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Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio
Hugh Pickens writes "Kia Makarechi reports that Neil Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists but is more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality. 'It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,' says Young. 'I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.' Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and is pushing a new format called Pono that would be 'high-resolution' digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording. Young wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that and hopes that 'some rich guy' will solve the problem of creating and distributing '100 percent' of the sound in music. 'Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.'"
Isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?
I read the headline to say "Neil Young Pushes Porno". Maybe this format should have opted for a different name...
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
The only reason I clicked to read more of this is because I first read it as 'Neil Young Pushes Porno'...
This article is trolling for comments about mp3 blind tests on quality audio.
There is a missing R.
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
Doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. I'd like to sit his coked out ass down for a double blind test and see if he can tell the difference between 128kbps mp3 and 24bit 96khz uncompressed. I bet you he couldn't, and if he could, I guarantee he couldn't at 160kbps.
Don't get me wrong, Neil Young is a great artist and I own several of his albums... but he's also an established artist who's made tons from his album sales over the years and, to be a bit crude, hasn't got much time left on the face of this Earth. While I get his point about quality it kind of bugs me that he's turning a blind eye to how piracy causes problems for new and independent artists. Maybe he feels that profit shouldn't be a motive in creating art but he's only pointing that out after he got his.
It's no different than upper management of a company shrugging off the concerns of their wage slaves because they're already established in their field and have made enough coin that a pay cut of a few percent isn't stopping them from eating or paying the bills.
Back in the days of Napster, I thought that the recording industry's best course of action would have been to purchase Napster. My idea would have been for them to limit the bitrates of freely shared music (say, to 128kbps) while selling higher bitrate versions of these songs. Listening to a 128kbps copy would have been the equivalent of hearing it on the radio and would have guided people to buy the full-quality version.
Remember, this was before P2P sharing and before Apple/Amazon/etc opened online music shops. The recording industry would have turned piracy into a source of revenue. More than that, though, they would have gotten ahead of Apple/Amazon/etc and would have been the main source for legal digital music purchases.
Yes, some people would have complained and found other ways to freely share MP3s greater than 128kbps, but if they did it right, I think most people would have remained. Instead, they shut down Napster and from its corpse sprang the P2P programs that the recording industry played Whack-A-Mole against for the next decade.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Most of the people listening to mp3s (that I know, self included) don't listen to the music on a nice system. Earbuds rarely provide definition or range of the actual recorded material. Yes, they may provide frequencies from 50-15,000 Hz, but you're not really feeling the bass line as recorded. Even if listening to a CD/DVD with 5.1, with the earbuds on, it may as well be a mp3.
These are some of the things molecules do...... given 4 billion years -Carl Sagan
... a Southern man don't need him around anyhow.
This 'news' is from (quote TFA) Posted 1/31/2012 4:18 PM | Updated 1/31/2012 4:18 PM... Next up, Elvis died.
Modern psychoacoustic models take into account both the physical and mental limitations of the human body. A prime example is "masking", where a louder sound will completely overcome a quieter sound, and do so for a period *longer* than the loud sound. Think of the ear as having an AGC with a slow response: it has to adjust the "gain" for the louder sound and ends up missing the quiet bits before it, then has to adjust the gain back down before it can pick up the quiet bits after. Simple compression trick: toss the quiet bits cause you can't hear them anyway.
What's clear is that he's just fronting for the latest in a long line of "we're better at this than the entire rest of the world combined" snake-oil audio companies with a nifty little lock-in strategy. Just read the list of trademarks.....
GStreamer - The only way to stream!
You read that as Neil Young pushes Porno didn't you, you big perv.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
How does he figure that? Digital Music was around for years before the iPod and mp3 players existed 2 years before it was released. He definitely was a pioneer in marketing it but not in the technology itself.
picking fights with U2 is a bad idea (you don't want to know how the Edge got his nick name).
Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono's cloud-based libraries of recordings
oh, oh.
this does not sound good. its vage as hell on details, but it sounds like something is remotely dependant or tracked or numbered or tagged?
