Pono - Neil Young

[troutman]

Neil Young Reveals the New Killer Gadget That Will Save Music


http://www.openculture.com/2012/10/n...ave_music.html

For quite some time now, Young has lamented the decline of music during the digital age. It’s not pirating that’s the culprit. It’s the MP3, a format that degrades the quality of the music we hear. Speaking at a Wall Street Journal conference earlier this year (watch here), Young complained that the MP3 can’t “transfer the depth of the art.” “My goal,” he continued, “is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years.”

Enter PureTone, which has actually been renamed Pono more recently. The device/music service will hit the market next year, and it essentially promises to let fans hear recordings in super high fidelity, as if they owned the original master tapes created by various artists.

[Hemi-Cuda]

until i looked at the thread title more closely, i had a vastly different idea of what it would be about

[jammies]

Neil's new book talks about it quite a bit. Pono, however, is a terrible brand name.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by jammies

Neil's new book talks about it quite a bit. Pono, however, is a terrible brand name.

Yeah, that is where I learned about it too. It was called PureTone before. Quite the rambling book.

The skeptic in me wonders whether lay-people can really hear the difference. There was another thread where it was shown people can't discern the supposed better sound of quality of vinyl vs. CDs.

The cheap skate in me does not want to have to replace my whole library with Pono, if it is indeed that much better.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by troutman

The skeptic in me wonders whether lay-people can really hear the difference. There was another thread where it was shown people can't discern the supposed better sound of quality of vinyl vs. CDs.

More interesting, in my opinion, is whether the current teen/young adult demographic would prefer something truer to the mixing board master. They've grown up on the MP3 sound, selected headphones with frequency response attuned to it, and indeed, much of their music is being mastered for reproduction via a lossy medium.

Are they really ready for music that has actual ..gasp..dynamics? With greater fidelity in the treble range? Snares and cymbals that sound like actual snares and cymbals?

[Rathji]

Maybe it is because I spent north of 12 years working in a extremely loud environment, but I can't tell the difference between $4 ear buds and $100 ear buds.

I doubt switching from MP3 to anything else really would do much for me.

[Inglewood Jack]

this...is so easy I'm not even going to bother talking about how I already have a massive library of Pono. damn, there it went.

low res MP3s are one issue, although I think the bad old days of 128kbps napster files continue to gradually fade away. iTunes downloads are still lossy but the algorithm is far superior so it isn't distinguishable from the original in most cases. even if you're the type that doesn't pay for stuff, lossless FLACs are pretty standard issue.

what's a bigger problem, besides us old #######s hating all music since our teen years, is clipping. when I hear that crackling sound because the studio engineer was stupid and wanted to make it as loud as possible, I want to murder bags of kittens.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by troutman

The skeptic in me wonders whether lay-people can really hear the difference. There was another thread where it was shown people can't discern the supposed better sound of quality of vinyl vs. CDs.

Yah, he mentions more than once that the "sound quality" of analog is better than digital, and that LPs sound better than CDs, but I think he is confused between "quality" and "the sound I am used to". I am a huge Neil Young fan, but when he also talks about how he spent money trying to get a water-powered vehicle to work before he went to biofuel+electric, it makes me wonder if he has a few misfires in his critical thinking skills.

I can barely tell the difference between a CD and a decent quality MP3. I can immediately tell the difference between vinyl and a CD, though, because vinyl has that background hum and distortion. Vinyl is also variable in quality across the platter (because the grooves are different sizes) and loses definition when you oversaturate it with more information than can be carried on the medium, although it degrades gracefully, unlike digital media. Still, you can hardly say a vinyl album is better quality, you might like the sound better, but that is learned preference, not better fidelity.

[jammies]

And Inglewood Jack has a good point, the main problem with music today is clipping and over-compression to try to get music to be as loud as possible on crappy playback equipment. That won't be fixed by any kind of media change, that's something that needs to be fixed by the engineers who are mangling the product.

[MickMcGeough]

Originally Posted by jammies

Still, you can hardly say a vinyl album is better quality, you might like the sound better, but that is learned preference, not better fidelity.

This is actually scientifically incorrect. Analog audio, technically, is superior to digital. I'm not saying anything about vinyl as a medium specifically, but there's always something lost in an analog to digital conversion.

I'd imagine only a very small percentage of music listeners even have the gear to appreciate a lossless digital format, never mind whatever Pono will deliver. Regardless of what Flea says, I seriously doubt most people would even know this is higher fidelity music.

[HPLovecraft]

Why would they call it Pono?! Seriously, why? People are going to rip that apart with jokes.

[GreenLantern]

I have the same feelings now as I did when I read about it in his book, I am sure the idea is great... but I don't want to rebuild my entire music library.

I might start buying albums in this quality down the road.. but I will most likely wait till they have tested for a while. I did read somewhere in his book that one of the big record labels already transformed thousands of albums.. or whatever they need to do to make it this quality.

They should offer those albums for free to anyone that purchased the MP3 quality previously, this would get me firmly on board.

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

This is actually scientifically incorrect. Analog audio, technically, is superior to digital. I'm not saying anything about vinyl as a medium specifically, but there's always something lost in an analog to digital conversion.

Highly debatable - leaving aside vinyl as a specific medium, every analog storage medium has inherent distortion. When you're dealing with magnetic media for example, you're dealing with reactive components (electrical fields generated in coils), and those have their own response curves, distortion, bandwidth limitations, etc. Throw variance in the magnetic media itself, tape wow and flutter (exists even on high end studio gear at some level), and its almost certainly less precise a recording method than high rate digital sampling.

