Both of these things are accurate.
Er, weren't you arguing with people about vinyl sounding sooooooo much better in a thread not very long ago? And that you could supposedly easily tell the difference in even MP3 bitrates, let alone lossy compared to lossless?
Lol. I saw that and face palmed. Sony's claiming that it generates lower electrical noise. However, that doesn't make sense. Digital systems aren't really affected by noise. You either get a signal or you don't. They're pulling some Monster shenanigans there.
My theory is that Sony's repackaging all their overpriced Class 6 NAND from the Vita in order to cut their losses on that hunk-of-junk console. It's genius really. Audiophiles will buy anything.
As for vinyl sounding better... well yes, it does. Only vintage vinyl though pressed before the Loudness War started. Some time in the late 80s / early 90s, recording engineers started using dynamic range compression to boost the overall loudness of a track. However, it clips out sharper sounds, making the music sound muddy and less realistic. New vinyl is made from these masters, so it's not going to sound much different from the CD version.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loudness_war
Well actually it is affected by noise (ever had your speakers pick up someone's phone call? But even basically at some point it converts it to analog which is impacted by noise, although an SD card is not going to make a lot of difference unless the player has some dysfunction).
It very well could be. I don't think the Vita is junk, but it's yet another instance of Sony seemingly learning from their past mistakes only to just replace it with another stupid one. It could have been quite good but it wasn't. Maybe Sony will realize before Nintendo that their best bet for making a portable game system is to make a quality controller case for iPhones and then work on porting their older games to it and integrating cross-play and the like for newer games.
Yes and no. It depends on subjective opinion, personally even quality vinyl doesn't always sound that good to me and it's because it can lack in the low end due to the EQ of the medium. But yes the masters, transfers, and mixing matter the most, and with the way that's handled right now it's just not good. And it's stupid because most people that are at all interested in quality know this, including the studios, but there's just no real effort to change it.
Interesting article about Young's Pono player in which the reviewer does an A/B test playing the same files with an Iphone, seems the Pono is mostly hype and then one has to buy the albums at the Poo store for a whopping $24 a pop!
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/it-was-one-of-kickstarters-most-successful-109496883039.html
This isn't surprising. With the right headphones you can probably tell the difference in the players (although that doesn't necessarily mean the more expensive audiophile stuff will sound better), but the Pono player apparently straight up sucks to use (horrible interface) so that alone would make me not want anything to do with it. Also I'm not at all surprised about the stuff they're selling on the Pono store not really sounding better. There's been some talk of pushing for going back to original recordings (the high quality studio tapes for instance, and then doing modern transfers), but that's still too little, and if they still muck it up in the transfer then it's mostly pointless anyway.
They're also doing a profoundly stupid way of trying to sell it to people, him saying that an iPhone only is 3% of the music that Pono offers (speaking of relative quality) is so absurdly bullshit that it's ridiculous.
It's annoying because it's a lot of marketing bullshit to basically sell a high-res capable version of MP3 players that failed a decade ago. They're trying to sell the 24/96 aspect when that matters about the least of anything they could have done. The player itself is supposedly decent quality (enough so that compared to other "audiophile" DAPs it's pretty good), but that's definitely not enough for me to drop $500 on Toblerone MP3 player.
To me it's hardly any different from Beats by Dre, this is just more marketing crap just with Neil Young pushing it. Now maybe he can actually do something to get quality masters/mixes/transfers, and improve the software (both on the player and the Pono store). Beats after all has improved their headphones so they're not total ripoffs but we'll see.
Best thing would be for them to drop Pono as a service/device, and use it as a label to indicate a quality recording (for new ones the whole chain from the recording onward, and for older recordings the transfer, mixing/mastering) and then push for Amazon and Apple to support losses digital files. But don't let it turn into a meaningless "certification" (there's some "Hi-Res" label that they've been pushing around recently and brands have been slapping that on everything they can, I noticed Audio-Technica was putting it on headphones even though that's fairly silly and meaningless).