I'm pretty sure he's solving a problem that only exists in the minds of those who want to make more money from consumers and their hunger for media. this does not sound like any kind of *technical* solution, the way this starts out reading.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Just recently, there was an article about a superior new audio format on /. : :-)
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/09/11/2156225/opus-the-codec-to-end-all-codecs
Free as in speech, too
Show me that Pono is better and equally free, and I might consider it...
C - the footgun of programming languages
I'm all for it. Recorded music fails to capture the live experience, which is the only standard to use in a "blind" listening test. I love classical and jazz, but can't stand it off a digital system. All of these tests just compare one recording method to another, they're pitting one imitation against another and arguing over which is the better imitation, without any reference to what was real.
"The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool" - Jane Wagner -
That is what most people like. People prefer the audio artefacts found in these to the actual music.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
...he's a clueless n00b, the sort that needs to be led around by the nose by a guy like Jobs. That's how he figures. He's clearly not someone likely to be ahead of the curve in terms of technology.
Thus he's prattling on about this in 2012 and ignoring existing alternatives.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
NIN has already done this... "FLAC high definition 24/96 (942 mb), better-than-CD-quality 24bit 96kHz audio"
That's not even maxing out what you can do with FLAC
This article would have made sense to me ten years ago but today I feel like Spotify and Grooveshark (streaming audio) is the new radio.
Spotify only streams at 160kbps for non-subscribers using the Ogg Vorbis format:
q3 (~96 kbps) mobile
q5 (~160 kbps) desktop non-paid
q9 (~320 kbps) desktop pay service
And you never know what Grooveshark is going to give you.
I personally can't detect a huge difference above 160kbps and for the sake of my own collection, I used to rip at 190kbps and only 320kbps if it was an artist I absolutely loved to blow my speakers out too. Even then, my ears and sound system couldn't capture the difference.
I don't really see the problem, as bandwidth and memory costs continually drop it only seems natural that we'll migrate to higher bit-rates, especially with the prevalence of so many high-end headphones lately. I would be surprised if Spotify free fully utilizes Beats headphones and don't get me started about people using Beats to stream Pandora at 96kbps...
The concept of distributing 24-bit studio recording data directly to consumers in order to get some kind of increase in sound quality has been thoroughly debunked. See this Slashdot article: Why Distributing Music As 24-bit/192kHz Downloads Is Pointless
That article is well worth the read.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Either Pandora One or on TuneIn Fullasoul radio. I'm not sure what Pandora One uses but the quality sounds like what Fullasoul uses wihich is AAC.
I wonder if Neil would be so unconcerned about file sharing if the CRTC rules didn’t require “English-language and French-language stations must ensure that at least 35% of the Popular Music they broadcast each week is Canadian content.” Effectively assuring daily Neil Young on your local rock channels.
Because you have damn atoms to do it.
Digital amplification is also problematic, though when you play your turntable through a digital amp, that difference goes away. Ever wondered why a 7W valve amp sounded as loud as a 50W digital (both by Audiophile power output)?
When songs are recorded and mastered badly with no dynamic range no amount of lossless compression will save it.
OK I happen to share his desire to make good-quality content available to people, no problem there.
But speaking from a studio perspective, and unless we're talking about analog masters from tape such as older recordings from the 70's and 80's, most modern masters are very seldom mixed to analog anymore, the majority of those who care about sound quality print digitally at resolutions of 24-bit / 96 kHz. [in MP3 language, that's 4608 kb/s, a fair amount of bandwidth] Now there are a few mastering houses who do 24-bit / 192 kHz... but I'd wager that they are a real minority already with that. From the 90's onwards, often times producers and bands only had the foresight to mix down to 16-bit / 44.1 kHz for their 2-track masters, and that's all that is ever going to be available. So this business about high quality sources being available is quite already murky IMHO.
Anyway, the important thing to keep in mind is that this previously quoted 24-96 number happens to be the sample and bit rate that the now-defunct DVD-Audio format was using. (R.I.P.) And for all intents and purposes, this sort of quality is also already currently available for download/purchase on HDTracks for a lot of classic Jazz albums. Would love to see sales figures on what that site sells. But I am sure that it's not very much.
Then there's the small matter of the death of SACD, Sony's wondrous Super Audio CD format no one knows about (or understands even, as it is not PCM). All of the 'Golden Ears' agreed that this was supposed to be far better than any existing system, and yet it doesn't appear to have worked out so well at all.
