Review of the Pono player

[whines]

Looks like to Pono is in reviewer's hands now!

http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2015/02/ ... snake-oil/

"You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you're gonna have a special dinner or something?" Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. "And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you're doing... you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it's like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?

"The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music."

[Ryan Sober]

There is a very simple explanation to why Neil Young has championed these "high resolution" media players.
And the reason is... a complete misunderstanding of digital audio.
Neil Young hates the sound of modern music. When he asked someone why music sounds that way now, they responded with "compression".
But there are two kinds of compression... and he blamed the wrong one.
Compression of data (aka mp3, aac, etc) is NOT the reason modern music sounds bad.
The problem is dynamic range compression... which can't be fixed with a $400 media player.

[Bruce Weldy]

There is a very simple explanation to why Neil Young has championed these "high resolution" media players.
And the reason is... a complete misunderstanding of digital audio.
Neil Young hates the sound of modern music. When he asked someone why music sounds that way now, they responded with "compression".
But there are two kinds of compression... and he blamed the wrong one.
Compression of data (aka mp3, aac, etc) is NOT the reason modern music sounds bad.
The problem is dynamic range compression... which can't be fixed with a $400 media player.

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Of course, there is one more reason that modern music sounds bad......it sucks to start with.

[Bill Fitzmaurice]

There is a very simple explanation to why Neil Young has championed these "high resolution" media players.
And the reason is... a complete misunderstanding of digital audio.
Neil Young hates the sound of modern music.

It's more complicated than that. Neil resisted the move from tape to digital in the studio, and it had nothing to do with compression. He liked the sound that tape saturation gave, which digital didn't. Tape saturation is a form of compression, and Neil liked it.
For many years he continued to do his mastering on tape, and only after it was mastered did it get transferred into the digital domain. He never complained about listening to a CD as opposed to vinyl, let alone cassette.
What he doesn't like now isn't digital. What he doesn't like is the data loss that you get with MP3 etc. He's got no issues with CD, but who carries a CD player in their pocket? The Pono is intended to give CD quality with MP3/iPod ease of use. I doubt it will succeed, the kiddies don't really care all that much, and serious listeners don't do MP3 or iPod.

[Ryan Sober]

There is a very simple explanation to why Neil Young has championed these "high resolution" media players.
And the reason is... a complete misunderstanding of digital audio.
Neil Young hates the sound of modern music.

It's more complicated than that. Neil resisted the move from tape to digital in the studio, and it had nothing to do with compression. He liked the sound that tape saturation gave, which digital didn't. Tape saturation is a form of compression, and Neil liked it.
For many years he continued to do his mastering on tape, and only after it was mastered did it get transferred into the digital domain. He never complained about listening to a CD as opposed to vinyl, let alone cassette.
What he doesn't like now isn't digital. What he doesn't like is the data loss that you get with MP3 etc. He's got no issues with CD, but who carries a CD player in their pocket? The Pono is intended to give CD quality with MP3/iPod ease of use. I doubt it will succeed, the kiddies don't really care all that much, and serious listeners don't do MP3 or iPod.

And that's where his perception is skewed. High-rate mp3's sound fine; the data compression isn't the problem. Neil may think it is, but he's wrong.
I was specifically referring to digital look-ahead brickwall limiting, which sounds nothing like tape saturation.
Neil hates the sound of brickwall limiting (and thinks it's a result of mp3 data compression), and I do too... but a music player isn't going to fix it. FLAC won't fix it. The only thing that will fix it is forcing the record companies to stop demanding louder masters from their mastering houses.

[Bruce Weldy]

There is a very simple explanation to why Neil Young has championed these "high resolution" media players.
And the reason is... a complete misunderstanding of digital audio.
Neil Young hates the sound of modern music.

It's more complicated than that. Neil resisted the move from tape to digital in the studio, and it had nothing to do with compression. He liked the sound that tape saturation gave, which digital didn't. Tape saturation is a form of compression, and Neil liked it.
For many years he continued to do his mastering on tape, and only after it was mastered did it get transferred into the digital domain. He never complained about listening to a CD as opposed to vinyl, let alone cassette.
What he doesn't like now isn't digital. What he doesn't like is the data loss that you get with MP3 etc. He's got no issues with CD, but who carries a CD player in their pocket? The Pono is intended to give CD quality with MP3/iPod ease of use. I doubt it will succeed, the kiddies don't really care all that much, and serious listeners don't do MP3 or iPod.

All excellent points.....

And the reason the kiddies don't care is that the music they are listening to is so compressed from a dynamics standpoint that it really doesn't sound any worse on MP3 than CD.

Every now and then I turn on one of the local county stations......geez, it really starts to bug the crap out of me after just a minute or two - from the compression in recording to the compression at mastering - then the compression that the station squashes it with......everything just comes at you like a 2x4. There's no life at all - it's just a wall of sound (and not the Phil Spector kind).

Maybe it's just our society now.....everybody gets a participation award so they don't get their feelings hurt. So, on the recording, everybody has to be equal and be at the same volume to keep everybody's self esteem intact. Wouldn't want that lead vocal to be louder than the tambourine player....now would we?

