Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.
But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.
The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.
Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.
In a post Tuesday in Slate, tech writer Seth Stevenson said he and some people he enlisted had “zero confidence” in their ability to pick music played on a Pono from that of an iPhone.
“Bottom line: Not one person had any clue whether they were listening to the Pono or to the ‘inferior’ iTunes track,” Stevenson wrote. “When forced to state a preference, six out of seven people actually picked the iPhone as the higher-quality experience. An eighth person refused to guess because he simply had no idea. These folks were in their 20s and 30s, all avid music listeners. A couple of them write about music professionally and one is a video producer.”
Yahoo News’ David Pogue gave the PonoPlayer a more rigorous vetting. Whether his test subjects used cheap earbuds or expensive headphones, the iPhone playbacks sounded better.
The headline read: “Neil Young’s PonoPlayer: The Emperor Has No Clothes.”
Pogue said Young’s heart was pure in his quest for high-quality digital files, “but Pono’s statement that ‘Everyone who’s ever heard PonoMusic will tell you that the difference is surprising and dramatic’ is baloney. When conducting the test with today’s modern music files, I couldn’t find even one person who heard a dramatic difference.”
Young has not responded to the criticism but in an email to Pogue, he said that 100 top musicians compared Pono songs to low-quality MP3 files and each heard a difference.
Sam Machkovech of Ars Technica called the PonoPlayer “a tall, refreshing drink of snake oil,” while Gizmodo’s Mario Aguilar accused Neil Young and Pono of “peddling junk science, and supporting expensive gear and music files you don’t need.”
David Pierini is a former newspaper writer and long-time photographer. Considered a luddite by most of his friends, they did not believe him when he broke the news that he would be writing for a technology website. He is fascinated by human nature and would love to cultivate stories about the people driving the tech bus. Reach out to him at [email protected].
16 responses to “Neil Young’s pricey PonoPlayer no better than iPhone for music”
The truth is here:
“…100 top musicians compared Pono songs to low-quality MP3 files…”
Apple doesn’t sell low-quality MP3 files. Sure, if you load up an iPhone with really crappy MP3 files, you’ll hear a difference – but I bet if you load up a Pono with really crappy MP3 files, you’ll also hear a difference.
Young doesn’t live in reality – he lives in his own reality distortion field.
Neil Young is overlooking his biggest advantage with this player. He can’t compete on the level of sound quality — does anyone look to Neil Young for that? — but he does have tons of connections with famous friends. He could be offering Pono-exclusive tracks, like unreleased recordings from artists’ vaults, or remasters/remixes done specifically for the Pono. Instead of trying to appeal to audiophiles, he should be marketing this thing towards music fans.
In fact, that’s exactly what Young promised. Pono Store albums were promised to be direct from studio tapes, without downsampling or mastering for “inferior” formats such as LP and CD playback. Neil got musicians aboard by asking them to provide remastered music for the Pono audience. Once reason that buyers are disappointed so far is that actual high-resolution mastered original albums are in short supply at Pono’s store, and their standard resolution albums are really no better than the average home user can get by ripping a store-bought CD using non-lossy compression. Maybe some day Pono will provide alternative and “better” takes on classic and new music, but right now, it IS a disappointment, both for music lovers and audiophiles. (And I own a Kickstarter pre-release Pono.)
I bought a Pono player and compared a full-resolution version of Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage with my cd of the same title. The Pono version had more detail and more dynamic range. The testers that are cited here don’t know what to listen for, or have bad hearing from listening to MP3 at loud volume. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)
I’ve purchased lots of music at 96k/24bit FLAC to play on my network system. I also do a high quality down-conversion to 48k/24bit then to 256kAAC for my iPhone/Pad. I also have an external DAC for the phone/pad from HRT. The phone is OK, but when I listen through the HRT microStreamer the soundstage is larger and both top and bottom end opens up… not more of it, just more robust and defined.
I do believe Mr. Young’s device can sound better, but you MUST start with better programming… and there isn’t much in the recent 10-15 years. Nobody masters a CD trying to keep the original dynamics of the mix like they did before the ‘loudness wars’ started. The music no longer ‘breathes’ and that’s the biggest difference you’ll hear at higher sampling and bit-depths.
I’ve been in the recording business for 45-years working in some of the best studios in LA/Hollywood in the 70s & 80s. Records had budgets and we all cared about how it sounded throughout the ENTIRE process, trying to keep the music ‘alive and breathing’. Because of today’s engineers putting plugins on EVERY CHANNEL to keep everything loud and forward in the mix, there’s no more nuance, nor any reason to have that higher sample rate and bit-depth.
