

 Does Neil Young's startup stand any chance? - leemcalilly
http://www.originalfuzz.com/blogs/fuzz/12852557-neil-young-launches-doomed-tech-startup-pono

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anigbrowl
No. Apart from the ridiculous form factor, encoding rates of 96 & 192 KHz are
just pointless for final delivery. It makes sense to use those higher bitrates
(at least 96khz...192Khz not so much) when mixing so as to avoid aliasing from
eq and effect processing, but most people can't even hear the difference
between 44.1 and 48khz. Basis: I am a recording and post-production sound
engineer and have been at it for almost 20 years. I have been recording
digitally that entire time.

It is nice that it does FLAC so you get lossless playback, and I presume it
has good d/a converters. But again, most people would be hard pressed to tell
the difference between lossless and well-chosen mp3 (320kbps and/or VBR),
which is very, very good. Also, storage is so cheap these days that if you
don't like compression you can just listen to wav files. I don't need every
single piece of music I ever own on one device and available at all times -
indeed I still play compact discs from time to time - but if I did, I could
just use a really large SD card.

I guess it could get by in the market, since everything in the device is
basically commodity hardware that can be assembled by machine and there are
enough audiophiles out there to break even or make a reasonable profit. But I
don't see it having any more than marginal impact on the market, and I say
that as someone who makes music, cares a great deal about sound quality, and
is up to speed on codecs, psychoacoustics, DSP, and all other related topics.

