Neil Young's PonoPlayer: The Emperor Has No Clothes

[chaosWyrM]

this sounded like a stupid idea when i first heard neil yammering on about it like 2 or 3 years ago.

people really have a quite distorted sense of what they think they can hear. under the very best listening conditions...only professional audio people might be able to tell the difference between high quality mp3s and flacs (or some other lossless format)...might.

best listening conditions means super high quality equipment in a room made for listening to things in. under normal listening conditions (i.e. everywhere)...no one can.

there is no practical reason to be concerned about "audio quality". 320kb mp3s are just fine for nearly all purposes. hell...192kb mp3s will get you through most needs.

and why buy an extra player (a ridiculously priced one at that) when the average smart phone does everything the pono player does (save play the unnecessary pono format) and more?

this whole scheme is 10 years too late.

[Deep Purple]

I'm really surprised at Neil Young being involved in this. Seems like a weird association to me.

[hibidy]

I'm really surprised at Neil Young being involved in this. Seems like a weird association to me.

That's what all that chronic does

[cron]

The preference for the iPhone indicates something very wrong with the test. I imagine the loudness was calibrated by ear (if at all) and people are just saying they like whichever is louder. I'd have expected a 50/50 split otherwise. Pono's output quality would have to be tremendously poor to lose against the iPhone (although I'm going from my first gen iPod Touch here - maybe it's improved). Insanely high noise floor on that thing. I still remember laughing when I noticed the built-in EQ caused 'in the box' clipping that wasn't remedied by turning the volume down.

The fun thing is, it's super easy to test whether you can spot the difference between a FLAC and a MP3 of the same source. Foobar + its ABX comparator component (both free) is all you need on a Windows system. Posting your ABX results should be f**king mandatory when discussing the subjective sound quality of compressed vs uncompressed audio formats in forums. The simple fact that's been evident in the LAME dev community for years is that nobody can hear it any more. A few truly exceptional golden eared individuals flag up problem samples (usually small portions of individual tracks) now and then, and even that's becoming rare as hen's teeth. For the 'general public' (well, insofar as people who actively follow audio compression technology and participate in listening tests can be called the 'general public'), VBR MP3 at approx 128kbps is becoming tough to ABX while more modern codecs such as AAC can prove surprisingly troublesome at as low as 96kbps on certain material.

Bottom line - lossy audio compression is a technological marvel that is woefully underappreciated by the people who use it.

[Deep Purple]

I'm really surprised at Neil Young being involved in this. Seems like a weird association to me.

That's what all that chronic does

Ah yes, the 'honey slides' that he consumed a lot of during the 70s...

[skipscada]

The preference for the iPhone indicates something very wrong with the test. I imagine the loudness was calibrated by ear (if at all) and people are just saying they like whichever is louder. I'd have expected a 50/50 split otherwise.

I had similar thoughts. A possible explanation for the preference for iPhone is that if it really has it's own sound, that's a sound many people will be familiar with. When I've changed speakers/headphones my initial reaction has often been a certain rejection, and I've only appreciated the improvement after getting used to the new sound.

On a different note, I remember reading many years ago when highly compressed digital audio and video became a part of everyday life that for most people compression rates generally had very little to do with perceived quality.

[CrystalWizard]

people really have a quite distorted sense of what they think they can hear. under the very best listening conditions...only professional audio people might be able to tell the difference between high quality mp3s and flacs (or some other lossless format)...might.

best listening conditions means super high quality equipment in a room made for listening to things in. under normal listening conditions (i.e. everywhere)...no one can.

there is no practical reason to be concerned about "audio quality". 320kb mp3s are just fine for nearly all purposes. hell...192kb mp3s will get you through most needs.

sorry, but not my nor quite a few ppl i knows experience. for one thing i depends on the program material. an overcooked pop piece o crap, sure likely hard to tell the difference. with a classical, jazz or any hi dynamic range, full frequency, dense piece of music the difference is quite often noticeable. not just to engineers either. that said, most people are so conditioned to mp3 listening that they have no or little experience with higher quality audio.

as for the "test" it seems about as unscientific as possible. were the volumes matched to .5dB? what does better mean to the testers? and the sony cans are marginal as far as hi-fi.

lossy compression is certainly convenient and often "not too bad" IMO, but lossless is far superior for serious listening. and maybe even not serious listening because we aren't sure what the real depth of effect music even has on us in a lot of intangible ways.

