I've had my Neil Young signature series Pono for a few weeks now, time to share some thoughts about it. I have only used it in single end mode, not balanced yet.
First, the sound quality is really very good. The presentation tilts just a bit to the lean side, with a nice air to the treble, which I personally prefer vs. a warm or muddy tilted signature. I compared directly to my iPod Touch 5g, and the differences are immediately apparent and Pono is an improvement. At least to my ears. (iPod Touch comparisons were using same files on both devices, Fiio A/B switcher and "blind".... I could pick out the Pono player every time). The Pono has an more clean and airy sound, tighter, drier bass and a definite advantage in sounding "dimensional". In comparison, iPod sounds flatter, rounder bass notes and lacking in sparkle. In my opinion, the 5G Touch is not bad at all, but it's shortcomings are certainly noticable when compared directly to the Pono Player.
If I had to choose a weak point of the Pono sound, it may come across a a bit "raw" in it's presentation. For better or worse, you hear the quality of the music you feed it. This comes with the territory of most hi-fi gear though, there's no help smoothing any warts or flaws in the source file. Curious to see how this may work for a device that is meant to convert masses to high quality audio. ...So for a device that is meant to appeal to the masses, and convert them to hi-res files and an audiophile player....It may come as an unpleasant surprise to a new Pono buyer that their old favorite badly mastered and lossy coded albums sound like crap on their new pono and expensive headphones.
Other portable sources I've owned are DIY iMods w/Leckerton or Pico amp, clip zip, Centrance Hi-Fi M8, other iPods, iBasso DX50 and DX90 and Fiio X5. I won't compare directly with these because I don't have them anymore. Just from memory though the Centrance M8 was my favorite of all, the Pono is in that same league. DX90 was also fairly good and I can't really say where it stands in comparison of Pono. Although I think the DX90 may be a bit darker than Pono (by memory).
Earlier this year, I liquidated all my thousands of dollars of desktop gear to fund another project, so I don't have any direct comparisons with desktop gear. But, I will say that if you expect a $400 portable player to completely replace something like that you are nuts. There's nothing "magic" with the Pono Player. It's a solid peice of portable gear that could probably work very well as part of a good desktop setup (using it as a transport/DAC with line out to a dedicated desktop amp). The Pono Player itself is nothing revolutionary, but stands with the best portable gear I have owned as far as sound quality.
The good:
- Sound qualty of the player is very good. Comparing to an iPod the Pono strikes a decisive win. Which makes sense since the basis of the Pono ecosystem is to provide better quality files and hardware to the masses, and raise awareness of better quality audio.
- There is a certain simplicity to the player. No EQ or other abstract sound related settings to fiddle with. Just plug in and listen. Focus on the music. I get it.
- You can drag/drop files right on to your card, bypassing the Pono Music app. Scanning the library is very quick.
- Packaging and presentation is very nice.
- I am surprised to find that I actually like the shape/size. Although it seems a bit odd, I actually like that it can sit nicely on it's side feeding line out to a home system, and read/use the screen. It actually works okay in a pocket as well, if you don't wear super tight pants. No one wants to see me wearing tight pants anyway so this works out just fine.
The bad:
- Although still beta, the Pono Music World software is terrible. I use JRiver, which it is based on, so I am familiar. Still, it sucks. Anyone not already familiar with JRiver is going to have a bummer of a time. I won't go into every detail but it's just not intuitive. It looks cheap. Music transfer is much slower than just dragging and dropping in windows without the software. After adding music to my cart, it took me 4-5 minutes to even find my cart to checkout. One of many learning curves that are too steep for this to succeed in the mainstream.
The neither good nor bad:
-The player UI isn't bad at all. It works. It's a bit clunky but perfectly serviceable. I haven't had any issue with it, no lockups, freezes, etc. But I see some room for improvement with future firmware updates. (the touch screen turns on when adjusting volume, my biggest gripe- keep the damn touch screen off for that!). Scrolling through artist/album is sometimes tedious on the small screen, depending on how many albums an artist has. For example, you scroll through "artist", click on "Neil Young" and 30 albums expand into the list. They stay expanded until you scroll back to the top and click "Neil Young" again, then they collapse. It would be nice if there was an "auto-collapse" after 30 seconds or so, so next time you scroll through artists, you don't need to scroll through 30 open Neil Young albums. Those two items are my biggest gripes but not a deal breaker.
- Build quality is good, middle of the road I guess. Although I the SD card cover seems like the weakest part, be careful with it. The silver finish on the LE player is slippery and I don't want to drop it. Maybe the black/yellow players will have a softer "rubbery" finish? The included leather case is very nice, but only for transporting it. No cutouts to operate the player while it's in the case. We need cases for these things.
So...will the Pono Player and it's store be successful? I don't know. The hardware is promising but the store and software are frustratingly behind at the moment. Still time for it to catch up though. I'll keep my fingers crossed. Anything this project may achieve when it comes to bringing better audio to the masses (or at least raise the awareness) is good for everybody in our hobby. We will see....
