These marketing graphs are actually accurate in their representation of the files waveforms (aka music data stream):
The only thing up for debate is if our hearing is good enough to discern the differences between them.
no they're not accurate. nothing exists in a device that actually looks like that.
those graphs are a human interpretation of the recorded values before being processed by the DAC. except that if you just had to do that stuff to recreate a sine wave from a few samples by placing points on a graph and join them using only vertical and horizontal lines, then PCM audio wouldn't have to be based on the equations you can get here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
anyway those samples are on the digital side, so there is no more or less stairs to make a wave because there is no wave in a digital domain only 0 and 1. those graphs are made by kids trying to imagine digital audio. they have no accuracy because they represent nothing in relation to what a DAC will output.
but even if we play the digital wave game... almost all DACs nowadays will oversample, the sabre chip in the pono will oversample. so the graphs would all most likely be a lot smoother(of course to say that we would need to know what frequency is being displayed in that ****ty marketing graph).
the DAC will at some point give an analog signal that could only look like that with a discrete NOS DAC and absolutely no filter. anything with some low pass filter would eliminate most of the utrasounds making those straight shapes in the graph. the result would be smooth and look even more like the original sine wave it's supposed to be. and in the process, greatly improve the signal resolution.
and anything with a delta sigma DAC would give an analog signal that goes up and down in the vicinity of the desired curve at a speed actually much higher than 96khz whatever the original resolution, so all the graphs would actually look almost the same with a thicker trace made from all the small added noises of the pulse system.
so however we look at it, the amount of BS we need to accept before those graphs become accurate is pretty phenomenal. I just gave 5 independent reasons and each one of them is enough to say that those staircase graphs are a lie.
again I'm not saying that mp3 is amazing, for me in practice it's good enough for portable use(more music, better battery),but that's it. I use flac on my computer. so I'm really not trying to sell mp3 to you guys. I'm just really annoyed to see that everybody is accepting marketing lies all day long( this one is not limited to pono, the last sony I bought used that same staircase crap kind of graph).
the superiority of highres can be measured, so why all the BS? because what they're trying to justify is the price difference, not the quality difference. they weren't making campaigns to tell us how much they ruined our favorite albums with the loudness war.
but scaring people with shameless propaganda to sell more of the more expensive stuff, they're all for it.
Thank you.
Exactly what I suspected.
I was going to ask you what benefit hi-res has if any if the DAP or Headphone cannot reproduce those frequencies not to mention that my ears can only hear up to about 17Khz but I will ask someone in the Sound Science thread. However it does sound like MP3@320 will be perfectly fine for me.
I suggest you encode a file in mp3 and try for yourself. only you can tell if you benefit from one specific format.