If nothing else, the introduction of Neil Young’s Pono has gotten people talking about sound quality. The triumph of the mp3 has seemed a foregone conclusion; no one was bothering to ask at what bitrate their media provider of choice was streaming. Sure, there was (and is) vinyl, but physical media will forever be a more boutique concern. Digital is for the masses and the resolution of the music has often seemed roughly as important as the bit depth of the accompanying cover art jpeg.
Meanwhile, Pono promises a new experience and a deeper connection with music through high fidelity. Whether it’s actually delivering on these promises is something else.
The world of audiophiles benefits from obfuscation. The more complicated an explanation is, and the more variables are presented, the less likely anyone not up on every single detail will be able to refute your assertions. Much of digital audio comes down to math. You take the sampling rate and divide it by two and that is the highest possible frequency that can be recorded (so 44.1 khz, the standard for CD audio, can go up to 22,000 hz—most adults can hear little above 15,000 hz or so). From the bit depth, you can calculate the theoretical limits of the dynamic range. For many years, there have been convincing arguments that the resolution of a CD supersedes what most human ears can discern. And studies have shown that mp3s ripped at higher bitrates are indistinguishable from CDs to most listeners (this piece on Cnet is a solid overview of where things stand with regard to resolution and hearing). As the $399-pricepoint Pono cheerfully reminds us, audiophilia is wrapped up in money—those who sell it benefit from the difficulty of scientific "proof," and those who invest in it are bound to feel better about the money they’ve spent if they know (or can convince themselves) that they can hear a difference and are having a richer experience because of it.
The other thing that Pono underscores is that what the world of consumer audio needs most is, in fact, simplicity and practical solutions. It should be about getting the greatest number of people the best sound they can afford; launching a system where a download of the Who’s Quadrophenia costs $43 isn’t going to get us there.
Yet here is a most crucial piece of knowledge regarding sound quality:
Transmitting electricity is easy, moving air is hard.
From the consumer standpoint, recorded sound moves from the source (LP, CD, digital download) through player (turntable, CD player, smart phone) through wires, a pre-amp, another wire, an amplifier, another wire, and a speaker system (stereo speakers, P.A., earbuds). The biggest engineering challenges, and the ones that will make the greatest difference in the sound, are the ones that involve things you can touch. Your needle, cartridge, and turntable have to spin precisely and be positioned just so to extract information from the vinyl record. Getting all that to happen in a way that results in quality sound is really, really difficult, which is why you can buy a turntable that costs $90,000. Almost no one can tell the difference between a $100 CD player and a $1,000 CD player, but almost everyone can tell the difference between a $100 turntable and a $1,000 turntable.
On the other end of the chain, it’s not easy to make headphones or loudspeakers that can translate an electrical signal and vibrate to move air and fool the listener into thinking there is a voice or an instrument in the room. Those little cones have to move air hundreds or thousands of times per second, and do so in a way that minimizes the inherent distortion that comes from their materials (wood, rubber, paper). Two loudspeakers from different manufacturers sound very, very different. Every time you get a new and better pair of headphones, you feel like you are hearing your music anew.
If you are someone who does, in fact, want to hear your music in the highest quality possible, your time, energy, and money should be spent thinking about the parts of the chains that involve physical space—your turntable, headphones, and speakers. I recently had the opportunity to listen to two items for sale at the Pono store: a 192/24 version of Neil Young’s Harvest, and a 96/24 version of Beck’s Mutations (each of which took up more than 1 GB of space). I spent a couple of hours comparing these versions to mp3s (320k for the Neil, 256k for Beck), along with a vinyl pressing of Harvest (the 2009 remaster). If I concentrated, I think I was able to detect a certain amount of clarity and definition in the low end of the high resolution versions, but sometimes I wasn’t sure, and it seemed possible that one was just a hair louder than the other. Regardless, we’re talking about perceived differences many magnitudes smaller than those that come with, say, an upgrade to a headphone that costs $50 more. Good sound is worth paying for if you can afford it, just make sure you start in the right place.