I feel amused by the reaction of audiophiles from Neil Young's announcement of his Pono audio file format. It's a sad return to DRM-laden music because some has-been wants to cash in on gullible customers like Dr. Dre did with Beats Electronics. Monty of the Xiph foundation thoroughly debunked the myths that Pono's "studio quality" has any effect on the listener's perceived quality of the audio encoding. So why are so-called audiophiles so gullible of marketing and flashy numbers?
Admittedly, enjoyment of audio quality can be quite subjective. Even if in double-blind tests you can tell that two samples are different, there is still the subjective aspect of which you prefer. The whole point of Beats is to preemptively distort the signal through some equalizer to make up for known limitations in the speakers. Bose did that for decades before Beats entered the market, with the only difference that Beats engineers Dr. Dre's music to match the hardware's equalizer. Add in marketing and a false correlation between cost and quality, and you get your captive market of suckers.
For speakers, there are clear differences in quality, even without the software tricks. The thing is, having used some studio-quality headphones for years, they're not what customers want. Nobody wants to hears the flaws in your amp or even the source recording unless your job is about removing those flaws.
On the other hand, unless you talk about lossless encoding, the latest generation of audio compression techniques are spectacular. Even with the best speakers, I dare you conclusively win a double-blind test between lossless and a half-decent 256 kbps AAC encoder. But no, the delusions of a guy in need of self-approval have more weight on public opinion than the decades of research in psychoacoustics.
Objectively, you do get more information with 192 kHz 24 bits recordings, but that extra data is useless unless you plan in mixing the music. If they dared distribute "open source" music in the form of the unmixed tracks in their original studio recording form, including a license that allows remixed for non-commercial uses, then Pono would be quite a revolution. Otherwise it's a complete waste of money.
Published on October 1, 2012 at 21:11 EDT
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