So I am scratching my head trying to understand what this Pono format can do better, when the sources have already been available at that level of definition, and that unless one goes back to analog masters (when available) and do new transfers, there is no more 'quality juice' to be squeezed out of that particular lemon.
Like I said, good intentions, but sadly it seems that the market has already spoken twice with regards to rejecting any high-resolution formats as being viable.
Besides the producer, the artist and the engineer, very few people care, it would seem. Not to sound cynical, but even on file-sharing sites where all of that stuff is basically 'free', it would appear that those hi-rez version do not get much in downloads at all.
I mean, not that there's anything wrong with being a bit quixotic about things you obsess about, especially if you can afford it. That can only be positive in the sense of raising people's awareness that all digital sounds are not created equal, and that some are quite awful to listen to, while others can make for a reasonably pleasurable experience.
But anyway: #goodluckwiththat
No, I haven't read this yet. But I seem to recall the very same person about 10 years ago making some of the most angry vitriolic "anti-download" statements I ever read. IIRC, his statements back then made even the RIAA's position look mild.
I think that the his comments were even discussed at Slashdot back then.
If the title is anything to go by, my how progress (and the lure of Muchos Dineros) changes peoples' attitudes.
The article doesn't mention it but I think it's a key question. Part of the appeal of the MP3 format is that the files are small and can be transferred quickly from PC to your music device. If Pono files are 10x as large as an MP3 file then that means you can only get 1/10 of your current music library on your iPod. Sure, storage is cheap for disk drives but portable devices not so much and iPod/iPhone does not allow for expandable storage.
So the obvious solution is cloud storage but that comes with it's own set of pitfalls. Personally, I'm not willing to throw my entire music collection up "in the cloud". If you're a storage host then you have to increase your storage and bandwidth usage many times more than if you were hosting MP3 files.
Then there is the question of cost. How much will a Pono file cost per song? I'd be willing to bet that it's a lot more than 99 cents a song. There are audiophiles out there that will be happy to pay for the sound quality but I wonder how viable it is for the masses? If you're just listening to the music on cheap bud headphones you're not likely to have a tremendous difference. Now if you're listening to it on a high end home stereo that's a different story. I could see it working well for listening to music in your car if you've got a really good stereo and can plug in a big USB stick with about 64GB of storage and fill it up with high quality Pono songs.
So to me it's going to come down to file size and cost. If both of those are not outrageous then it might well work.
No, it's not a step up. No-one has ever been able to reliably distinguish a 24/96 recording from it's downgraded 16/48 version in a properly conducted double-blind test.
It is absolutely necessary to oversample when acquiring data (since all analog filters have some roll-off), and it is good to use higher dynamic range when mixing to keep the repeated rounding errors below the noise floor. But once the final recording it is mastered, there is no benefit to distributing or listening to the result at higher than 16/48.
We have .wav files, .aiff, Apple Lossless, Flac, etc. All will do 192kHz, 24 bit should you wish to go that far.
48 kHz, 24 bit is the sweet spot for me, I can't hear any different between that and higher sample rates.
Now, where can I buy such files?
Will it be the Holy Grail of digital formats; as good as studio DAT?
More importantly, will it play on current-generation or even Gen-1 equipment?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I knew the floor sweeping sound in harvest moon was missing something.
So far the most detailed description I've come across is basically Young saying that Pono will contain "95% more" information than current digital files, apparently all in terms of resolution. That's barely more detailed than saying that Pono is "95% better," and frankly if it's simply an increase in resolution I'm highly sceptical that any difference will be perceptible by human ears.
Some detail, *any* detail, on how the format differs than what's currently available would be quite useful, Young.
I'm advocating dark clothes
If I'm not alone How long have I been asleep
As long as I have
Did you ever live in a drum?
No
Well then you aren't me I only dreamed I lived in a drum
Ever since it got dark
Dreaming is hard
Yea, but with nothing over your head?
No just light over my head and underneath too I don't think I could take it without anything over my head
M-m - ? ? ? Well why don't you go out and see what's out there?
Well I don't know if that's what's out there.
