Neil Young's PonoPlayer: The Emperor Has No Clothes

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.

There are a few twists and turns to this.

1) Regular bells, we’re all familiar with, produce a very jumbled sound, full of dissonant overtones. So someone designed bells that give clean and clear tones. However, people familiar with “normal” bells preferred them, as that was what they were used to.

2) When professional musicians want to “tune up” their hearing, sharpen their hearing, they listen to violin music for a couple of weeks. The same applies to listening to analog music. If you listen to quality vinyl recordings for a while, digital music sounds dull and blah. But only if you have good hearing in the first place.

One correction comment on the oversampling part...one uses oversampling to provide a means by which the low pass filtering that occurs after the digital to analog conversion to be done with digital filtering and less of an analog “brick wall” filter. When one uses the 44.1 kHz samples, the analog filtering must provide a very steep drop off around 20 kHz in order to avoid spurious “things” appearing in the sound. This so-called “brick wall” filtering introduces phase and amplitude anomalies which some folks feel contribute to digital’s rather steely sound. - Da Coyote
Yes, I think that is a serious issue. At the same time, the Nyquist Theorem says that if you have no frequency components above the Nyquist frequency, you can reproduce the whole waveform perfectly by passing the sampled data through a filter with a sin(x)/x impulse response (which of course you can’t do perfectly since you can’t implement the infinite range of “x” required theoretically). But if you oversample at, say, four times the final sample rate you can implement a digital filter to pretty thoroughly wipe out the frequency content in the two octaves above your final Nyquist frequency. Subsequently throwing out three samples for every one sample you transmit to the customer becomes your data compression.
The subsequent issue is then how particular you are at reproducing the waveform you had originally, to the extent the compression allows it. IOW, how high a sample rate do you insist on in your output to the hearer, and how faithfully you implement the ideal sin(x)/x filter between the reduced sample rate of the recording and the hearer’s ears. By means of a cheap DSP chip it would be possible to implement a digital filter with an output which would give a very good approximation of the waveform which you would have obtained by digital-analog reproduction of all the samples you had before you threw out 3/4 of them. That DSP filter could jack up the sample rate by ten times, not just four times, if desired.

There is always a difference between recordings and live sound. It cannot be avoided. There is an interplay between beat frequencies that is lost in recordings that is always present in live music that cannot be recreated with the limited means of reproducing recordings. Our ears can pick up these beat frequencies that change with the positioning of each instrument. . . and each voice. When I sang lead bass with a large chorale, it was amazing what a different sound could be had by merely changing who sang next to each other. . . because the voice mixture changed. Same with instrument placement. This is lost in recordings. Even inaudible high frequency overtones can create beat frequency tones that are in the audible range that add to the ambiance of live music that can be missing from live music recorded in studio. I had a long discussion about this with our conductor. . . and he demonstrated it with a super-high quality multi-channel analog tape recording that recorded into inaudible ranges had been mastered to a CD. There was a huge jaw-dropping difference. He said a lot gets lost in the digitizing.

My ear is probably worse than that of many, but when our chorus master did the matching of voices I was not blown away by the result. I make no doubt, tho, that the effect is real. I sang with a chorus as a lowly chorus member - a mere bass at that - for a couple dozen seasons. That chorus performs The Messiah about 3 times each December. You will know that tenors capable of the register required by The Messiah are at a premium in a volunteer chorus . . .

My ear is probably worse than that of many, but when our chorus master did the matching of voices I was not blown away by the result. I make no doubt, tho, that the effect is real. I sang with a chorus as a lowly chorus member - a mere bass at that - for a couple dozen seasons. That chorus performs The Messiah about 3 times each December. You will know that tenors capable of the register required by The Messiah are at a premium in a volunteer chorus . . .

My theory on that is the premium that was placed on high male voices in the dark ages and into the renaissance. . . too many tenor candidates became castrati and the genes for tenors were, shall we say bred out of the gene pool or rapidly learned to sing baritone. . . or completely forgot how to sing at all.

There are already two high-rez music storage and playback systems in our homes - reel-to-reel tapes and analogue vinyl LPs; all digital is inherently low-rez and destroys the music. Why anyone would deliberately choose a format that destroys music to serve the music is a mystery, bordering on insanity. Convenience hardly justifies someone who supposedly loves music in killing the music by sampling bits and pieces of it; digital was adopted by the ignorant who could only hear that the faults in LPs - “Listen, Ma, no pops or ticks!” - were absent, and whose ears were not attuned (yet - remember “perfect sound forever,” and what a nightmare that was?) to the horrible distortions introduced by digital (similar to the ignorant who rushed to embrace transistors over tubes - it seems to take some people years to realize that the new is not necessarily better). Makes me furious that generations of music are being torn to bits.

You forgot the intervening step between LPs and CDs, cartridges and cassette tapes. . . with the slower playback of both intended to get enough tape into the carts and cassettes for an album. The HISS of the magnetic tape transports. . . which lead to DOLBY NOISE REDUCTION: drop out the frequencies where the hiss existed (who needs those anyway?), convert the rest onto higher frequencies and drop the dB of those frequencies (nobody will notice you know!), and call the sound "New!” and "Improved!" and "Dolby!" and market the heck out of it for a generation. No wonder people were WOWED by the quality of the CDs when they came out! Most of them had not heard a good LP played on a good system for 20 years. They were used to Sony Walkman quality cassette music. . . Low hiss but OK was "good enough" for background music.

Not if you took care of your albums.

I was really into music in the 80s and had (still have) a pretty good album collection from black artists late 70s-mid 80s (ex - Lakeside, Barkays, SOS Band, R James, Aurra). Using a carbon fiber brush and record jackets designed to protect albums, the sound from these albums on a great system cannot be explained.

Heavy, deep, rich, thick but not the ghetto heavy like you hear from these car systems you hear thumping in neighborhoods. CDs through a great system obviously sounded great too but an album was another level.

The author/tester was right about headphones. Good and great headphones are a must with portable music.

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