Spent most of Saturday morning half-listening to a podcast while poking around Kickstarter, because thats apparently what my weekends look like these days, and I keep circling back to this Pono thing. If you havent seen it yet: Neil Young launched a Kickstarter last Wednesday for a little triangular music player called the PonoPlayer, built to play "studio quality" high-resolution audio instead of the compressed stuff most of us have been living on since the Napster days. The goal was $800,000. It blew past that in about four hours. Checked again this morning and its sitting somewhere north of $4 million, with over two weeks still to go. Early backers get the player for around $200, everyone else pays $399 at retail whenever it actually ships.
I want to be on board with this. I really do. Neil Young ranting about MP3 quality is basically a running bit at this point (he was doing the same speech on Letterman back in 2012, pyramid prototype and all), and theres something charming about a guy in his late 60s deciding the solution to bad audio is to personally build and Kickstart a hardware company. But Im also the guy who spent a decade ripping CDs at 128kbps because I wanted more songs to fit on a 4GB iPod shuffle, so I might not be the target market for "studio master quality." My ears have been ruined by two decades of earbuds you can buy in a gas station. Buying a $399 player to feed them isnt going to undo that.
Heres my actual problem with it, and its not really about Pono specifically. Its the whole "golden ears" thing that shows up every time this argument happens. Every audiophile forum has a guy insisting he can hear the difference between a FLAC file and a well-encoded 320kbps MP3 through his $2,000 headphones, and every actual blind test Ive ever seen written up says otherwise, or at best says the difference is so small it stops mattering the second you're not sitting in a silent room doing an A/B comparison on purpose. Im not saying compression is inaudible. Im saying most of us are listening to music on a subway platform, in a car, at a desk with a fan running, and no $399 pyramid is going to fix that room.
And I say this as someone who actually likes physical media and thinks the shift to all-digital, all-compressed listening has been kind of a bummer! My dad still has his old Pioneer receiver and a stack of records in the basement, and putting one on when Im visiting genuinely sounds better than anything coming out of my laptop speakers. Im not a "any format not on vinyl is garbage" person. Im just skeptical that the bottleneck in most peoples listening experience in 2014 is file resolution, as opposed to, you know, everything else in the signal chain between the file and your ear.
None of which is stopping four million dollars worth of people from disagreeing with me, which is fine, thats what Kickstarter is for. Ill be curious to see how this actually ships. A lot of very well-funded Kickstarter hardware projects from the last couple years have had a rough time turning "we raised way more than we asked for" into "we have a finished product in a box on a shelf," and a pyramid-shaped audio player with a custom DAC seems like exactly the kind of thing that could slip a ship date by six months. Not betting against Neil Young specifically. Betting against hardware timelines in general, which is a safe bet basically always.
Small unrelated aside: I finally put iOS 7.1 on my phone this weekend and the update notes mention CarPlay, which apparently nobody has a car that supports yet, so thats a feature Im functionally storing for later. Software shipping ahead of the hardware that uses it feels like it should be the opposite problem from the Kickstarter one above, but here we are.
Anyway. If anyone backs the Pono and gets one of these things before I do, let me know if you can actually tell the difference on regular headphones. Im genuinely curious, I just dont believe it yet.