's new Pono hi-res music service

"pono." Say it with a straight face. Will the adjective be ponographic? Or is it just me that has an irretrievably corrupted and polluted mind?

Sorry if this seems irrelevant and irreverent, but I also don't see why Renault think it is a good idea to name a car after a rag that one wipes things with. These things matter.
 
the Duster is trying to wipe the slate clean thad.. and also to wipe the smile off the competition :lol:

cheers !

mpw
 
the Duster is trying to wipe the slate clean thad.. and also to wipe the smile off the competition :lol:

cheers !

mpw

Sorry for being offtopic:
Indeed Duster has wiped the dust off Scorpio and now it is the latter that is shining bright! (in plain English: Scorpio sold more than the Duster in August).
 
Still, I'd rather buy a Jopasu Duster than a Renault, even though it is a really nice car albeit not as nice as the Yeti. Anyway, I'm not in the market for an SUV: most of my driving is alone or with one other person. The Ecosport, on the other hand, might, one day, suit well, given that one can never tell when a city road is going to become a farm track.

Cars aside, the high-res music debate will go on. And on, and on. We already have at least two threads in response to Why 24-bit/192kHz music downloads make no sense. To those who say, Bah! He doesn't know what he is talking about! I can only say FLAC! OGG! (Imagine a comic-book fight: Biff! Pow! :) ) and to those that find a lot of the digital sound theory a bit troublesome, I suggest xiph.org's movies. Our engineers might say they oversimplify, but so do all teachers when they have to make something accessible to all.

They are worth watching, if only to find out that the reconstructed waveform that comes out of your DAC is not a series of steps! Even if the music was only 44.1, and even if every diagram we ever saw has made us believe that!
 
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PONO

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The digital filter used in the PonoPlayer has minimal phase, and no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made (including music) always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural" and harsh.

All circuitry is zero-feedback. Feedback can only correct an error after it has occurred, which means that it can never correct for all errors. By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry with wide bandwidth and low output impedance, there is no need for unnatural sounding feedback.

The DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip being used is widely recognized in the audio and engineering community as one of the best sounding DAC chips available today.

The output buffer used to drive the headphones is fully discrete so that all individual parameters and circuit values and parts quality can be fully optimized for the absolute finest sound quality. The output impedance is very low so that the PonoPlayer delivers perfectly flat frequency response and wide volume range using virtually any set of headphones
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I couldnt understand if there is any difference between the FLAC files I have and what will be available from the Pono service
 
Sound bite: Despite Pono's promise, experts pan HD audio

Cast your minds back. When did you first hear the terms High-Definition or High-Resolution associated with audio? You can go way back to the dawn of digital sound, and find sample rates and bit depth, because those are the real technical terms. Definition and resolution are the babies of the marketing department --- and the market, which has its tongue hanging out for such things.

I couldnt understand if there is any difference between the FLAC files I have and what will be available from the Pono service

There might be. If they keep their promise, then their Porno FLAC files may be made from remastered material. Of course, it can't be better than the original recordings, but it can be better than subsequent commercial releases, especially if they were spoilt by compression (ie loudness wars). As they are working direct with the record companies, this could happen. It is this that will make the difference, not the sample rate nonsense they have sold us.

"They have sold us." Yes, us. I too, when faced with a choice of 16-bit or 24-bit FLAC, think Oh, what the heck, and go for the 24/96. Because, you know, maybe.... :o :lol: :o :lol: :o

<Later>

There's a bunch of engineers, techies, etc, arguing about porno here on Gearslutz. Over 1500 posts so far. I lost track of it and had to skip about 20 pages. I doubt that anyone will want to start from post 1!


~
 
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Here's some good comment, not so much about the porno machine, but about its position in the music industry.


What Is The PonoPlayer Doing For Music? Not Much
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The greatest trick the music industry ever pulled was making consumers think they need to buy the same classic rock records over and over again. Think about the number of opportunities we've had to repurchase, The Beatles' discography. There were the original records, The Beatles Collection vinyl box set, The Beatles Box Set on CD, then the remastered stereo and mono box sets on CD and vinyl, then on iTunes. Same goes for The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Bruce Springsteen name a classic artist, and their albums have been repackaged and re-released again and again. Each time, the shiny new package comes with marketing campaign making you think the copies you already own have to be replaced by the new ones, which are better and cleaner sounding, bringing you closer and closer to the artist's original vision.

This is how 1% of artists make 77% of the income generated by the music industry today. If you think the Big Three major record labels (Sony, Universal, and Warner) are banking on finding a hot new indie band around the corner, then you're wrong. They're banking on reselling the back catalogue of their top earners over and over again, in new formats that consumers don't really need.
 
Buy from India's official online dealer!
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