The Pono Player and Promises Fulfilled
innerfidelity.comFor a counterpoint, based on actual science, make sure to read [Daniel Rutter's excellent "Righteous Bits"](http://www.dansdata.com/gz143.htm), and his [responses to the responses](http://www.dansdata.com/gz145.htm).
I listen to MP3s, I listen to AACs from the iTunes store, I listen to FLAC (concert bootlegs), and I listen to vinyl with a tube amp. I cannot tell the difference, even on quality studio headphones, between a v0 MP3, an iTunes 256kbps AAC, and a FLAC file. I can tell a difference with vinyl and the amp, but while it's different, I would hesitate to say it's _better_, let alone assume the reason why.
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.
You link to Monty's critique of hi-rez audio, yet you speak of how to "take advantage" of a higher quality. But 192 kHz and beyond may actually bring lower audio quality to a human, as ultrasound data may well bring distortive effects into the hearable band unless they are filtrered off. So only in the best case would quality be as good as with normal-rez.
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.
That's what is different. When you bought an album, brought it home and put it on, you really relished the moments listening, you put more effort in to listening, you put more effort in to experiencing the entire product... The song ordering, the album art, etc..
U2 gave away a new album last year, it has song great U2 tracks in it, it's a strong album from them. The entire discussion about it revolved around not the music but the delivery. Not about them getting old or how they've only made crap since War or any of the other slags on them, it was about the delivery. Maybe it's always been this way but it seems like the appreciation is going down. Seems like in a few years, people won't buy dedicated audio equipment, not generally at least.
Yeah most of my friends are content with a laptop with Spotify and a cheap pair of headphones. Definitely a different mentality.
Interesting that I always preferred LPs because of the random access they afforded. When I really got into music in late 70s I could deep dive my parents vast collection by moving the tone arm to different tracks and quickly assess if I was interested in hearing more.
There's a song that goes: "Revenir d'exil comporte des risques // comme planter une aiguille dans un vieux disque" (coming back from exile has its risks, like sticking a needle in an old record)
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.
Objectively, for virtually any definition of 'fidelity' vinyl has less fidelity than digital systems. If you read about the production on vinyl you will get a pretty good idea of the series of compromises in fidelity that are required to create a release. That said, the inherent deficiencies of the medium necessitate different and typically less aggressive mastering. Many listeners, including myself prefer this. If you were to listen to a digital recording mastered the same way you might be surprised to hear even more detail.
Fun fact: Some producers that use digital recording systems will mix in analog noise because the noise itself can be very pleasing in the right dosage. In this way it is used more like an effect rather than an inherent limitation of the recording process.
Assuming the digital copies had an adequate bitrate, it's possible that the differences you're hearing between vinyl and digital are attributable to 'loudness war' brick-wall limiting. Some studios choose to use different masters for vinyl and digital which can make vinyl sound better.
To quote Daniel Rutter: "[B]etter-mastered music will sound better on cassette than badly-mastered music would at a zillion bits per second."
This really isn't even a 'choice', it is practically a requirement for the medium. Some examples:
The outer grooves have relatively more fidelity (needle moving faster) than the inner grooves, so the master may be progressively tweaked to add more high end as the content gets closer to the inner groove. The closer you get to the inner groove, the lower the playback fidelity.
12" Singles have larger groove spacing so you can slam them way harder than an LP. There is a greater margin of error and less chance of the cutting lathe skipping or hopping during cutting the master.
The process for creating stereo vinyl recordings is pretty much a compromise that allows stereo content while maintaining compatibility with mono playback equipment. This results in another series of compromises/limitations in the mix, like severely limiting the amount of truly stereo content. Extremely loud or bass heavy content that is panned wide would cause the cutting lathe to skip, etc.
> 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 never claimed vinyl was superior, just different in a way I enjoy.
I didn't say you did.
> 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?
"In terms of its sound, I would say that for me it's without equal in the realm of hand held portable players in terms of pleasurable listening...When I compare it side-by-side in blind tests with other players I find its smooth yet resolving treble to be its stand-out characteristic. "
" This test pitted the Pono Player against a Galaxy Note 4 and an Apple iPad Air. This was actually the hardest test to get a reliable grip on identifying the various players... Because differences were so small I had to rely more on a subjective approach—just relaxing and sensing how the music was affecting me. 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."
