The Pono Player and Promises Fulfilled

In his rambling ranting about how the Pono player is equivalent to homeopathy (?) nowhere does he take on the the strongest claim of the pro-Pono side: that they've spent the money to better engineer a music player and the product uses better parts and better circuit topologies than their competitors. If this thing was packed with the same parts as an iPhone just playing back at 192k he'd be right, but you can't rest on ceteris paribus unless you make sure the other things really are equal.

He postures as a scientist but he doesn't do his diligence and post any studies on whether or not people can tell the difference between music played back through $5 and $50 DAC chips. That actually pisses me off, if you want to take the "science" side in an argument you should do your homework.

While personal anecdotes are not typically good for discussions, in this case it's important to compare your equipment against the reviewers: he's using $300 headphones in a quiet room, using well-sourced high-quality music. The original proposition for this device involved unleashing a world of 24bit, 192khz audio downloads, which is not worth it by a long shot [0]. I don't doubt that the engineering inside the Pono player is top notch, but it will require an ecosystem of other top-notch gear to take advantage of it -- including music that wasn't specifically engineered to be played out of a smartphone's earbuds (Mastered for iTunes, for example).

And if you're going to get all that gear together, you're going to want at least decent conditions for listening (quiet, mainly) or those details you paid $400 to get out of the music will be drowned out.

I guess the point I'm making is - who is this DAC meant for? It seems like its attempting to fill a space (or create one) that is already filled.

[0]http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

I love vinyl not for the audio quality but for the ritual and commitment of putting the needle down on a side and listening to the whole thing. It's a really nice, anti-add way to listen to music.

I started listening to vinyl a few years ago and bought some albums I've listened to dozens (if not hundreds of times) on digital. Horn sections I didn't even know existed showed up on tracks; instruments were so crisp and distinct it was like I could go to a part of my room and grab the sound out of the air. The effect is less jarring for stuff I haven't been able to acclimate to over such a long period of time, but it's definitely better, and it's because there is more fidelity.

> I can tell a difference with vinyl and the amp

Here are a few possible differences:

- RIAA EQ curve on the vinyl compared to the mastering on digital music

- Vinyl is not exactly a precision format, it's very noisy and you're getting a lot of audio that isn't even part of the recording

- Tube amps inherently distort sound. This is the "tube warmth" that people talk about; it's just the amp not being very accurate at all.

These aren't "bad" things, but they're also not exactly something to point to for superiority of a medium.

> I cannot tell the difference, even on quality studio headphones, between a v0 MP3, an iTunes 256kbps AAC, and a FLAC file

What type of music are you listening to? Certain instruments are handled very poorly by LAME. A v0 MP3 is going to be pretty bad on cymbals, woodwind instruments, and harpsichords, for example.

AAC is far better about this, and I've never been able to blind ABX a 320kbps AAC against a FLAC successfully, even using a headphone setup worth over 2k. I can blind ABX 320kbps mp3s vs flac 100% of the time on those underperforming instruments, and a good portion of the time on music in general - assuming I have listened to the FLAC version of the song extensively.

That being said even on expensive mobile setups I have a hard time even on the 'bad' mp3s. Granted, my mobile setup is a fiio x5 and midrange CIEMs, so it's not nearly as nice as what I have at home. But on the go is where I'm space constrained - I see no reason to keep FLAC files on a portable player. An MP3 or AAC file should be all you need on the go.

But, there is a MAJOR problem with MP3s, particularly in today's mastering climate - converting from WAC/FLAC to MP3 usually adds .5DB to the audio. With the 'Loudness War', there is a significant amount of audio that is mastered to -0.1, and this conversion will push the audio to 0.0, resulting in clipping.

As for vinyl, the difference in sound very well might be the loudness war. A portion of vinyl releases use the same mastering as the CDs, but a lot get a special "vinyl master" where they haven't squashed the dynamic range. Part of this is due to physical limitations of the format - you can compress all of the audio to have the same dynamic range like they do in the loudness war, but this compression is a casualty on CDs - they just want it to be louder. On vinyl, because of the way it works, if you want all of the DR crushed, the average loudness has to actually go down, which defeats the purpose. If you're comparing against a vinyl master with non-compressed dynamic range vs something that came from a cd loudness war casualty, you're getting a very different audio experience. I'd say it's better, and as such have spent a significant amount of money on vinyl, despite it being an inferior format on a purely technical level.

All that being said, with storage space being so cheap, I choose to keep FLACs of all of the CDs I rip, because it isn't expensive for me to do so, and I don't have to worry about losing information whenever some new compressed format comes out. I keep AACs and MP3s on my DAP, and this way I won't have to re-rip everything when some new format comes out. It's inexpensive to keep archival quality audio around, so why not do it?

> "Usually it would take me 5-15 minutes of listening and slowly switching back and forth between sources before I could determine which was the Pono Player."

Yes, I'm not clear on how his blinding setup works, but this sounds like the sort of activity that could easily unblind oneself.

Self-deception is the hardest thing to contend with in these kinds of listening tests. An edge case might be this person's experience with self-deception in a hearing test:

http://www.sociopathworld.com/2012/02/hyperlexia.html

The thing is, we've long past the point where it's a difficult task to exceed the the perceptual limits of the human ear. Even the middle-of-the-road DACs are indistinguishable from perfection now, and the rest of the circuit is just ensuring that any noise in the power supply and the output traces are below a certain threshold - not trivial, but the industry has built techniques and for doing this in much, much more demanding applications than audio reproduction, and so it's not like you have to use exotic components or circuit design techniques.

Yes, there's lots of crappy audio kit out there, but it's not hard to get superfluously good stuff either.

I think people just liked the fact that in the 60's and 70's you could make a hobby out of actively pursuing a better sound in amplifiers, and are disappointed that some time in the 80's it became possible to buy gear that was indistinguishable from perfection, and these days it's not even expensive.

Neil Young should have focused on headphones, or speakers - that's an area where there's still detectable amounts of distortion. But that would require something more difficult that attaching a big branding effort to a solved problem.

> Yes, a 192k playback sampling rate is a joke and maybe even superstitious. There's not much of a reason for anything to play back at over 96k and many argue 41k is sufficient for mixed/mastered material. Point granted.

Please don't interpret what I'm about to say as audiophoolery. I'm an EE. I haven't worked in audio a whole lot, but I've looked at things enough that I feel like I could do a reasonable job at designing a DAC.

The one thing that a higher sampling rate does is that it makes good engineering easier. Designing an antialiasing filter that both prevents aliasing and still sounds good at a 41k sample rate is hard. There's just not a whole lot of room between your passband and stopband, so you need a really sharp filter. Add in component tolerances, and your sharp filter is probably going to be a set of mediocre tradeoffs.

I suspect when the author talks about "smoother treble", they're probably referring to the fact that the anti-aliasing filter doesn't need to have a weird phase response to be able work properly.

I'm personally torn about 192K. Some folks that know a ton more about the recording process than I swear by it. On occasion I will source things at 96/24 if the track count is going to be low. Generally I just stick with 44.1/24. The higher sample rates also use a lot more space and processing power.