That's a thought, if you'd like
Yes but still you can say darker and darker I don't know what the outside of this thing looks like at all
I knew it's dark and murky
How do you get your water so dark?
Cause I'm paranoid
I'm very paranoid and the water in my washing machine turns dark out Of sympathy
Out of sympathy?
Yes Um where can I get that?
At your local drug store
How much?
It's from kansas
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Did anyone on slashdot actually understand the point of this article? It was not to debate audio formats, or to point out that Pono is close to Porno (omg you 3rd-graders are killin' me.)
The point of the article was that illegal (implied) file-sharing is the "new radio," and that the artists are suffering due to the quality of the illegal copies. This is practically a heretical statement for such an established and respected artist to make.
Let's spell it out... (hint: these are entirely legal/political points - the technical implementation is of almost ZERO consequence)
Point 1: Radio, historically was extremely important to promote artists, therefore extremely important to the artists themselves, and now the current technology's version of "radio" is ILLEGAL. Hello? This is like the patent wars - both are suppressing the development and progress of important art on a mind-blowing scale!
Point 2: Illegal copies need to be of better quality. Who cares what algorithm they use? The point is that ILLEGAL COPIES SHOULD BE OF BETTER QUALITY. That's like saying pushers are suffering because illegal drug users are receiving sh*t drugs that make the pushers look bad.
HOW DID THE ENTIRE AUDIENCE OF SLASHDOT MISS THIS?? (Self-supplied answer withheld due to *too obvious*.)
Now, ... DISCUSS.
When I first glanced at the headline on this story, I read, "Neil Young Pushes Porno"
Good points have been made about FLAC and Pono vs MP3. MP3 really is not a high fidelity medium.
But let's not spend *too* much time blaming the tools. It's the use to which they are put that is (in my opinion) most of the problem. Terrible, super dynamically compressed, as-loud-as-possible mix-downs is a worse problem, from a sonic standpoint, than the distribution medium. I suspect it will be possible to produce terrible sounding audio in FLAC and Pono also. We need to change expectations before the industry will buy into a better format.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
all the audio. Not just the final mix but the original instrument tracks.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
What does Steve Jobs have to do with the main thrust of the story and why should anyone care how he listened to music? Apple Fanboys just can't help themselves.
If you aren't part of the solution, then there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Anyone struck by the self-serving nature of an artist who, having made a boatload of money in the pre-internet era, now says that he's "not concerned with the effects of piracy on artists" these days? Now he can afford to be holier-then-thou and claim that it's all about the sound quality. Nice, coming from someone with a net worth of $65 million (according to celebritynetworth.com), living on a huge property ("Broken Arrow Ranch") outside of SF? Wonder how those starving artists who can't sell a CD due to piracy feel about Neil.
Speaking of crazy technology, would it be possible to build an audiophile system where basically you used very high quality microphones similar to what they used to record orchestras etc. Then the system plays back stuff through reasonably decent speakers[1] in the room, records the result using the microphones, and keeps "practising" till the playback is as close to perfect as possible (the microphones produce close to the same values as the studio put[2] in the recording).
;).
;) ).
The advantage of this "practising" approach is the filtering or changes do not have to start "after" each sound, they can actually start "before" the sound - in anticipation of it. This allows your time-domain filters a lot more flexibility
The disadvantage of course is it could take a while before the system gets good at a particular performance in a particular room (and weather - humidity, pressure, will affect it). And you probably have to be sitting very close to where the microphones are for the performance. Of course with some intelligence and heuristics you could still have it play a new piece of music adequately - but for best performance you need to let it practice for a while.
It might be easier to do a variation of the concept with very fancy headphones (you may need a dummy head with mikes).
[1] The speakers could also be digitally controlled - the position of the diaphragms could be measured optically and a very powerful amplifier would "slam" the diaphragm to the desired position at very high speeds. If this can be done accurately 192000 times a second your ears would be the low pass filter (some animals might not be impressed but too bad
FWIW I've been thinking about this stuff since the 1980s and 1990s, but I've been working in IT not audio... The technology level probably wasn't good enough back then anyway.
[2] Yes I know the studio will usually do a lot of processing, but if their release version sounds the same to you as it does to them then that's "high fidelity" right?
