[Alex Murphy]

So I wrote to Pono — and heard back from Neil Young himself. “Of approximately 100 top-seed artists who compared Pono to low resolution MP3s,” he wrote, “all of them heard and felt the Pono difference, rewarding to the human senses, and is what Pono thinks you deserve to hear.” Aha — there’s a key phrase in there: low-resolution MP3s. My test compared Pono files against Apple’s iTunes files, which come in 16-bit/256Kbps AAC format (more on formats below). That’s much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1998.

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.

[Swordmaker]

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.

It looks as if, from the article, they are doing their comparisons to MP3 files with low bit sampling rates, not the newer MP4 high bit sampling rates you'll find on modern music in the iTunes store. Sounds like fudging and cheating to me, to make their music player sound better in comparisons. Some of those old MP3s sounded atrocious!

[Swordmaker]

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.

This is the "Monster Cable" scam of 2015!

[cuban leaf]

“...compared porno to low resolution mp3’s...”

That’s the money quote. 96k is my bet. Now compare it to 256k :)