One of these things is not like the other...
> "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.
Well that and if this device is so great that it will save music and we need to send $500 and re-purchase our entire music library from the Pono Store, then you should be able to tell the difference between it and a tablet pretty easily without 15 minutes of intense concentrated listening.
> I'm not clear on how his blinding setup works
Search for "Blind Testing" on the first page: "I use a passive three-way switch to route the outputs from the three sources to a pair of headphones. ... without looking, I scramble the cables in each hand."
Can that possibly work? I would not expect cables to be perfectly indistinguishable (human touch is pretty sensitive), if only because of slight differences in tension/position/direction.
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:
This should be required reading for anyone in this discussion: https://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html
"The articles that have been published by others criticizing Pono for lauding the virtues of the small differences between file resolution or between a Pono Player and an iPod are ignoring the importance of subtlety in an art form."
TL;DR - Don't you bring your SCIENCE in here, I like being conned with audiophool nonsense!
I almost get a kick out of the cries of "science" debunking the Pono player.
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.
However good engineering is most definitely not a joke. Using higher quality DAC's (digital-to-analog converters) and better designed circuitry, spending the extra few pennies and dollars here and there to get the parts with lower tolerances, designing the shape of the product around the circuits instead of cramming circuits into the shape of the product, these are the exact things I would expect to see in a better music player.
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.
Isn't this the middlebrow dismissal we're supposed to avoid here? I'm not sure where the ubiquitous, portable, high-quality music players are that make Pono redundant. Are you referring to smartphones?
If you look at actual studies of the performance of smartphone audio you see it's not a trivial task to get right[0], if we're seeing problems on a large company's flagship model like Samsung's Galaxy S5 then this isn't a solved problem.
Playback at home while plugged into a 120V power grid with equipment that only needs to fit into a shoebox is a bit different from playback from a device that's simultaneously a computer and a phone which also happens to have severe space and power constraints (and a giant color touch-screen to boot.)
[0] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/8078/smartphone-audio-testing-...
> 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.
But that's why we've got oversampling. The higher sample rate can be in the conversion stage, it doesn't have to be in the transmission format.
I'd be super curious to see what the frequency spectrum of the input files looks like too. If your source material is being directly sampled at 44k1, then you're going to need a brick wall filter on the input of that too (or you can oversample with a high rate ADC and do the brick wall digitally). If the source material is cut off hard due to the sample rate, no amount of oversampling can fix that.
For robustness sake, I really really love keeping as many filters as possible in the "gentle" range of design specs. Sometimes that's not possible, but if it's possible to do it start to finish through the signal chain, that makes me very happy.
Agreed, which is why I don't think anyone argues against, say, 192kHz/24bit on the production side. Unfortunately, I think that people look at what the studios use and interpret that as a quality signifier when it really has no use once the signal is mixed down for transmission.
What I'm getting at though, is that if the source material goes from 192/24 in the studio and then downsampled to 44.1/16 into the final file that gets distributed, that material is going to have a brick wall filter applied to it in the downsampling process. If new systems like this are actually distributing real 192/24 streams that haven't ever been downsampled to 44.1/16, I'd expect to get better results from it than from 44.1/16 oversampled back up to 176.4/16.
I'm not saying that we can hear stuff on the recording at 30kHz, but the stuff right at the edge of our hearing around 20kHz will get less messed up.
My gut feeling is that it's way easier to make a well-engineered audio system when there aren't any sample frequencies that cause any of the stopbands to be close to audible frequencies.
Ah, I get what you're saying now. On the downsampling side, correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is that resampling in general is a well-solved problem (brick wall included), given reasonable target rates.
In terms of it being easier to filter an orginal signal than to filter a downsampled->upsampled one... my gut goes the other way, but it's something I'd definitely have to look into before I'd comment either way. Interesting question though.
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.
For reference, here's Dan Lavry's whitepaper on the subject: http://lavryengineering.com/pdfs/lavry-sampling-theory.pdf
It's possible there are counterpoints to this that I don't know about.
> It's my feeling that your average contemporary hand-held device is pretty darn good these days.
Sums up the subject really well.