“It was one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns. Its inventors sought $800,000 in funding from the public — but raised a gigantic $6.2 million,” David Pogue writes for Yahoo Tech. “The project: the PonoPlayer, “a revolution in music listening.” It was designed to play back music files that use up to 20 times more data than the MP3 files that gave the first pocket music players a bad name.”
“You’ve got to admit it: The argument for the Pono Player sure is appealing — that we don’t know what we’ve been missing in our music,” Pogue writes. “Unfortunately, it isn’t true.”
“I’m 51 and a former professional musician. I know how to listen. But when I bought Pono’s expensive remastered songs and compared them with the identical songs on my phone, I couldn’t hear any difference whatsoever,” Pogue writes. “I got worried. Is the Pono story a modern-day “Emperor’s New Clothes” fable? Were those famous rock stars just imagining things? There was only one way to find out: conduct a blind trial, using identical songs on identical headphones, comparing the Pono with a standard audio player — an iPhone. So that’s what I did.”
“Neil Young and the believers in high-res audio aren’t fools, and their hearts are in the right place. But Pono’s statement that ‘Everyone who’s ever heard PonoMusic will tell you that the difference is surprising and dramatic’ is baloney,” Pogue writes. “When conducting the test with today’s modern music files, I couldn’t find even one person who heard a dramatic difference.”
Tons more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Pono Player is the Monster Cable of portable music players.
Related articles:
Neil Young’s 24 bit/192kHz ‘PonoMusic’ project is a very silly boondoggle – March 16, 2014
Neil Young unveils new music media ‘ecosystem,’ PonoMusic – March 12, 2014