At the extremes of fidelity, I can digitally sample discrete values at ever increasing rates, and simply consume more storage at a linear rate per sampling interval. Analog mediums, however, run into intrinsic physics based limits that you can't overcome. I can guarantee you I can run a digital sampler at higher frequency rates than the rise and fall time of traditional analog recording techniques that rely on magnetic fields induced in coils, and then depend on the media they are writing to responding perfectly to the magnetic field and inducing precisely the correct magnetic charge for that exact point in time.

In fact, you can't even build an analog oscillator with the same kind of accuracy as a digital one to drive the tape across the recording head at exactly the right velocity, so you've already got to dip into digital technology to preserve temporal fidelity.

[jammies]

Originally Posted by MickMcGeough

This is actually scientifically incorrect. Analog audio, technically, is superior to digital. I'm not saying anything about vinyl as a medium specifically, but there's always something lost in an analog to digital conversion.

Any medium you use for analog audio s going to degrade the quality. You are confusing the analog waveform you are recording with the recording itself: because an analog medium invariably introduces distortion (tape or vinyl), it is never going to be as accurate as a sufficiently sampled digital recording, which introduces no distortion and can have as arbitrarily high dynamic range and fidelity as you like, up to the technical limitations of your equipment.

Analog has built-in fidelity limits imposed by the medium and the equipment used, including, but not limited to: the specific formulation of the metal on the tape (if you were around in the 80s, you might remember the different types of cassette tapes you could buy, of differing prices and quality); the thickness of the tape; the reading/writing strength of the tape heads while recording and playing back; the saturation level of the recorded waveform; the flutter and distortion introduced by physical media flowing through a complex geared system; tape stretch; and the accumulation of oxides on the tape heads as the media scrapes over them.

To say that you "lose something" when doing a analog/digital conversion is true, but you undoubtedly lose MORE recording to analog because of these factors. Further, because these are physical limitations, they are not nearly as easy to overcome as limitations in the digital realm, where error-checking has had literally billions of man-hours dedicated to its perfection, since it is both fundamental and critical to computers, networks, and every other digital technology we depend on.

So, to summarize, it is a misconception that analog equipment is more faithful than digital because you are not converting anything - you *are* converting sound to something else, that being a copy of that sound in a different medium than the air it travels over to your ear. Digital conversion is theoretically better (and now, in actuality better as well) because it is not limited by the physical medium in which that copy is stored, and can be as true to the source as you have computing power to make it.

This is also why digital photography has almost completely replaced film, and there, too, the purists decry the loss of quality against the demonstrable fact that sufficiently high resolutions of digital film only differ from analog in that they have better fidelity due to the same mastery of error-checking. Subjective opinions otherwise have no basis.

[jammies]

Ha, I took too long typing that out. Damn you sclitheroe!

[sclitheroe]

Originally Posted by jammies

Ha, I took too long typing that out. Damn you sclitheroe!

Heh.

I still respect those that prefer analogue (hell, a lot of times I like certain material in mono, or played in mono, if I can get it); it's a very subjective topic.

One interesting thing I was reading recently, that I'll have to find a link for, is that the human auditory system, at the nerve impulse level, is a series of "ticks" - that is to say, the analog waveform in the ear canal is actually translated to digital nerve impulses that the brain then interprets as an analog sound.

So in fact we can argue all we want about digital vs analogue recording, but the sound actually reaches our brain as a digital signal in the end.

[Inglewood Jack]

I think the confusion is mostly whether vinyl sounds "better" or "more pleasing". probably the inherent distortion has a smoothing or warming effect that makes it easier to sit and listen to a record beside the fireplace with your cognac. also a lot of those hardcore analog guys are the same ones who will tell you that their $1000 stereo interconnects and power cables gave the music that extra sense of "danceability".

I use studio monitors with a good DAC cause I like hearing a guitar pick slide across strings and the weight of each key press on a piano recording, but it does actually get a bit fatiguing after a while, especially when you spend the rest of your day with low-fi music in the background of your car, or workout headphones.

but I guess that's the root of the problem, who still sits around just listening to music and doing nothing else? barely anybody, which is why the hi-fi game will remain niche unfortunately. it would be nice if the download options were always the highest resolution either way, so that those few who care will be satisfied.

[Titan]

Once again blown away by the depth of comprehension people on CP have in areas I have no knowledge in whatsoever. Great posts Sclitheroe and Jammies. Well done.

[MickMcGeough]

Thanks jammies, sclitheroe - good audio education in here.

[opendoor]

File size is going to be a real issue for most people. You can already get stuff in 24 bit 96khz and you're looking at about 1.5GB for a FLAC album, and more than double that for uncompressed.

Hopefully there's more to this than simply a higher sample rate, because studies have shown that no one (even audiophiles) can reliably discern an improvement between CD encoding (16 bit 44.1khz) and 24/192 on high end equipment, let alone on whatever crappy gear most people use. I'm familiar with one study that involved about 500 recording engineers, engineering students, and self-described audiophiles doing a double blind test on a 24/192 source and then that same source downsampled to 16/44.1. Listeners were repeatedly given 2 different samples and told to pick the higher one and they were correct 49.6% of the time; in other words they were basically guessing and were less accurate than a coin toss.

And if you ignore professionals and enthusiasts, 99% of the population would likely have trouble discerning between a well encoded 192 kbit/s MP3 and a 24/192 file. Digital audio isn't like video where limited storage and transfer technology has forced artificial limits on resolution that are perceptible to the average person; CD level sampling that's been around for 30 years more or less covers the human hearing spectrum.

The biggest victory for Pono will be if it can force better mastering/re-mastering practices for stuff released through it. If music was mastered to actually sound good on decent equipment instead of over-compressing everything in an attempt to get it as loud as possible, that would be fantastic. That's what most people hear when they do their own A/B tests with CDs and things like SACDs and think they're hearing the higher sample rate; the mastering for the latter is usually much better so it sounds better.