David Pogue, for Yahoo! on PonoPlayer:
You’ve got to admit it: The argument for the Pono Player sure is appealing — that we don’t know what we’ve been missing in our music.
Unfortunately, it isn’t true.
Ouch.
And Sam Machkovech, of Ars Technica:
When it came to comparing albums that were nearly identical, save their sampling rates, we sometimes heard an opportunity to pick out sibilance in a vocal or the ringing sound of a cymbal and say, “Oooh, there’s the higher-res version.” We were right on those calls every single time. But we had to really, really pick at the audio, asking for frequent replays of short snippets, to make those calls. Some albums, particularly Ella, gave us very few obvious moments like that to work with.
We did notice a difference between songs rendered through a Pono Player and the same ones on either a stereo or a MacBook Pro. Mostly, we preferred on the Pono where the bass sat in the mix, which we noticed was less of a bitrate issue and more of the Pono Player’s on-board mix of pre-amp and digital audio converter (DAC). We confirmed this preference after countless volume adjustments to make sure the Pono wasn’t just tricking us with volume bumps. We should point out that this bass improvement was most noticeable on pop-rock albums; jazz and classical have plenty of bass action going on, but in those cases, it was actually the higher-end sounds (like an endlessly banged high-hat) that sounded noticeably brighter and crisper compared to other sound sources.
So there was no real difference in sound between the Pono songs and the same songs on iTunes.
There was a time a couple of years ago where I maintained an iTunes library that was around 150 GB.[1] What took up so much space? I had carefully curated around 40% of my library to be high-resolution (hi-res), most of which were encoded at 24-bit depth and had a sample rate of 192 kHz. I read all the forums. I read all the articles. All the scientific proof[2] out there showed that, all things being equal, high resolution music was no better sounding than CD-quality music. Still, like everyone else aboard the snake oil audiophile train, I wanted to believe what I had curated was somehow better.
Is there a discernible difference between Napster-esque LAME MP3 lossy encodes and FLAC/ALAC lossless 24-bit/192 kHz encodes of the same song? Of course. Even EarPods would translate that difference quite obviously.[3] But a CD-quality, 16-bit/44.1 kHz encode of the same song would probably approach the differential between the aforementioned hi-res and Napster-quality samples I suggested earlier. At least to the 99th percentile.[4] That sounds good enough to me.
I’m sure this will come up again, like it does every few years.
The real issue facing most modern music concerns dynamic range and The Loudness Wars. Check that out instead.
Not counting my then immense video library, which largely fell off a truck. ↩
Read: ‘non-proof’ ↩
Ultimately the bitrate of the encode matters more than the bit depth and sampling rate, but even then, it’s a stretch. Once iTunes Plus came out and ushered in 256 kbps AAC files, the days of crappy sounding lossy tracks were gone. ↩
My statistics are completely based not on actual data ↩