Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music

[braymond]

Geko I wouldn't bother modifying the device in anyway - I was just suggesting you might want to try it with a separate dac - which you already have :-) - as the internal one isn't that great . It is however an excellent digital transport . You're right about cap upgrades etc - quite often there is zero science in these supposed upgrades. People like swapping op amps for example - and often introducing distortions - usually due to incorrect decoupling and hence oscillation - which they perceive as "cleaner bass, better treble" etc.


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[danbarber]

I will say that your assertion that people like vinyl because it's distorted is a little misguided.

I'm not sure it is. There are many cases where it's possible to point to the distortion being the reason something sounds good. For instance, many people like the sound of tube amps due to the distortion from the tubes. FM radio is pleasing to listen to because of the inherent distortion.

There are problems with filters in the a/d and d/a chain which cause a large amount of phase distortion as you get closer to the filter (clearly visible at 20k on a CD player for example) - to get a clean unhampered phase response for 20k audio you actually need a bandwidth of about 200k. Which would mean a 400k sample rate . That would be my ideal choice - but even that would be fraught with other problems.

Certainly early D/A and A/D converters suffered at the high end due to problems implementing a steep enough filter in the analogue domain. Modern oversampling converters implement these filters digitally and consequently don't suffer from this problem.

Can you explain why you would need a 400Khz sample rate to accurately record up to 20Khz?

Another problem is 22k of bandwidth doesn't capture harmonics - which you might not be able to hear as a tone but your brain can perceive them.

I'm pretty sure most audio chains (especially speakers) will filter out anything much higher than 20Khz. My monitors certainly do!

I always come back to the same conclusion - sound is analogue and is best kept that way. But I love the convenience of digital I must say. Btw - the best sounding medium I've heard is 2 inch tape running at 30ips - much higher resolution than 16bit digital

I've only had the pleasure of working with 2 inch once or twice (a Studer 24 track machine). It was certainly an experience!

[danbarber]

That is one reason. Not the reason. The other... is that it is 24 bit. Which is both higher quality, and the quality it was mixed at, in the studio.

Yes, in many cases the source used to cut the vinyl master will be 24-bit (although I have heard of masters being cut straight from CD or even MP3!). This does not mean that the vinyl has the same objective sound quality as the master though, as the noise floor on vinyl is much much higher (around -60 to -70dB at best).

Yes. Because it was mastered... and then compressed to fit on a CD.

Modern records are compressed or limited in order to sound louder (on jukeboxes or the radio), not to fit on a CD.

[MHP]

I'm liking this danbarber guy, he's telling it how it is!

[DJ OD]

I'm not really an audiophile but I know that whenever compressed music is played loud, IE in a nightclub, it often can sound pretty shit. This was also the case when CD turntables first came on the market. Clubs didn't implement them straight away as they sounded shite. Until the equipment developed, clubs still used trusted turntables, in fact a lot still do.

Whenever I have had records cut, I was always told to provide .aiff or .wav at 24bit. But the engineer always said, he could take off a CD or a lower rate, but the final cut would sound crappy, especially loud.

I've also had badly engineered tracks on vinyl where the stylus would jump all over the shop and top end distorted, albeit only crappy white labels.

I'm sure CD's were made for conveniece and lower manufacturing costs than sound quality.

Just my 2p


DJ OD

[macmilm]

I'm not really an audiophile

Are you not a DJ ?

[Goldberg]

Are you not a DJ ?

Not sure Steps, Five, B*Witched and the likes ever released music that was 24bit or whatever the bestest is so probably not an issue.

[Geko]

Modern records are compressed or limited in order to sound louder (on jukeboxes or the radio), not to fit on a CD.

So an album of tracks mixed in a studio in 24 bit fits on a CD?

I don't know about you... But I don't play my CDs on a jukebox or the radio. How old are you, 70?

I'm liking this danbarber guy, he's telling it how it is!

Is he though?

[Geko]

I googled. And this one supports what I was saying... So this is the one I am posting.

http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/02...ut-why-bother/

[danbarber]

I don't know about you... But I don't play my CDs on a jukebox or the radio. How old are you, 70?

Dude, radio still exists! As do jukeboxes actually (although I haven't seen many).

Anyway, you should read up on the loudness wars (if you haven't already). The practice of making records louder to stand out started somewhere around the 40's (to stand out on jukeboxes), but was accelerated in the 80's when it became apparent that you could push the levels of CD much harder. Unfortunately this has resulted in many good records being ruined by shitty limiting and compression.

So an album of tracks mixed in a studio in 24 bit fits on a CD?

Yes, when dithered properly down to 16-bits, and you won't hear a difference. This is an excellent video on how digital signals work, and explains dithering well too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cIQ9IXSUzuM

Skip to about 11:35 for the section on dither.

