Apple iPhone Music v. PONO Music Player Ping!
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
PING!
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
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.
This oversampling technique can also be used on the recording side, thereby lessening the effect of the analog to digital filtering. The digitized oversamples can then be “smoothed” digitally in order to reduce to the CD’s 44.1 kHz sample rate.
Sorry for the geektalk, but there is good reason for oversampling.
Nothing in the above (probably boring) set O’paragraphs is meant to disparage or not disparage the PonoPlayer. It’ll succeed or fail based on its design and performance.
Neil and tech: Not exactly a match made in heaven.
The Emperor has no clothes...http://cdn.ebaumsworld.com/mediaFiles/picture/2238119/83996576.JPG
Yikes! $25 an album?!
all of the songs from one of the CSNY albums i downloaded on amazon sound like chipmunks. stuff i rip here at home sound pretty good even some old opera recordings.
Well, I’m certainly not a “sound connoisseur” because at my old age, my hearing is more limited than ever. But still, I can’t see that people are going to be able to detect an improvement in this new sound technology as compared to Apple Lossless.
But, I’ll defer to those with better ears than me ... :-) ...