Unless mixing attitudes change, higher quality playback will never win the blindfold test.
The only compromise I will not make when it comes to quality is video quality. I will want the biggest and best HD video you can get me. Audio quality, give me whatever, I’m not fussed.
The problem is that no one is actually stating what quality the music they are comparing is encoded in. Low quality mp3 is very general, is it 128kbs or 320kbps? This generalization is just preying on people’s lack of knowledge about different encodings.
God, another example of Internet echo chamber. You actually posted an article about someone else writing a bad review. You never saw a Pono or actually listened to one, yet your title boldly claims that its no better than iPhone. How do you know that, exactly?
This whole debate is as if amateurs tried to convince graphic professionals that JPG is the same as TIFF, because they (and their mates) can’t tell the difference. Ok!
Yes, I own pre-release Kickstarter Pono, and yes, I LOVE it. If you can’t hear the difference, simply don’t buy it. But there is many of us that can, and this little player, though not perfect, is more than worth its price.
I consider myself somewhat of an audiophile. I have high end 70s era stereo equipment and I listen to almost everything on vinyl. My question about the pono was always does 96/24 FLAC sound any better playing from the pono vs 96/24 FLAC from another source? I don’t need convincing that higher res music sounds better than a 128/192 rip, that should be a given. However, since my phone is perfectly capable of playing FLAC if I wanted to listen to it, it seems to make the pono kind of pointless.
All these articles and sites are comparing hi-res to mediocre res music, but I’d love to see a FLAC to FLAC comparison, cause I can’t imagine the pono sounds any better on product specs alone.
Pono claims it does, and frankly, there is the difference, but it is almost not noticeable. I tried few experiments playing the same FLAC on B&O A8 from Pono, and then from Blackberry Passport using Neutron player. Mind you, this is thru headphones out on BB compared to Line out from Pono. Also, Pono has balanced output, but I didn’t have the cables.
So, the answer is yes, but not much different.
Still, I am very happy with Pono purchase.
Thanks for the feedback
Sorry, I listen to Pono and to iPod Classic, same files, same headset and with many songs (60%) that ask for the dynamics and breath you really note the difference. But if you only listen to pop-music or badly mastered files, the iTunes mastered loudness-prepped files may sound better (cooler, not more details) than those or normal CD-rips to WAV.
I believe >>70% of the public will have no argument/need to buy something that the newest generation of highrez enabled High-End Smartphones support anyway.
High-End Fans need to make a commercial judgement, but can rest assured the Pono has all technology to treat the sound data of their files best possible with a discrete analog section even better than High-Res smartphones (apple doesn’t support HighRez), such as the HTC M8, …
But really, why all the fuzz?
Simply because newsjournalists always need stories.
Neil Young wants to sell albums, he’s old school, and he knows real High-End Fans like albums too, mostly.
Guess what, the labels like that approach, too. It’s their old model, with the added capability to resell old compressed masters in upsampled pseudo-highrez and pseudo-high quality fashion.
While the initial Kick-Start Idea was for High-End/Hifi fans only, the press and the labels push it now as if it was interesting to any mass.
It isn’t no wonder, never was the concept, nor the capability looking at the available master qualities.
digital HighRez is 90% label driven, high margin business.
Save your money, buy from the artist, lossless, invest in live concerts and have more fun for the money.
I’d say:
– Stop listening to compressed data,
– Stop listening to streamed-services, they pay labels not artists
– Listen to Radio and “label-free” forums for discovery
There’s a lot of good music around!
…and what else does the Pono player do besides play music at the same quality for all that money? Nothing?
Oh.
I would love to do a side-to-side. I use a pair of $1700 JHAudio In Ear Monitors every day and I can easily tell the difference in mp3 audio I ripped with EAC at 320kbps CBR and the same file ripped in ALAC from iTunes from the same source CD on my iPhone. The mp3 copy sounds very, very good – but if I had the space, I’d have everything in Lossless, of course.
Mind you, this is music that I am VERY familiar which means a lot in this situation.
But I’d definitely be game to do an honest side-by-side. Anyone have a Pono I can borrow?
I have a PonoPlayer and it sounds excellent!!!!! Better than my FiiO X3. 1000 times better than my iphone.
