What do you think of the PONO?

[Craig234]

I'm not entirely sold on a lossless player yet (availability and cost of music, right headphones, amp...), but Fry's has the Pono on sale 50% off for $200. Opinions?

 

[Randy99CL]

Just google pono music and read about it. Most reviews say it is absolute BS; expensive and doesn't actually sound any better than MP3s.

http://appleinsider.com/articles/15...er-loses-to-apples-iphone-in-blind-audio-test
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/it-was-one-of-kickstarters-most-successful-109496883039.html

The 64Gb player holds 400 songs?
I have 600+ 320K whole CDs ripped into 64Gb.

You can only buy music from Pono at $25 per album? No thanks.

 

[Craig234]

Thanks for the reply. The things I'd read were more mixed - your yahoo article is pretty convincing to not get the Pono (or any other lossless player).

 

[biostud]

Wouldn't get one. for portable mp3's are fine. I'm trying to get all my home audio in FLAC though.

 

[destrekor]

Yeah I'm going for FLAC for home listening myself, and appreciate lossless. And, I also appreciate high-quality masters.

Anything above 24bit/48hz is largely a waste of space, and frankly, and hardly anybody will be able to really tell apart 16/44.1 from 24/48.

However, I wouldn't be quite so quick to say that Pono, as an initiative, is a flop. Consider this: so we might agree the hi-res audio is just a sham, but the quality of music is, for the most part, actually better.

How, you ask?

When companies produce hi-res audio for digital download, they are generally using a different master than what they use to press the CD or create MP3s for digital distribution. Heck, even some FLAC is no better than the MP3s for almost everyone, and if you are ripping from a CD, frankly FLAC is mostly a waste of space, most people will never appreciate the difference between 320kbps MP3 (or V0) and FLAC or other lossless format, when they share a CD source.

If the music industry would stop killing quality music with the loudness wars, we wouldn't even need hi-res audio, as it would bring no benefit if the CD was mixed from the same master as vinyl or hi-res digital.

It makes you wonder if it will remain this way, simply because now the industry can charge more for hi-res audio, and keep it so that the hi-res is actually presented as an audible upgrade. Say it's due to hi-res, but it's simply due to better audio production methods, the public won't understand the difference.

But really it's just a method to dupe the gullible, or the people who know that, dammit, it is the only way to get quality dynamic range from modern music.

We could all have the classical vinyl audio quality but without the clicks and pops and physical degradation of the media, and it should be that way, there is nothing holding back CD from outperforming vinyl.

The vinyl fans aren't wrong in proclaiming that it is better than CD, though they are only right when the CD mix is terrible and the vinyl mix is as it should be.

Though even if they actually presented high-quality CD mixes, the 320kbps MP3 would still suffice for all but the most anal audio purists.

Not that there isn't anything to gain by increasing the bit depth and frequency, but it is a game of diminishing returns, of very very minimal returns that literally takes training to appreciate, and for the most part, once you go above 24bit/48Hz, you may very well introduce artifacting in the upper treble that lessens the quality and accuracy. I think the jury is still somewhat out on if that is truly the case, but as with anything in the audiophile and videophile realm, things will forever be hotly contested with heavy bias on both sides, thanks to very successful marketing and sometimes finding very gullible people. Some aspects of high-quality audio and video are factual and worth the expense, but there is plenty of junk that people swear by.

 

[Deders]

There's also the quality of the hardware itself that plays a big part to reproducing the sound. Not only how the player treats the sound, but how well the hardware can drive the headphones.

 

[destrekor]

There's also the quality of the hardware itself that plays a big part to reproducing the sound. Not only how the player treats the sound, but how well the hardware can drive the headphones.

This is very true.

There is very much a market for high-end audio players that have better DACs than the junk found in the common mobile phones and iPods of this world.

Of course, sometimes the companies go off their rockers when it comes to pricing for them, see Sony's premium Walkman that was insanely expensive.

Most mobile players, even high-end ones, may not have very strong amps, but sometimes they can drive high-resistance headphones decently. That's why there is also a market for portable headphone amps so you can drive your 300ohm or higher cans, but if you have a nice pair under 64ohm, you should be fine on most mobile devices (at least regarding how well they can be driven).

