Neil Young is our most famous champion; so audiophiles… don’t you eff with him.
In the New York Post there was a recent article (yes, I know, it is the NYP, but I think they are representative of the hordes who we do expect to eventually join our community, albeit perhaps as causal imbibers as opposed to addicts like the rest of us)
Engineers at Neil Young’s company admit doubts on music player
This is typical Luddite fodder. First declare Neil as the Audiophile’s champion, then have what he champions, and how he champions it, appear to be ridiculed by people who are close to him, work for him or who are members of the Audiophile community itself.
They even poo poo 4K video in this article, also as ‘too advanced’ for real people to ever care about [I’ve had a large 4K monitor on my desk for a decade, and of course the size and resolution does not give me a competitive advantage :-)]
This article takes a ‘high-resolution is worthless’ position.
They interview Chesky, who explains what improvements high-res can bring [presumably on devices that can handle the higher bandwidth. Like Neil Young’s Pono]. Yay David!
They interview Lukasz Fikus, digital audio designer at Lampizator [a relatively new and relatively unknown, but rising, brand. Their room at THE SHOW Las Vegas 2014 sounded decent] , who explains “the difference is so miniscule that it’s not even worth talking about”. Not… worth.. talking… about… Well, I guess we better close down the blog, since that is ALL we talk about. Perhaps someone who thinks these differences are so minuscule does not a great digital audio designer make? I don’t know.
Hey, everybody has their favorite approach to digital audio technology.
Audio Note likes Red Book just fine. They do well with it 🙂 [We are certainly enjoying the poop out of their very expensive 16-bit CDT-5 transport and DAC5 Signature]
EMM Labs like extremely high resolution, and they do well themselves. But, if I remember correctly, feel that most players out there that support the high-res formats do not have the horsepower [powerful enough DSP chip and support structures] to properly handle the higher bandwidth required.
The real situation is that most players that say they support high-resolution, like 24×192 etc, are typically better built than those that do not. They care about catering to the audiophile community, unlike that vast majority of everyday consumer electronics out there. They are making a least a small nod in the direction of people who think the quality of the sound MATTERS.
And so the Pono, by supporting higher resolution formats, is saying that they care about the sound, unlike the other mainstream digital audio players out there.
And, let’s face it, it is a mathematical certainty that higher res sounds better than low resolution…. All Else Being Equal. And the vast majority of people can perceive higher resolution quite easily [both audio and video]. And they really like it.
All Else Being Equal.
Of course, if you have to remaster to bring the media to the higher res format – well, mastering often has a larger, more beneficial, effect on quality than resolution. So does upgrading your speakers or headphones. Or cables. Or power supply. Or power supply or circuit architecture. Etc.
So higher resolution isn’t the ONLY way to improve playback sound. I am sure the Pono does other things to improve sound quality as well. Just as I am sure one could find ‘engineers’ who question what capacitors are used, and the thickness and width of the traces used. And whether they are curved or rectilinear …
—–
Neil was on Fallon a few night ago.
His approach was to say that the Pono [has a higher quality sound that] is for ‘music lovers’ but not everybody is a music lover; some people like to listen to music in the background.
🙂
Them’s fighting words…
Told you he was our champion…:-)