I like live music most. I don't have vinyl and would have a problem with that as I play with my songlists. My family doesn't care, for them it's ok to have mp3. They just don't hear the difference.
In the 1990s, a typical average band that actually had some business sense could make a living selling CDs, as well as gigging. If you had a label or did the pressing yourself, you could earn $5 to $10 a CD.
What piracy did was absolutely kill that, and change the music industry in a nasty way. Instead of having decent new bands on the radio or concerts, the record industry only either puts out acts they KNOW will sell, with each and every single word in every lyric run over by marketers for maximum "pop", or they use established acts over 20 years old and run another greatest hits album. Joe Sixpack and the Thumpers have -zero- chance these days of making it, since they can't make any cash at all selling albums, and with venue slots so rare, gigging is out of the picture. Getting past local/regional is impossible. Heard of ANY act making it big since the 1990s? I sure have not, other than bands that were tailer-made from the ground to cater to the kiddos like Justin Beiber.
Thank you pirates. The music industry is completely dead with no way for any new acts to ever make it big, or perhaps even past the local bar-room stage, since the A&R folks are just not there anymore -- they only "promote from within."
This is not endorsing RIAA tactics either. IMHO, they just made piracy cool and more accepted.
Nope, piracy didn't kill the music industry, the record industry killed the music industry.
Don't go mixing cause and effect my friend.
ABX or go home.
The original article at http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-trademarks-new-audio-format-20120403 Rolling Stone says that Pono is "a revolutionary new audio music system" and "a modern-day iPod for the 21st Century". I'm not sure why that would include a new audio format - although Rolling Stone's URL seems to suggest that. I have seen this article misquoted all around the globe, though - everyone pointing at the same old Rolling Stone page, some mentioning "new audio formats", others mentioning "patents" for a new MP3-format - etc etc..
I'd say hoax. Educated hoax, with press releases and trademarks and the lot, but still a hoax. Wake me up when the Pono system is for sale at the Neil Young Store.
my other sig is a 500 page novel
I already pirate all my music as flac, been doing that for a few years. in fact, I've been replacing what mp3's i have with flac copies.
I just googled Pono and Pono Audio Format and I don't see shit for it.
I call bullshit on this.
Be seeing you...
I think I've found Noam Chomsky's slashdot account.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you had a label or did the pressing yourself, you could earn $5 to $10 a CD.
And the label has always eaten the bulk of that. The music industry has always been predatory.
Well, Wikipedia isn't much help here... Plain Old .NET Object. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PONO), but I doubt using .NET Objects would get him very far...
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I heard a perfect echo die
Into an anonymous wall of digital sound
Somewhere deep inside
Of my soul
I can't find a side by side comparison anywhere between these codecs. Is there a significant improvement over the other two 'piracy' standards?
You say things that offend me and I can deal with it. Can you?
Neil Young is talking about online digital music sales. Steve Jobs and Apple were the first to twist the arms and convince the Big Four to legitamitely sell digital music online (DRM Fairplay AAC/MP4). Before that there was little to no online sales and the majority of music was either MP3 being download through Napster/Gnutella/etc or CDs purchased at Walmart/Sam Goody/Best Buy/etc. The rest of the industry followed after Apple's success in this, including Amazon MP3, Zune Marketpace and all the others.
Seems we need some music to go with this.
From Neil Young's "Rust Never Sleeps" concert, the one with the Jawas (yes Jawas) at the end:
"Hey Hey, My My (Into The Black)"
Well I hope Neil Young will remember, a southern man don't need him around anyhow
. .
Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording
So lets see. The cost of a CD is about $15 and contains 12 tracks on average (rough guess). That's a value of $1.25 per song. If pirating it only gets you 5% of that shouldn't the restitution for pirating music be 6 cents per song? Actually if you are pirating it you also save the music label the physical cost of the CD, case, and printing a label. Not to mention shipping and warehousing. Why the music industry doesn't figure out a way to make their customers happy is beyond me. Not that I'm an advocate of piracy, but the way the *IAA works is pretty crazy.
just like billy mays pioneered in laundry detergents
apple doesn't know jack about music or sound, people were playing music on the model1 before apple ever started.
apple is just a johnny come lately like SGI
Now, my history may be a bit rusty (do please correct me if I am mistaken), but as I understand it, radio started out with people playing their records and / or live music over the air. The rights holders got pissy, so the radio operators figured out a way to generate income and compensate creators.