 

[Craig234]

The yahoo article I mentioned did testing showing that more people preferred the phone than the Pono - while that wasn't explained, it was explained why they wouldn't get benefit from the Pono, that the Pono improvements were over old low-quality MP3's not the better current MP3's you usually get. It makes a case that there's basically no noticeable improvement from the 'good' MP3's - the only reason I'd want lossless.

 

[Deders]

Yes MP3's have come on leaps and bounds since they came out. After making sure my entire collection was freshly encoded with Lame VBR 0, I found a lot more of the detail was kept, as well as the soundstage being vastly improved. With the right player and earphones it's a very enjoyable listening experience.

That being said I did find out recently that Lame (VBR at least) cuts off frequencies higher than 20KHz. I believe this is so they can concentrate on keeping more of the data within the human hearing range. Whilst this sounds great on my Sony NWZ-A829 MP3 player (Sony's sound signature is usually warm so there's no perceivable difference at the top end between these and a Wav on the same device) When I play it back on my receiver (Sony again) I can definitely hear the difference between this and a flac of the same file.

A friend of mine who has built and runs his own recording studio doesn't like Lame encoders because it cuts out any of the effort he's put in to make the high end sparkle.

For a while Lame was considered better than Fraunhofer (who invented the MP3) but I believe since then they have caught up, although I've not tested this for myself.

Now I have my receiver I'm partway through making sure my collection is Flac. There are still some tracks that even high quality MP3 encoders can't cope with. Otherside by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers is an example of this. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't have listened to them both but there is definitely some warbling in the vocals on the MP3 which is surprising because it's not really sonically that busy compared to a lot of tracks.

 

[destrekor]

Yes MP3's have come on leaps and bounds since they came out. After making sure my entire collection was freshly encoded with Lame VBR 0, I found a lot more of the detail was kept, as well as the soundstage being vastly improved. With the right player and earphones it's a very enjoyable listening experience.

That being said I did find out recently that Lame (VBR at least) cuts off frequencies higher than 20KHz. I believe this is so they can concentrate on keeping more of the data within the human hearing range. Whilst this sounds great on my Sony NWZ-A829 MP3 player (Sony's sound signature is usually warm so there's no perceivable difference at the top end between these and a Wav on the same device) When I play it back on my receiver (Sony again) I can definitely hear the difference between this and a flac of the same file.

A friend of mine who has built and runs his own recording studio doesn't like Lame encoders because it cuts out any of the effort he's put in to make the high end sparkle.

For a while Lame was considered better than Fraunhofer (who invented the MP3) but I believe since then they have caught up, although I've not tested this for myself.

Now I have my receiver I'm partway through making sure my collection is Flac. There are still some tracks that even high quality MP3 encoders can't cope with. Otherside by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers is an example of this. I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't have listened to them both but there is definitely some warbling in the vocals on the MP3 which is surprising because it's not really sonically that busy compared to a lot of tracks.

Just curious - is this comparing against 44.1 kHz source media in all steps of the process? As in, 16/44.1 FLAC vs 16/44.1 MP3?
Because 44.1 kHz has a spectral cut off at 22.05 kHz, and frankly, most humans cannot hear much beyond 16 kHz unless they have golden ears. I think I did a test and found I couldn't.. it could have been my headphones so I'll have to run the same test on my old cans and my Shure IEMs, but, I'm fairly certain I just can't hear above 16 kHz.

However, what is heard might not be a direct result of cutting off at a certain frequency range, and more so to do with what happens to the frequencies near that upper limit.

If you perform a spectral analysis on a 16/44.1 FLAC file, and then compare it with a MP3 V0 VBR encode, there is a noticeable difference at the upper limit, where there is far less background "white noise" and a subtle introduction of distortion or artifacts. MP3 320kbps CBR does not suffer that issue nearly as much, though it does have a hard cut off at around 20 kHz. The V0 VBR encode does something different in that, I don't believe it actually has a 20 kHz cut off, but rather, it induces distortion at the upper frequency limit due to the removal of the background... in spectrals, it looks like solid black background around the upper frequencies as opposed to a light purple. For 320kbps CBR, the light purple extends all the way to the cutoff, but the cutoff is simply lower than the 22.05 kHz limit of 44.1 kHz audio.

