ab initio
500+ Head-Fier
- Joined
- May 1, 2013
- Posts
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Hi All,
I saw "pono" mentioned a few times in some other threads, and apparently I'm not "with it" enough to know what it was without searching the internet for it. For those who aren't in the know, here is wikipedia's description:
Pono High Definition digital music service, brainchild of Niel Young: Wikipedia
To sum up, Pono is a music service where they want to sell you a DAP, headphones, and your entire catalog of music, remastered for high quality sound and distributed in 24/192 FLAC.
Because this is head-fi and because the business model for Pono is to sell you a digital audio player and headphones, I expect there might be some folks who arrive here looking for answers regarding Pono, "whether 24/192 is really better than cd quality (16/44.1)", and "why and how and what is going on with digital audio and those stairsteps", and "oh no! Flac is compressed, therefore it must somehow sound less good than wav?" and other questions and myths then tend to get frequently asked on head-fi.
Therefore, I thought it might be a good idea if there was a thread to help folks form a scientifically informed opinion on the merits of such a music service such as Pono. Let me start by linking to a few threads that have already addressed these issues.
On High Resolution audio formats (i.e., High Inefficiency audio formats):
On digital audio theory:
On the Free Lossless Audio Codec (i.e., FLAC)
On the importance of quality mastering
Cheers
I saw "pono" mentioned a few times in some other threads, and apparently I'm not "with it" enough to know what it was without searching the internet for it. For those who aren't in the know, here is wikipedia's description:
Pono High Definition digital music service, brainchild of Niel Young: Wikipedia
To sum up, Pono is a music service where they want to sell you a DAP, headphones, and your entire catalog of music, remastered for high quality sound and distributed in 24/192 FLAC.
Because this is head-fi and because the business model for Pono is to sell you a digital audio player and headphones, I expect there might be some folks who arrive here looking for answers regarding Pono, "whether 24/192 is really better than cd quality (16/44.1)", and "why and how and what is going on with digital audio and those stairsteps", and "oh no! Flac is compressed, therefore it must somehow sound less good than wav?" and other questions and myths then tend to get frequently asked on head-fi.
Therefore, I thought it might be a good idea if there was a thread to help folks form a scientifically informed opinion on the merits of such a music service such as Pono. Let me start by linking to a few threads that have already addressed these issues.
On High Resolution audio formats (i.e., High Inefficiency audio formats):
- http://www.head-fi.org/t/716822/why-24-bit-audio-and-anything-over-48k-is-not-only-worthless-but-bad-for-music
- http://www.head-fi.org/t/716947/avsforum-is-high-resolution-audio-irrelevant
- http://www.head-fi.org/t/415361/24bit-vs-16bit-the-myth-exploded
- http://www.trustmeimascientist.com/2013/02/04/the-science-of-sample-rates-when-higher-is-better-and-when-it-isnt/
On digital audio theory:
- http://xiph.org/video/vid2.shtml
On the Free Lossless Audio Codec (i.e., FLAC)
- https://xiph.org/flac/
On the importance of quality mastering
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Gmex_4hreQ
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
- http://dynamicrangeday.co.uk/
- http://mastering-media.blogspot.com/2008/09/metallica-death-magnetic-stop-loudness.html
Cheers