Pono Music - high-quality music initiative from Neil Young

holland123 said:

Ok, mike et al. I pulled the trigger on this thing, as popeye would say " I've heard alls I can stands and I can't stands no more". After hearing your comments on the pono and now auditioning my friends unit, with some sennheiser ie80 reference ear buds I just ordered one, and a set of those buds too. (Shhh don't tell the old lady, she already thinks I'm insane enough) ( and when the hell did earbuds become IEM's? ( in ear monitors?) I missed the memo on that one...

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I upgraded the speakers in my car so I could hear Pono better. Got some JL Audio rears and fronts and installed them on Friday. It sounds great. Added a stereo cable to the back of my auxiliary input on the JVC and play the Pono out of the balanced out port. It sounds great. The DVD-Audios also sound so much better now.

I also saw last night on I believe Steve Hoffman's forum that someone contacted Pono about the Beatles rumor and they confirmed it. Now it's just a question of when and what mastering the files come from. Some believe it might be the remasters used to make the latest Stereo records or possibly the full sized files that were ported down to the Apple USB drive back in 2009.

http://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/report-beatles-tracks-coming-to-pono.406067/page-7

It wouldn't surprise me if the pono sounds better than the dvda's in that jvc, cuz the dvda chip in that jvc head is not very good. My friend you really need to snatch a kenwood or pioneer dvda unit when you can.

i am also curious if any of you have tried ripping the hi-rez 2 ch stream of a dvd-a to the pono to see if it ignores watermarks.

holland123 said:

i am also curious if any of you have tried ripping the hi-rez 2 ch stream of a dvd-a to the pono to see if it ignores watermarks.

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Does anything pay attention to watermarks in FLACs? I thought they were only an issue when playing DVD-A discs in a DVD-A player.

damn good point atrocity, converted to flac and played through a flac player the watermark should be washed away, i can't wait to give this thing a test ride.

holland123 said:

damn good point atrocity, converted to flac and played through a flac player the watermark should be washed away, i can't wait to give this thing a test ride.

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At the risk of being pedantic, I don't think it would be washed away, I just can't imagine that there's any circuitry in anything other than a DVD-A player that would look for it or do anything based on it. I'm pretty sure that DVD-A extracted to FLAC and then re-authored as another DVD-A would run into trouble on players that react to watermarks.

Then again, I guess you do have the option of removing the watermark when doing the extraction via Foobar2000...I just leave that switched off since I don't know if it would affect the sound or not.

Pono was just updated with a new firmware to add DSD playback direct from the DAC, no conversion to PCM. It's opened up a whole new world on my player as I can listen to OOP SACD files and other offerings. Really like this player. Next up is getting a set of balanced headphones which supposedly take the musical enjoyment to another level.

http://www.frys.com/product/8361897

$249 at Frys after $150 off promo code (must be signed up to receive email promo codes from frys)

good 5/10 - 5/16

In store and online for shipping

salsdali said:

http://www.frys.com/product/8361897

$249 at Frys after $150 off promo code (must be signed up to receive email promo codes from frys)

good 5/10 - 5/16

In store and online for shipping

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Interesting. Add the ROM upgrade and the Pono handles Stereo DSD64 and DSD128 files as well.

Ok , I am reviving this thread because this pono is excellent, after some lengthy break in I must unquestionably conclude that this thing smokes any other portable that I have owned; I pod, rio, sansa, and my last one the galaxy s, dedicated media player, which can also handle 24/96 audio, but not like this. Ripped the 2 ch dvd-audio to this baby and wow. I picked up a 128 g card for it and it gives almost 200g. This thing drives my full size over the ear AKG cans with no problem. I even pulled out my old koss pro4-aa power guzzling phones and it handles them moderately well. The only draw back for me is there is no tone control. But thats just due to my obsessive nature to mess w things. The reality is if it's top notch going in then no adjustment is necessary but I like tweaking shit sometimes for no reason. Encoding hi rez to flac level 2 or 3 gets your average album to about 800 -900 mb, so a decent collection can be loaded. It handles tags very oddly though, as it will subdivide albums into 2 or 3 folders sometimes for no apparent reason, but it is gapless, handles dsd effortlessly, it even handles sacd transfer to diff files, haven't tried a ps3 rip yet. But so far it plays everything I've thrown at it superbly. For the price I must say this is a winner. Really Bad name though, I have to keep telling the old lady... no honey it's not a PORNO.... but you go ahead and get ready and I'll be right up!

I am curious if you tried any FiiO players before settling on the Pono? The FiiO players are cheaper and very well rated for sound quality, and they play HiRes. I've had my eyes on both, but haven't made a purchase yet. I am still using an old Cowan player that sounds great, but doesn't play 96k HiRes (48k/24bit max).

http://www.cnet.com/news/fiios-new-low-price-high-res-music-player-wows-the-audiophiliac/

http://www.cnet.com/news/the-ponoplayer-whats-up-with-that/

SMS said:

I am curious if you tried any FiiO players before settling on the Pono? The FiiO players are cheaper and very well rated for sound quality, and they play HiRes.

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And the newly released 2nd Generation FiiO players also play DSD files, as long as they do not use DST packing.
www.dsd.sonore.us

No unfortunately I had no opportunity to listen to that fiio, I think I was looking at the x-5, I was on the fence as well between the two and a bud of mine had purchased the pono and I had opportunity for a listen, but I have a feeling that fiio is excellent as well. It gets generally good reviews over at headfi, I would love to give it a listen though.

holland123 said:

....Really Bad name though, I have to keep telling the old lady... no honey it's not a PORNO.... but you go ahead and get ready and I'll be right up!

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Just wait til they come out with a smaller model and call it a child pono.

While I don't see myself buying the Pono hardware any time soon, I finally spent some time last night poking around on the Pono Music Store. Mr. Young may claim that everything other than 24/192 is garbage, but he's sure willing to sell a lot of 16/44.1!

That aside, a couple things caught my eye. He's selling "Time Fades Away" at 24/192...I don't really care about the bitrate, but as far as I know that's still the only Neil Young album you can't buy on any modern disc format, so it's nice to know it's there. You can also get the Dylan mono box in 16/44.1 for about $30 less than Amazon gets for the physical discs. And quite a bit of out of print Beach Boys.

I think the prices--at least for Young's own material--are better than HDTracks. My cheap side thinks they're still inflated, but it's tempting to get some of his albums that I don't already have on CD. But it also seems to me that Pono is selling some material at 16/44.1 that can be obtained elsewhere at higher resolution. I'm not personally convinced of the need for higher resolution, but it seems a bit sketchy for the bitrate evangelist to sell the "inferior" stuff when the "superior" product exists. I'm sure it comes down to contracts and l*wy*rs and all that nasty behind the scenes stuff, but it looks like anyone really obsessed with numbers needs to shop around a bit before pulling the trigger.

atrocity said:

I think the prices--at least for Young's own material--are better than HDTracks.

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The 24/192 of Sinatra's "Wee Small Hours" is $17 or $18 at Pono and $25 elsewhere.