Posted on 02/02/2015 12:29:06 PM PST by Swordmaker
It was one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns. Its inventors sought $800,000 in funding from the public — but raised a gigantic $6.2 million.
The project: the PonoPlayer, “a revolution in music listening.” It was designed to play back music files that use up to 20 times more data than the MP3 files that gave the first pocket music players a bad name.
“Everyone who’s ever heard PonoMusic will tell you that the difference is surprising and dramatic,” Pono wrote on Kickstarter. “They tell us that not only do they hear the difference; they feel it in their body, in their soul.”
In Pono’s Kickstarter pitch video, famous musicians react to the Pono sound they’ve just heard. “That music made me feel good. Much better than I’ve felt in a long time listening to music,” says Norah Jones. “This gives it to you as good as you can get it,” says Tom Petty. “MP3 [the old format] is like seeing a Xerox of the Mona Lisa,” says Elvis Costello.
Neil Young, celebrity founder and driving force for Pono, points out that MP3 is a compression scheme. It was developed in the era of music players with limited storage capacity; the idea was to shrink the music files by discarding music data from the original recordings. But these days, storage is copious and cheap. So why are we still compressing our music? Why can’t we listen to our music the way it was recorded in the studio, according to the musician’s original intentions?
The Pono Player, once just a Kickstarter prototype, is now a product that anyone can buy, for $400. To hear the magic, you’re supposed to buy all new music—high-resolution audio files—from Pono’s new music store (ponomusic.force.com), and load them onto your Pono using a new Mac or PC loading-dock program (Pono World). Albums cost about $25 each.
You’ve got to admit it: The argument for the Pono Player sure is appealing — that we don’t know what we’ve been missing in our music.
Unfortunately, it isn’t true.
rip off city, in other words.
Why would he name it PornoPlayer?
Is this the same sanctimonious Neil “keep on bitchin bout the free world” Young. Can’t be possible.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me.
There’s another factor at play here, too: Pono is going to extraordinary lengths to acquire remastered versions of the songs in its catalog. “If we are looking for a popular master and find it has not been sampled at the highest rate, we try to access it and, with the cooperation of labels and artists, maximize the recapture at the highest resolution,” Neil Young wrote to me. “We reach out to the creators, if they are still with us, to include their knowledge in the mastering. Sometimes they will even supervise it. This is a long process, but we are providing the absolute best available and pushing for improvement in resolution for maximizing the labels/creators’ art whenever possible.”
In other words, Pono is being marketed to the artists themselves, to get them to buy into a new proprietary compression scheme that doesn't involve royalties paid to Apple. Pono then uses their testimonies to persuade the consumer to purchase the player.
Let's say 4 minutes per song on average. That would be 160MB per song, 667 kilobyte/second (or almost 4 times the data rate of an uncompressed CD, or 41.7 times the data rate of a 128 kilobit/s MP3).
Later on in the article:
Music CDs, and the downloadable songs you buy, are sampled at 16 bit/44.1kHz. The songs you buy from Pono, on the other hand, go as high as 24 bit/192kHz.
24 bits would be nice to have a good SNR ratio on quiet parts of a very dynamic performance (a quiet violin solo when the album volume is set to handle a full orchestra). 192 kHz sampling rate is a complete waste. That puts the Nyquist frequency at 96 kHz. You might need that for your dog, dolphin or bat but you won't be hearing it and in all likelihood your amp and speakers aren't going to play it either.
I would rather use the bandwidth have a good multichannel musical system so I can boost vocals and drop the guitar when I feel like it. Or have an isolated channel just for the cowbell.
It is interesting that Young's comparison was his Pono vs. low resolution MP3s. I can hear the difference between 128 kbps and 192 kbps, but that's about where I max out. I'm thinking of re-ripping all of my CDs at 192 (I already have 128 rips of everything I own), but I don't think I would get anything at 256 or higher. Maybe if I still had the ears of a 20 year old.
Music Porn?
LOL at those who have grown up listening to MP3s all their lives and now have “discovered” a higher quality sound.
Also LOL at anyone who would name a product PonoPlayer.
PT Barnum lives.
Gee, and for a couple of hundered more, you get a still camera, HD video camera, a computer, a cell phone, personal game console, tv.... All on top of a music player.
Such a deal.
It looks as if, from the article, they are doing their comparisons to MP3 files with low bit sampling rates, not the newer MP4 high bit sampling rates you'll find on modern music in the iTunes store. Sounds like fudging and cheating to me, to make their music player sound better in comparisons. Some of those old MP3s sounded atrocious!
Pono files are bigger still. Even CDs have compression and loss. Pono is aiming to get back to the LP sound... Actually further back, it’s trying to ship Master Tape quality sound, so you can hear it the way they hear it in the studio. As an idea I like it, but it’s kind of dealing with a ship that sailed, multiple times. Maybe the next generation that don’t already have digital music libraries will make it viable, I personally can’t see replacing 350 gigs worth of music.
This is the "Monster Cable" scam of 2015!
PING!
Huh? CDs are just a straight 44.1kHz, 2 channel, 16 bit data stream with some header information and error correction added. There is no data compression. There may be some audio compression (make the quiet sections louder) but that can be done on analog or digital sources.
You do get some losses from quantizing both in time and amplitude, but I doubt that one person in ten could tell the difference between a CD and a 48 kHz professional studio recording.
Please see post 16 this thread....
I don’t agree with most of Young’s political philosophy, but I’m not going to dog him too much on this. He’s trying to make sure the highest resolution version of songs are available. Also, when he finds low resolution tunes still being sold he’s trying to go back to the record companies and artists and get hi-rez versions on the market.
The first problem seems to be the limits of human hearing, the super high resolution formats are beyond what we can process as far as audio. The second problem is that technology has sprinted far ahead of the original low-rez media. We now have CD quality downloads everywhere, and the CD level of digital resolution is at the limit of our hearing with the highest Pono resolution being wasted.
I’m sure there are some golden ears that can hear the difference, but basically the Pono player seems to be a solution in search of a problem. Again, if the effort results in older low-rez music getting upgraded then that will be one positive offshoot.
That's like taking a time machine back to 1985, when compact discs were still for the elite and yuppies were snapping them up for around $20 a pop in those long cardboard boxes.
Back then, they justified the high cost by saying the audio was extremely high quality and that the cutting edge compact discs were SO expensive to make. That kind of went by the wayside when we discovered a few years later that we could buy a spindle of 100 blank compact discs at the local CompUSA for about $7.99.
Now the cost is apparently justified because much higher royalties will get paid to the artists.
Not too long ago, I painstakingly dragged my entire CD collection out of the attic so that I could upgrade my AAC bit rates to 256MB, like the iTunes Store is now doing with new purchases (my iTunes Match did not match all of them.)
But to be totally honest, I'm just not noticing that much difference between the older 128 and 160 bit files I had before. Now maybe I have a tin ear but I went ahead and upgraded them anyhow because disk space is no longer an issue for me and I want to have decent quality music files.
Once iTunes moves to 320 bit or maybe even the FLAC standard, I'll go with the flow. But I'm just blown away by the difference. It's kind of like drinking a $40 wine vs a $20 wine. You know the $40 wine is better because the "experts" say so, but your nose and taste buds are just fine with the $20 bottle.
Now
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