Thirty years ago, I visited a newly
opened “high-end audio” store called Excalibur, on the outskirts of Washington,
D.C., with the idea of writing a scathing exposé. Back then I read Stereo
Review, which insisted that pretty much all audio components sounded alike.
(If they measured the same on a test bench, they’d sound the same in your
living room.) So I was going to take down these deluded souls and smarmy
hucksters, with their $5,000 turntables and $10,000 amplifiers, which—c’mon!—sounded
no better than the stuff I’d bought at one-tenth the price.
But I stopped smirking when I sat
down and listened. The first album the proprietor played for me was a recording
of Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and I’d never heard anything like it; I had
no idea that what I was hearing was even possible. Trumpets sounded brassy,
violins silky, tympani boomy, clarinets reedy, and they were all laid across
the “soundstage,” just like in a concert hall, in spacious depth and lifelike
proportions. He put on a jazz album, then a pop album (Coltrane and Joni
Mitchell, I seem to recall), and the musicians seemed to be playing and singing
in the room with me, their voices and instruments so vivid, almost 3-D, imbued
with the tonal colors and emotional heft of the real thing.
It was an exhilarating, even
life-changing experience. I brought home a few issues of the Absolute Sound,
the top audiophile magazine at the time, and soon started writing for it as an
equipment reviewer. I now write for the field’s other leading journal, Stereophile.
For the most part, the cultural
gatekeepers ignore those of us who write and read about high-end audio. Lately,
though, putdowns of audiophiles have been popping up in the popular press. Many
of them start with critiques of Neil Young’s new high-resolution,
digital-download music player, the Pono. The bad reviews, especially this
widely circulated one by David Pogue, who claims that the device sounds no different
from an iPhone, might be justified; I don’t know, I haven’t heard one. But some
of these articles, including a recent one
in Slate, use the dismissal of the Pono as a springboard to
dismiss high-res downloads—and all of high-end audio—in general.
Seth Stevenson, in his Pono review
in Slate, quoted, at one point, “a friend who fancies himself an
audiophile.” This friend was me. What’s with this “fancies himself,” I asked
myself? It suggests that the whole enterprise is vaguely fraudulent, in the
same sense that you might refer to someone who “fancies himself a psychic.”
Let me be forthright about this: I am
an audiophile, and proud of it. And so, I rise in defense of audiophilia—which
might be defined as the love of listening to good music that sounds good, that
sounds in some sense real. What could be wrong, or silly, about that?
Well, some people believe that we’re
kidding ourselves, that we somehow think we’re hearing things that we’re not
really hearing. They point to “scientific” blindfold tests in which people can’t
tell the difference between costly high-end components and the stuff that
normal people buy on the cheap.
In a blindfold test, someone hooks
up two components to an “A/B box” (one to input A, the other to input B), then
switches—or doesn’t switch—back and forth, to see whether the subject can hear
the difference. But this is more complicated than it seems. First, most A/B
boxes have their own sound, due to poor circuitry; it’s not a pure listening
test. Second, it’s hard to hear differences right away, especially when
listening to music or equipment that you haven’t heard before.
That said, I have taken A/B
tests, and passed. At an audio show many years ago, I took a test purporting to
show that no one could hear the difference between two sets of speaker cables.
I heard the difference four tries out of five. Around the same time, Randi the
Magician, famous for exposing frauds, was offering $1 million to anyone who
could identify a particularly expensive brand of speaker cable in an A/B test.
My friend and Stereophile colleague Michael Fremer accepted the
challenge. Randi backed out, after telling his fans that Fremer had
backed out. (It’s a funny story. Read it here.)
When I passed my A/B test at the audio show, the guy administering it
dismissed my score as a “statistical anomaly.” An alternative explanation might
have been that I was an experienced listener.
There are bird-watchers who can distinguish three kinds of sparrows from
their tweets, though they all sound the same to me. It’s not that the birder
has “golden ears.” It’s mainly a matter of training and exposure. If you or I
wanted to master the birdsongs in Central Park, we could, with some training
Four years ago, I wrote a Slate
column extolling the promise of new high-resolution downloads. I pointed
out that the high-res format encodes music in 24 bits at a sampling rate of 96
kHz, which translates to 4.39 megabits per second—three times the density of
CDs (16 bits and 44.1 kHz sampling, which translates to 1.41 Mb/s) and 10 times
that of an MP3 (320 kilobits per second). I cited these facts simply
to illustrate, in numbers, the huge sonic difference that I’d heard with my
ears.
