PONO - Neil Youngs portable hi-res music player

[tgdinamo]

 
After my blind test between 3 Astell&Kern DAPs I can totally believe the above.
 
A friend of mine and me put the same iRiver demo songs HiRes FLACs on all the players, matched the volume and then listened to AK100 Mk1, AK100 Mk2 and AK120 via transparent input switcher and poof. All the differences we thought we heard when used sequentially were gone. None of us could identify a player. Headphones used: SE846, UE900s, JVC HAFX850. We added a DX50 in the mix and couldn't reliably tell it apart either (sometimes) and we both agreed that we wouldn't be unhappy with any of the quality we heard. So from $200 to $1000....
 
So, that the Pono is as good as these AKs or better? I totally buy that. Am with you there, not a problem at all.
 
I think the whole tumult is the way they market it as redefining music and the over the top positive - wow I never heard music like this before - statements. They target the mainstream and not the audiophiles. And by the way:  Everyone who discredits David Pogue, this guys studied music and graduated from Yale summa cum laude and conducted orchestras, he worked as a professional musician. I think he knows a few things about music.....
 
Cheers,
K

 
I agree that during short listening sessions (most often used for these "blind" tests) it's sometimes hard to pick out players and/or hires files.
However, the most obvious benefit I found with hires is that I can listen for many hours consecutive, without getting tired and/or getting a headache.
For years in the past I used ipads and iphones and listened exclusively to my ripped CD's (so still listening at 44.1-16 full CD resolution). That already sounded better than way back when I listened to MP3's on ipods. However, even at CD resolution on Apple players I would typically listen for 1hr max (headphones) before needing a break (getting my ears "tired" and even getting headaches if I did not take breaks). However, since I switched to Tera player couple of years ago I no longer have this problem at all. I am able to listen for many hours straight without every getting tired or needing a break (ie. listened for 8 hours straight on flight from USA to Europe).
I don't know whether this is due to my particular dac (Tera), or using 192 resolution files as much as possible, or some combination - but there is absolutely no doubt this is the case.
I think this is similar to the difference when using a high quality hires monitor (with high scan rates) vs low res monitor. It may not look that much different when you casually look at it for brief amount of time but it makes night and day difference when you have to work on it the whole day (your eyes and brain will thank you for taking it easier on them).

 

[doctorjazz]

I don't know how I'd do in blinded testing, maybe I'd fail and not be able to tell the difference in my players in a minute, but, in my normal listening, the Pono is just much better sounding than my iBasso DX90. Is it 78.232485% better than the DX90? I have no clue how to quantify this kind of stuff, others seem to be able to but I've never been able to put a number to it. Am I a suggestible audiophile who just WANTS to hear the difference? Could be, but I honestly didn't get the Pono expecting there to be a difference between it and the DX90, I liked the DX90. Now, if I'm "stuck" with the DX90 (happened recently when the battery ran out), I definitely hear a difference in air, detail, and find I'm more involved with the Pono. This holds for Red Book and Hi Rez files. I sometimes find a big improvement with the hi rez files, sometimes I don't notice it much. Still, the hype may be what's fueling the sniping at the Pono, but, from where I sit, it is just a really cool, good sounding little player.

(As far as David Pogue being a musician, many musicians/engineers have no interest or sense of good sound, doesn't matter to them. That's been my experience reading Pogue in the Times for many years. He was an entertaining read, but useless in areas relating to audio. Just my opinion, of course)

 

[miceblue]

I've A/Bed the DX90 with an iPod 5G and JDS Labs C5D while volume matched and I couldn't really pick out anything different. Were I to blind test it, I would probably fail. Likewise, I've blind tested the 5G to a Sansa Clip Zip as well as the iPhone 4S and failed that test. *shrugs*

 

[doctorjazz]

Then you should stick to the iPod, I'd say...

 

[miceblue]

Maybe, but that's why I often don't trust reviews that do comparisons between devices without proper testing and just claim that X completely destroys Y in terms of sound quality, or things of the like. It's really not that hard to setup an A/B test between two sources like what David Pogue did.

 

[tgdinamo]

It's really not that hard to setup an A/B test between two sources like what David Pogue did.

 
Yes but most of those tests are of still very limited and inconclusive unless much longer running comparisons are made. What should be done instead is to load each of the sources being compared with highest res files that can be played on those players and then listen to each of them for at least one typical work day (say 8 hours uninterrupted). I think that most people claiming they can't A/B whatever would come to very different conclusions (because most players and especially those with lower resolutions would most likely give them headaches after longer listening sessions and that alone is the proof that hires players and resolutions matter).

 

[miceblue]

Well an A/B test isn't just limited to a short duration. You could sit there for as long as you needed before you switched from A to B and you would be in a much more controlled environment still than listening to each device out and about.

And listening with the highest resolution music seems silly if one device doesn't support the resolutions of the other device. That's already an unfair test from the get-go.