[danbarber]

"What we're trying to do here is fix the degradation of music that the digital revolution has caused," Jimmy Iovine, head of Interscope-Geffen-A&M, said recently during an HP event to announce its new webOS-based mobile devices.

The degradation is entirely down to shitty mastering practices enforced by record execs that just want every record to be louder than the last. It has nothing to do with digital, even with MP3/AAC compression.

[DJ OD]

Are you not a DJ ?

I am a DJ, but that doesn't mean I am an audiophile. Vinyl junkie maybe... Some of the places I've DJ'd in, you wouldn't notice if the sound quality was 24bit, 16bit or 8bit. Ravers on drugs tend not to notice much, so long as something repetative is being played.

Not sure Steps, Five, B*Witched and the likes ever released music that was 24bit or whatever the bestest is so probably not an issue.

Britney Bitch!


DJ OD

[blaggard]

I've resigned myself to digital recordings even though I've been in studios since the early 70's, I can tolerate it pretty much but even with modern digital recording systems (I'm talking about LONG before the mastering process) the degradation is mostly in the space AROUND the instruments, it largely gets ignored or thrown out, hence an orchestral recording will be (subjectively) cold and clinical. Electronic instruments will be unaffected or even (subjectively) improved.
As a musician I find the rigid computer timing on pretty much all recordings more disturbing, that and the fact that NOBODY seems to be able to sing in tune resulting in the profligate use of pitch correction which I can ALWAYS hear.....

[tombott]

Digital music is shit, end of. You can argue about bit rate, compression etc all you like but at the end of the day music is analogue not digital. The original algorithms used for the compression of CD's rips the soul out of music. If Pono can go some way to restore that, then that's great. Vinyl still is, and always will be my preferred way of listening to music.

[braymond]

Dan - I partially explained one theory as to why higher bandwidth is beneficial . I am too busy at work to post more at the minute - I will tell you that no high end mixing console with an analogue signal path has a 20k bandwidth . More like 80k . One I worked on 10 years ago had a ruler flat response to almost 200k. - the limit of our audio precision test kit at the time . I will also say I don't glean my info from articles I read on the Internet - my knowledge comes from working in the industry for a long time . I'm not dissing everything you are saying don't get me wrong - but if it was all as simple as following the nyquist theorem digital audio should have been perfect from the offset . And it most certainly wasn't


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[braymond]

The degradation is entirely down to shitty mastering practices enforced by record execs that just want every record to be louder than the last. It has nothing to do with digital, even with MP3/AAC compression.

Please don't tell me you think mp3 is ok


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[braymond]

I've resigned myself to digital recordings even though I've been in studios since the early 70's, I can tolerate it pretty much but even with modern digital recording systems (I'm talking about LONG before the mastering process) the degradation is mostly in the space AROUND the instruments, it largely gets ignored or thrown out, hence an orchestral recording will be (subjectively) cold and clinical. Electronic instruments will be unaffected or even (subjectively) improved.
As a musician I find the rigid computer timing on pretty much all recordings more disturbing, that and the fact that NOBODY seems to be able to sing in tune resulting in the profligate use of pitch correction which I can ALWAYS hear.....

I would certainly agree that some spatial information seems to be lost


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[CzarJunkie]

Since Dan's first post I've done a lot of reading about this subject, including the article Dan first referenced. Do I understand it? No. From the reading I have done though, and from my limited understanding, it seems no one really knows what the answer is.

Those who try to boil it down to pure science, like Dan and his article, argue it's a waste of time producing something like Pono. I would argue that humans are very good at recognising patterns in nature. We're hard wired to use our senses to detect minute changes in patterns and that, in part, is what has made us a successful species. Our ears are the receiving equipment that make sound possible. Like everything else, some ears will be better equipped than others for certain tasks. Every ear will also be different in the way it handles vibrations. To make it even more complicated, no doubt the brain throws in a few more unknown variables too. So, could our ears and brain be the imponderable variables that makes all sound so subjective and the science incomplete?

As Dave Grohl says in regards to Pono, 'I'm a believer'. And given what I've read over the last week or so, I'm also going to take it on faith.

[Geko]

I can definitely hear the difference in different formats of compression. Be it an mp3 at 192 or 320. Be it between 16 and 24 bit and different bitrates. There are many different variables to your listening experience. DAC, Amp, Speakers. When I setup my Touch with the external DAC and Tube Amp with hand selected valves. I was blown away. I then got a dedicated headphone valve amp and some decent headphones. That was also a great experience. I went through all the music I loved from before and had what I consider a brand new listening experience. If there is no perceptible difference between the different types of audio formats.... Then I am fucking mental.... And I've wasted quite a bit of money...!

[CzarJunkie]

They've released more info about the design and technology:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...c/posts/807924

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects...c/posts/808242