The column spurred thousands of comments, more than anything I’d written
about the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. Many of the commenters claimed that human
beings couldn’t hear above 20 kHz anyway (thus conflating, as many critics do
today, frequency response with sampling rates, which are
related but not quite the same). Others shrugged at the controversy, saying
that MP3’s sampling rate was “good enough” for them. Still others just called
me an “audiophile asshole,” a phrase that comes up a lot in these sorts of
exchanges.
What puzzles me is why we audiophiles are so often the object of contempt. I
don’t mean jokes: a lot of audiophile jokes—for instance, Mad
Magazine’s special hi-fi issue in 1958—are very funny. I mean
contempt. In an otherwise delightful Slate piece on bachelor
pads, Troy
Patterson advised readers not to seek “stereo advice from guys who are
really, really, really into stereos.” Would Troy warn a car shopper to stay
away from people who know a lot about cars, or someone looking for a good
restaurant to ignore people who know a lot about food?
Some of the contempt, no doubt, stems from the price tags for this gear. I
should emphasize, more expensive doesn’t always mean better: I’ve heard some
lousy $100,000 speakers, and I’ve heard some $500-a-pair models that I could
live with. But yes, the really good stuff is expensive. There’s a lot of
information in those record grooves and those CD bits. What it takes to extract
all that information—the high-quality phono-cartridges, digital-to-analog
converters, the 1,001 parts in a great amplifier (capacitors, power supplies,
low-voltage regulators, etc., etc.), and speakers—it’s all, unfortunately,
expensive.
Many audiophiles spend tens of thousands of dollars on their rigs; some
spend more than that. Is this crazy? Maybe, but I don’t read articles jeering
at people who spend $400 on a meal (which disappears once they’ve eaten it), or
$80,000 on a car, or $10 million on a painting. There may be some populist fury
at the people who have this kind of cash to toss around, sure. But the
mainstream media run rave reviews of high-priced restaurants and luxury cars,
and breathless style-section profiles of the hedge-fund managers whose walls
are flush with de Koonings and Rauschenbergs. Audiophiles, meanwhile, are
portrayed as obsessive nerds, insufferable aesthetes, hopeless nostalgics.
I think part of the derision for audiophiles is relative. Most people don’t
have de Koonings on their walls, but they do have a stereo, and they’re
incredulous that a more costly stereo could really sound that much better.
Another factor, though, is sheer, possibly willful ignorance. It’s clear,
from many of the articles and comments dismissing audiophiles, that their
authors have never actually heard a high-end audio system. They’re like I was
30 years ago, when I smugly walked into Excalibur. The difference is that I walked
into Excalibur; I sat down and listened, and wound up writing a very
different article from the one I’d outlined in my head beforehand.
When I sit down and listen to, say, Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong
singing their duets, I can practically see them right before me—Ella’s ethereal
breath, Satch’s throaty rumble, the delicate chords, bass walks, and
cymbal-swooshing by the rhythm section in the distance. When I listen to Miles
Davis’ Kind of Blue, I hear every spittle on Miles’ mouthpiece, every
lick of Coltrane and Cannonball’s sax solos, Paul Chambers’ every bass note
(and the thump and wood of the bass), the slightest rhythmic flourish from
Jimmy Cobb’s trap set. When I played Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” for a
visiting friend, he was astonished not only by all the instruments he’d never
heard so clearly before, but, still more, by the raw anger in Dylan’s voice,
which he hadn’t heard before at all.
“We’re trying to do time traveling here,” an audiophile record producer once told me. That’s what this is about—feeling transported
to the place where the players laid this music down, hearing it the way the
mics and spools and mixing boards took it down.
People ask me if, say, a $50,000 stereo system is 10 times better than one
costing $5,000. It depends what you’re listening for. If all you want is nice
music in the background while you’re cooking, cleaning the house, or reading
the paper, then no. If you want a time-traveling machine, then it’s infinitely
better. You just can’t get there with the cheaper system.
So tell me you’re not interested in sonic time travelling; tell me you’d
rather spend the money on live concerts; tell me you just can’t afford the
ride. These are legitimate positions. But don’t tell me that I’m a nut who’s
just imagining things, or some freak with paranormal hearing. And don’t tell me
that the brilliant engineers who recorded the great sessions—or those other
engineers, the best of them anyway, who designed the equipment to extract the
information on those albums—are all delusional or dishonest, too.
Go listen.