Some music is going to be more susceptible to audible differences that those encodes offer; anything that relies on a very bright mix is going to suffer at the hands of MP3, but honestly, not at all significantly with MP3 320kbps CBR. It may happen, but at that point it leaves the audible hearing and into the realm of debate regarding what we can physically perceive beyond our true audible range. For the low end this is easier to argue due to the way LFE reverberates in tissue/bone, but beyond the upper limit of our hearing, I don't know if there is solid science supporting perception beyond the range our ears detect.

 

[Deders]

I'm going to run some tests. I'm experiencing different things than I was when I previously ran these tests.

What do you use to analyse the waveform? I'm using MusicScope.

Edit: Just done some ABX tests in Foobar and it seems the effect isn't as pronounced as I thought. It may be that when I initially noticed it I had just got my receiver and was still experimenting with the sound enhancement features and EQ. I was also streaming with DLNA so the receiver's decoder would also effect the sound. What initially turned me on to it was I was hearing some odd artefacting with all my MP3's in the higher register that became more pronounced as I raised the treble. These weren't' present in any flac's i played. I tracked it down to a feature called DLL which is like Creative's Crystalizer on my old X-FI. After switching between the same tracks (flac and MP3 both at 16/44.1) I could hear a definite difference, and switching DLL off seemed to lessen but not completely eliminate the problem

Maybe the top end info was getting garbled along the way. I was using my old computer that had been on the wrong end of a lightning strike (during the only day in 3 years I'd actually plugged it into the router instead of using wi-fi) which damaged the ethernet ports. One didn't work at all and the other I was never sure if it worked correctly as it worked but never with consistent performance. I put it down to damage on the extension and never took it downstairs to test properly. I don't really know the inner workings of how DLNA works or if somehow the error checking wasn't functioning properly on the port. I would have thought because Flacs need more bandwidth, the effect would have been more prominent on them.

I do remember doing a test where I set a range of frequencies from 20Hz to 16KHz at what I perceived to be the same volume. Using my X-FI and Sony MDR-EX700's, all the frequencies were at the virtually same amplitude all the way up to 16KHz where I needed it to be a lot louder in order to hear anything.

When ABXing the same tracks, the first few I found fairly easy to differentiate, but not for the difference in high end cut off. It got very difficult to choose between them during the middle of the tests and much easier towards the end. I think this is reflected in the final score I got. 9 out of 16.

 

[truckerCLOCK]

I'm not entirely sold on a lossless player yet (availability and cost of music, right headphones, amp...), but Fry's has the Pono on sale 50% off for $200. Opinions?

Yeah see that's the problem with this thing. A portable high res player that unless you have noise cancelling headphones or really really good earphones/earbuds, you won't be able to tell the difference.

 

[Craig234]

Yeah see that's the problem with this thing. A portable high res player that unless you have noise cancelling headphones or really really good earphones/earbuds, you won't be able to tell the difference.

I don't mind not treating it as portable for a home experience with good headphones, but even then it's not clear it's worth it unfortunately.

 

[destrekor]

I don't mind not treating it as portable for a home experience with good headphones, but even then it's not clear it's worth it unfortunately.

Me, I'd like well-encoded 320kbps MP3s on the go (and please, mastered properly! Rips from CDs these days suck a fat one), and a good set of headphones/earphones for that style of usage. Which I'm plenty happy with my Shure earphones (SE200 or something like that) for mobile enjoyment.

Even then the majority of my mobile music enjoyment is in the car with my car speakers. Granted, I replaced the head unit, amp, and speakers, and tried to carefully tune the audio for a flat response (albeit slightly warm because that's how I roll), and I tried FLAC in the car for a little while then figured, what is the point? I have a lot of road noise so there is zero reason to take up the space with FLAC when I will not be able to truly appreciate the difference.

But for home use: I don't have the equipment I truly want, but my Xonar U7 USB DAC/headphone amp does the trick for now, and drives my cans perfectly (Sennheiser HD598). I want more goodies, for sure, and I'll definitely splurge in the future on audio enjoyment in the home. I'm not worried about getting anything fancier for on the go, quite frankly.

And I suspect you are in the same boat.

 

[MrSquished]

$200 is not a bad price for a 128GB high quality mp3 player if the interface is nice. forget about the lossless format stuff, if this thing can just hold your jams the way you want them might be worth it. a fiio x3 is about the same price.

OTG I just use my nexus 6p to a fiio e6 to dunu dn-2000J IEM's. what I am really enjoying now is upgrading my home headphone and amp/dac system. now that is a ton of fun.