From these and other comments it seems that the real opportunity for the Pono service is providing higher quality music with full transparency about the origin of the remastered track.
I completely agree, which is why I am
disheartened to see the PONO venture buying-in to an existing catalgoue (Omnifone), unless (and this remains to be seen) they intend to collaborate with Omnifone
only for their web-based / cloud-based storefront and content distribution engine, rather than for dubiously re-labeling Omnifone's own content with a PONO badge.
I see PONO as being able to improve the industry, by competing with existing vendors in (for example) the following ways:
- Price (although since the record label is the greediest factor, I concede that Neil largely has his hands tied with this)
- Quality & Integrity of content
- Transparency of both the origin and the mastering method for each album
- Description of the dynamic range of each album, and honestly noting any legitimate but unavoidable flaws in the master
There is definitely a real opportunity here, but I fear it may get overlooked in favour of accelerating the number of 'PONO' content offerings when they hit the market.
As for the discussion about theft vs commerce, in addition to the salient rebuttals already proffered, regarding fraudulent upsampling, I'll also add that I don't think anyone's post was promoting theft - the discussion was simply observing that if,
in the name of 'commerce', record execs greedily price-gouge their customers, then they have only themselves to blame when their greed kills their golden goose.
FTR, I don't anticipate Neil
intentionally having anything to do with fraudulent upsampling - I think I trust him enough to have the integrity to steer clear of that particular gravy train. But I do have concerns that he can't
guarantee the quality of the
(re)mastering unless he absolutely nails down the procedure for each and
every PONO content release; something which will take enormous diligence, and no buying-in to other vendors' catalogues unless those vendors have themselves the integrity to ensure genuine quality of the master.
Linn Records, in the UK, are generally pretty good with the quality of their own-label releases, but now that they are vending quite a few releases from 3rd-party labels (including some also vended by HDTracks, in the USA), I must admit I've been wondering how tightly
Linn are QCing those...
In spite of some of their very dubious offerings, HD Tracks have nonetheless shown themselves
capable of providing their customers with detailed information on the mastering procedure for some of the albums they offer, so there is absolutely no reason why PONO cannot make this transparent provision of information to the customer a de facto standard for all their content.
ALL these labels and vendors should be selling only those Hi-Res tracks which have been sampled directly from the original master or remaster; that much is clear, but PONO have made by far the biggest song-and-dance about how they're going to 'change the industry', so the only way they can genuinely accomplish that is by nailing-down the integrity of their content until it's absolutely water-tight. If they don't, it's not just going to be carnage - it'll be an all-out
blood bath and Neil will be the laughing stock of the industry.
Here's hoping Neil makes the effort to ensure it's done properly, reliably, and consistently, even if the
pricing still sucks...