 

[meat01]

   
Yes but most of those tests are of still very limited and inconclusive unless much longer running comparisons are made. What should be done instead is to load each of the sources being compared with highest res files that can be played on those players and then listen to each of them for at least one typical work day (say 8 hours uninterrupted). I think that most people claiming they can't A/B whatever would come to very different conclusions (because most players and especially those with lower resolutions would most likely give them headaches after longer listening sessions and that alone is the proof that hires players and resolutions matter).

I have never heard of low res music giving people headaches.  Just when you think you have heard it all.  I have also never heard of someone not being able to tell the difference between something only after prolonged listening.  If something sounds different, it sounds different right away.  You know, the "night and day difference" and the "X blows Y out of the water" we hear about on this forum all the time.

 

[tgdinamo]

  I have never heard of low res music giving people headaches.  Just when you think you have heard it all.  I have also never heard of someone not being able to tell the difference between something only after prolonged listening.  If something sounds different, it sounds different right away.  You know, the "night and day difference" and the "X blows Y out of the water" we hear about on this forum all the time.

 
Have you also never noticed that high end headphones get you a lot less tired listening over longer periods than cheap ones? Hopefully you have since this is presumably your hobby if you are on this type of forum. What I'm describing is very similar to that or to watching large screen TV in standard definition vs top of the line HD TV with high scan frequency. Watching from the same close distance your eyes/brain will certainly get less tired watching HDTV (and less tired eyes/ears/brain equals less headaches).

 

[miceblue]

Have you also never noticed that high end headphones get you a lot less tired listening over longer periods than cheap ones? Hopefully you have since this is presumably your hobby if you are on this type of forum. What I'm describing is very similar to that or to watching large screen TV in standard definition vs top of the line HD TV with high scan frequency. Watching from the same close distance your eyes/brain will certainly get less tired watching HDTV (and less tired eyes/ears/brain equals less headaches).

Wouldn't that depend on the frequency response? The HD800, HE-500, and Abyss all sound pretty aggressive to my ears in terms of treble and the SRS-2170 sounds much smoother in comparison. Heck, even a Shure SE215 is less fatiguing than all of the above.

 

[Kokomo O]

   
Actually all real-life music is continuous, otherwise the waveform would have instant jumps in amplitude (0 rise time), which doesn't happen. You mean that x(t) must not be time-limited (put another way, x(t) must have infinite support). We can get arbitrarily close to whatever band limit we require with the right techniques (good filters, oversampling, etc.). And you are ignoring one major issue: the inability of the human ear to detect signals much above 20kHz.

You might want to think that through. A cymbal crash is continuous? A plucked-and-released or hammered string, as in a guitar, banjo, dulcimer or piano? Even the sawtooth wave created by a horsehair bow on a violin string isn't continuous in the world we live in--it's multiple repeated plucks and releases. Now, the analogue representation of any of those sounds, as transmitted by the microphone that is used to record the sound, certainly does have non-zero rise time, but that's a different story.

 

[tgdinamo]

Wouldn't that depend on the frequency response? The HD800, HE-500, and Abyss all sound pretty aggressive to my ears in terms of treble and the SRS-2170 sounds much smoother in comparison. Heck, even a Shure SE215 is less fatiguing than all of the above.

 
Frequency response is one variable - in addition to better design, higher quality hardware components, quality of craftmanship/manufacturing, etc (and also higher resolution source materials) are the other critical components.
Same as when comparing most other things in life - more often than not you get what you pay for. By the way I don't see how comparing Shure SE-215 to HD800 makes any sense given one is iem and the other over-ear cans - comfort and fatiguing in this case is related to individual preference between two completely different designs (comparing apples and oranges).

 

[RRod]

 
You might want to think that through. A cymbal crash is continuous? A plucked-and-released or hammered string, as in a guitar, banjo, dulcimer or piano? Even the sawtooth wave created by a horsehair bow on a violin string isn't continuous in the world we live in--it's multiple repeated plucks and releases. Now, the analogue representation of any of those sounds, as transmitted by the microphone that is used to record the sound, certainly does have non-zero rise time, but that's a different story.

 
You're confusing very fast with instant; not the same at all mathematically. Non-continuous would mean that you would have a jump discontinuity in the actual waveform; I task you to find me an actual physical example of that happening.
 
As far as Fourier analysis, one of the initial objections, in fact, was that it could NOT represent periodic waveforms with discontinuities (like a square wave) exactly. Subsequent evaluation led to elucidation of the Gibbs phenomenon and its properties as the number of terms in the Fourier series increases. But we should probably go to Sound Science at this point.

 

[audionewbi]

Used CDs on Amazon! The hope for the Ponostore, for some of us, is availability of new masters of albums where the CD release was marred by the loudness wars.

Amazon is cheap for the U.S. Market, rest of the world doesn't get the same treatment.

 

[PalJoey]

Amazon is cheap for the U.S. Market, rest of the world doesn't get the same treatment.

Marketplace sellers on Amazon UK can be pretty cheap.