[thecontrolcentre]

People didn't like it coz it's called Pono ...

"Hey babe, check my new Pono"

[hibidy]

Just use vinyl. Then we know the algorithms are not wrong.

[CrystalWizard]

"Hey babe, check my new Pono"

[ccDuckett]

I've had a lot of fondness for Neil Young's music and orneriness over the years, and there's nothing wrong with listening to high-resolution audio if one wants to, but the whole Pono campaign just strikes me as halo effect boutiquery woo.

[jancivil]

Sad isn't it.
When I first heard about this, I wondered how the hell Neil Young had ears better than mine.
I'm an ex audio engineer who kept things at reasonable levels and still developed tinnitus.
There's Neil standing in the middle of 10 to 20 thousand watts of foldback getting off scot free and bitching about audio quality....right.

NO SHIT

[jancivil]

You should have stopped reading after:

...Each subject put on nice headphones — Sony MDR 7506

Every Sony audio device I've ever tried was always crap. Their TVs are very good IMO, but audio gear? I've never experienced anything good from them.
.

Sony MDR 7506's are actually very good headphones.

Now, if the writer said, "If you're using Sony MDR 7506s or similar quality headphones you won't be able to hear the difference" .

That's how I took the remark to mean; for the purposes of your objection you're turning ''put on nice headphones" into this other argument. Then it goes on to put in earbuds. It's not a scientific test, the gist I took as something else.

But Neil is deluded. I think audiophiles frequently are. Do you want to bet a lot of money on Neil Young's (or anyone's) ability to reliably detect his 192 thingamabob versus mp3 highest quality in blind testing? I would bet the other way and I never gamble.

[chaosWyrM]

people really have a quite distorted sense of what they think they can hear. under the very best listening conditions...only professional audio people might be able to tell the difference between high quality mp3s and flacs (or some other lossless format)...might.

best listening conditions means super high quality equipment in a room made for listening to things in. under normal listening conditions (i.e. everywhere)...no one can.

there is no practical reason to be concerned about "audio quality". 320kb mp3s are just fine for nearly all purposes. hell...192kb mp3s will get you through most needs.

sorry, but not my nor quite a few ppl i knows experience. for one thing i depends on the program material. an overcooked pop piece o crap, sure likely hard to tell the difference. with a classical, jazz or any hi dynamic range, full frequency, dense piece of music the difference is quite often noticeable. not just to engineers either. that said, most people are so conditioned to mp3 listening that they have no or little experience with higher quality audio.

no need to apologize. if you say you can hear it...ok, maybe you can. though i dont exactly believe it. the actual statistics when people take blind tests say otherwise. people cant tell the difference. they just cant.

i dont even understand why its a big deal. we dont go around saying we can hear ultra high frequencies when we cant...why is it so important for people to believe they can hear the difference in "better" quality audio files when they just cant?

here...this is the difference between mp3 and lossless, this is what the mp3 removed from the audio:*

(if it wont play just open in a new window)
http://www.mediafire.com/listen/nuicxa4 ... mp3%29.wav

seriously....no one is ever going to miss that, especially when theyre on the bus, or in the car, or a noisy club, or just about anywhere.

*not my test it came from here, update 08/01: https://teksyndicate.com/forum/sound-ca ... tor/167128

[hibidy]

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm not saying there is NO DIFFERENCE. I am saying that after 30 years of CD and how blown away "sound quality" wise it was vs cassette or vinyl, it's safe to say that "they" DIDN'T get the algorithms wrong.

At 44.1k and 16 bits, it's pretty f**king awesome. So, there is that..........