[whines]

Maybe it's just our society now.....everybody gets a participation award so they don't get their feelings hurt. So, on the recording, everybody has to be equal and be at the same volume to keep everybody's self esteem intact. Wouldn't want that lead vocal to be louder than the tambourine player....now would we?

Or the microspeakers that people use aren't really capable of dynamic range, so you have to compress it like crazy so you can hear anything from your bluetooth puck or laptop/cellphone speakers.

[Bruce Weldy]

Maybe it's just our society now.....everybody gets a participation award so they don't get their feelings hurt. So, on the recording, everybody has to be equal and be at the same volume to keep everybody's self esteem intact. Wouldn't want that lead vocal to be louder than the tambourine player....now would we?

Or the microspeakers that people use aren't really capable of dynamic range, so you have to compress it like crazy so you can hear anything from your bluetooth puck or laptop/cellphone speakers.

We've had little speakers since the transistor radios in the 60s. This is really about the loudness wars waged by the record companies who think that if their song is louder on the radio than the next guy - they will sell more records. But, now pretty much everybody is doing it. Everybody talks about not doing it in all the trade magazines, but then they all are afraid that their record won't be as loud, so they do it anyway.

The band I run sound for just put out their CD of originals .... really good solid tunes and played well. But, the mix drives me absolutely nuts. Within 30 seconds of the first song - I was totally turned off. Everything was too loud. The snare was cutting through like a knife, the guitar fills were as loud as the vocal.....argh....

[David Raehn]

I used to burn CDs to 1/4" tape for the saturation..... It was usually awesome but not always.

I think that someone should make a saturation plugin.

Why does it seem so hard to make a portable music player that runs .wav? Some do it rather well but the big names (with an 'i' typically) seem to have the popular corner on the market.

[AcousticScience]

Yes Bruce, the dreaded loudness war.

I think compression has its uses don't get me wrong. It's good for evening up that accidental bass guitar twang or rogue snare hit that's 6dB above the others. Or to tame the vocals of overly aggressive rock singers with bad mic etiquette.

The album American Idiot suffered from loudness compression, and is less listened to by me than International Superhits, despite me liking the actual melodies on the songs more on American Idiot. It gets played when I'm in the mood for a wall of sound.
I heard there was a poor mastering of Metallica's Death Magnetic album, which should have been renamed Death Dynamics.

When I listen to rock music I like the hits of the drums to be crisp and stand out above the electric guitars. I also like the bass guitar to come through well (although being a bass player I may be somewhat biased), otherwise I tend to get bored by a fatiguing wash of noise and turn the volume back down.

This is probably one of the reasons I prefer electronic dance and trance music, although the shrill sounding "bro step" can be fatiguing to listen to.

[Ryan Sober]

If anyone else wants to put the pieces together...

Neil: "...we have the worst sound that we've ever had. It's worse than a 78 (rpm record)..."

Wikipedia: "Early 78 rpm phonograph discs had a dynamic range of up to 40 dB."

Wikipedia: "The dynamic range of human hearing is roughly 140 dB."

This website: http://musicmachinery.com/2009/03/23/the-loudness-war/
and many others like it show that dynamic range in most genres of music has declined since the early 90's, from averaging around 20dB to around 4-6dB.
Now, what else started getting big in the late 80's/early 90's...
And became an easy scapegoat for bad-sounding music...

[Tom Smit]

In the past half year, I've read a couple of articles in the magazine named "Professional Sound" where the discussion was about loudness wars. Several different engineers have been trying to steer away from it because of the bad sound and lack of dynamics. As well, there is a new method out (the name of which escapes me) that apparently preserves some of the dynamics yet helps control volume levels.

[Radian]

Now, what else started getting big in the late 80's/early 90's...
And became an easy scapegoat for bad-sounding music...

Dunno? You tell us.

[Bruce Weldy]

As well, there is a new method out (the name of which escapes me) that apparently preserves some of the dynamics yet helps control volume levels.

The use of compression isn't really about lowering the highest levels, but rather bringing up the lower levels. As you add compression, it lets you turn up the overall volume without the louder parts being a lot louder than the softer parts - thus, you end up with the lowest volume of any particular instrument being much closer to the loudest volume which is what kills the dynamic range.

Compressors used by the really good mixers make individual instruments and vocals sound punchy and present without squashing the dynamics out of it. Also used across the stereo buss, it can help warm up a finished mix.

But too much of a good thing takes all of the space out of a recording - never letting the listener have a moment of calm within the song. That's why so many songs nowadays have no sparkle or sizzle to 'em - the intro, verse, chorus, and solos are all equally loud. The drum tracks during the verse are just as loud as the drum fill that takes you into the chorus - thus, the drum fill has no meaning and doesn't stand out as exciting.

It's just a cacophony of sound. The music business has forgotten that the most important part of any song is not the notes, but the space between the notes. There is no longer any space - musically or sonically.

[Radian]

.. the kiddies don't really care all that much, and serious listeners don't do MP3 or iPod.

No doubt, there's also some ignorance at play there.

I've "wow'd" several people in the last couple of years with a Sansa Clip+, playing FLAC files of well-mastered music over an old pair of 1st gen Sony MDR-E828LP ear buds. From old farts to the kiddies.

For under $100, the sound of this combination simply runs circles around most anything priced an order of magnitude higher.


shown with the even better sounding MDR-AS40EX in-ears