Is file sharing really any different? I know I've read about file sharing services trying to come up with ways to do the same thing (compensate creators), but nope... the MAFIAAs want total control over everything so they can keep ripping off artists in quasi-secrecy.
...It's only business models burning.
It's the content of the music, that relays the emotion. Would Robert Johnson, or Django Reinhardt, convey any more or less emotion in vinyl, or 192khz sample rate? You won't extract more emotion from music with more clarity. Less clarity could actually enhance the emotion delivered, for example a distorted guitar amplifier sound. It's too easy to get caught up in the properties of the playback machines, rather than the message of the music, the emotional payload that can be carried just as well through various different quality media. Rhythm, harmony, pitch, tone, timbre all combine to deliver the message, the quality of the reproduction is less important.
If you're old enough, remember enjoying a song on AM radio? Was the sound quality better than CD? Did the content of the song make you feel something in your heart and soul? That is what music is, and good music won't be hindered very much by the media of delivery. Of course we all want to hear music in the cleanest, clearest, and truest way, but don't overvalue it.
Yawh..... here we go again "24/192 Music Downloads...and why they make no sense"" ( http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html )
That may be true but makes no sense in context. Why would he follow up his comment about Steve Jobs being a pioneer in digital music "sales" with how he listens to Albums at home. He was clearly talking about the quality of digital music - not how it is sold.
More Apple spam ? I am beginning to prefer the Mormons.
Where would the news, current affairs, documentaries, panel discussions, politics or theatre go if you wasted the radio channel time on music. You might have to make a second radio channel!
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
if he wants some low quality, he should think back to am radio. and then there are his concerts on dime a dozen: crap in flac
He was born in 1945, so it's most likely that most everything sounds like it's gone through a compressor to him now.
@peetm
Neil must listen to the rock band Pono for Pirates. or was that Pyros? I never get that right.
Um... because it rhymes with the name of the main guy from U2?
In point of fact, Opus supports 24 bit, but it's a lossy codec, so there's not much point to caring about that. It does have > 16 bits of dynamic range though, so that's worth something.
Opus supports > stereo in a single stream, but channels are paired within that stream. There is no freeform coupling like in Vorbis, because it turns out not to be very useful. Vorbis gets it's 5.1 boost not form the coupling, but from the custom codebooks for those modes. Opus is also able to tailor its codebooks for 5.1/6.1/7.1....22.2, etc
This bit rate conversation is a hoax!!!!!!! The real problem with modern day audio quality are the god damn "devices" that everyone is listening to with ear bud headphones! Try going to a place like Best Buy to purchase a descent to high end stereo.... you can't. It's the speakers man!!!! Get out of your micro chip worlds and buy a pair of speakers with a big woofer and tweeter and a wood cabinet and blast it and piss your neighbors off. Who is Neal Young trying to fool? Do you think he is concerned about bit rates when he is blasting his guitar riffs through an amp and PA system at one of his live concerts? Back in the day before this computer insanity started, the way you would hear new music was by walking down the street and hearing the sounds of people's s stereos bleeding into the street. Or by going into the local record store and seeing a funky album cover and purchasing the record without even hearing it because what the hell, I'll take a chance, It's only ten bucks. Half the fun of music use to be taking a chance and discovering new music, now people pick and choose like their life depends on it.
We have done extensive tests on this. So have dozens of audio developers.
There's one thing all the science has made clear: If Pono offers any sonic advantage, it won't be due to file resolutions.
Blind AB listening tests confirm that even trained audio engineers and self-professed audiophiles can not hear the difference between 256kbs and 320bps files and the original high-resolution masters.
http://trustmeimascientist.com/2012/05/05/results-from-our-audio-poll-neil-young-and-high-definition-sound/
If there is any sound advantage to be had with Pono, it might come from improved headphones, speakers, *possibly* amplifier sections, and *maybe* DA converters.
You can listen for yourself if you want and decide on your own! Here's a link for that:
http://trustmeimascientist.com/2012/04/02/take-our-audio-poll-do-we-need-higher-definition-sound/