Neil Young’s PonoMusic

Why you might want to tailor your expectations

Roy See

--

Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will take you everywhere.

Albert Einstein

I’m not an audiophile. At least, I don’t feel qualified to to be called one. I cannot perceive a drastic difference — in most cases — between a CD-quality (16 bit, 44.1 kHz) lossless rip and a high-resolution (anything 48k and above) version. I haven’t spent tens of thousands on audiophile equipment and accessories. No single audio hardware or recording that I have purchased in the past decades have brought my listening experience to a whole new level.

But I might just qualify as a “mid-fier” in that I can hear a difference between compressed lossy music files (WMA, AAC, MP3, etc.) at a relatively low bit rate compared to a CD or a lossless/high-resolution version. I have also spent a fair chunk of change on entry- and mid-level audiophile equipment and accessories; you know, the kinds that that are routinely touted as providing the best bang-for-buck listening experience.

With the disclaimers out of the way, I have a few things to say about the recent buzz that Neil Young has managed to generate around his project, PonoMusic and the accompanying PonoPlayer. The whole thing is currently an ongoing Kickstarter project, which at the time of writing has surpassed $3 million in pledges within less than a week of its launch.

Media hype is already in high gear. The introductory video on Kickstarter serves up some heavy-handed plugging: a slew of music artists, sound engineers, record producers, label owners, one after the other telling you they just heard the best-sounding music, EVER: sounds like vinyl; realistic and stunningly lifelike; intimate, like you’re right there with the artist in the studio; and so on. The onslaught of superlatives and hyperbolic praise includes Young explaining how PonoMusic is all about restoring the righteousness (“pono” is Hawaiian for “righteous”), the “soul” of music artistry and enjoyment. He also includes an infographic on “Underwater Listening,” and likens listening to MP3s, CDs, and even music at 96 kHz to being “underwater” with diving and snorkeling gear on your head. You only start “breathing air” after you “break through the surface” at 192 kHz.

Wow. I haven’t seen or heard marketing hype like that since … no, wait; I have heard all that before. On audiophile forums. In audio equipment reviews. From music services specializing only in high-resolution music. From audio enthusiasts, professional reviewers, and opinionated foaming-at-the-mouth nutjobs alike.

Before we go any further, let’s look at what Young and PonoMusic has done right.

The Kickstarter project is really just icing on the marketing cake. I doubt PonoMusic really needs $800,000 to get its business off the ground.

Given that it’s Neil Young — who the Southern man doesn’t need hanging around — the heavy-handedness is not such a surprise; it’s actually befits Young. He is an icon and a legend; he’s gotten support from his friends and fellow musicians, used his clout as a major recording artist to secure rights from the major labels, and hooked up with Ayre Acoustics and AudioQuest — names that most audiophiles would be well acquainted with — to produce the sound technology. The Kickstarter project is really just icing on the marketing cake. I doubt PonoMusic really needs $800,000 to get its business off the ground. But news of the project pulling in millions in just a couple of days — and it will probably close in about 30 days with a total of maybe five to six million in pledges — is priceless publicity. In short, brilliant moves all round by PonoMusic.

The problem starts, however, when you take a step back from the reality-distorting rah-rah of it all. Let’s start with the introductory video. The whole thing just seems kind of … lazy and thoughtless. It’s longer than most Kickstarter project intros but tells us nearly nothing about the PonoPlayer or the PonoMusic service. What did all these people in the video just hear? The PonoPlayer? A PonoMusic file they played in their cars? And wait: why’re they even listening to audiophile music files in their cars? Wouldn’t a good hifi system or a headphone setup at home be a much better choice than their cars? And the “Underwater Listening” is really quite insulting. If you listen to music at 192 kHz, you’re “breathing air” and your body feels good? I may not be a legendary music artist and audiophile like Mr. Young, but I know bullshit when I hear it.

The whole process is a combination of physiology, psychology, and acoustics, so it’s no surprise to hear one person praise a recording as an absolute triumph and another to treat the same recording with the utmost disgust.

Human listening is not so much an exact science as it is a minefield of subjectivity. Take our ears, for instance. Our outer ears — the ear flaps and ear canals —are all different in shape and size, so how sounds are captured and then transferred to the middle and inner ears where they are converted to electrical signals that are finally interpreted by the brain happen very differently for all of us. The whole process is a combination of physiology, psychology, and acoustics, so it’s no surprise to hear one person praise a recording as an absolute triumph and another to treat the same recording with the utmost disgust. Of course, the difference could be due to a number of other factors such as the equipment they used or even their hearing acuity. But audiophiles are commonly known to disagree even when they audition the same equipment using the same music at the same location (e.g., at audiophile meetups). In short, we all hear differently.

Experts and audio enthusiasts alike have long debated this, and there are some studies that suggests that we may not be able to perceive a difference.

Another issue that complicates Young’s “Underwater Listening” claims is whether we can actually tell the difference between, say, CDs and high-resolution audio. Experts and audio enthusiasts alike have long debated this, and there are some studies that suggests that we may not be able to perceive a difference. (See note for a landmark study.)

Young and PonoMusic also make a further claim that is unsubstantiable and overlooks major complications: “PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio.” This really is the same claim made by Apple’s “Mastered for iTunes” label. As consumers, we can only assume these claims to be true, that the music we find on PonoMusic or labeled “Mastered for iTunes” are faithful to the artists’ vision and the choices made by the recording engineers. There’s no way we can verify any of it.

In addition to all of the troubling issues listed, how good your music sounds is not purely a matter of sampling frequency. In the last decade or so, there has arisen a practice of mastering records with increasing levels of dynamic range (DR) compression in an attempt to make the music louder and more immediate. This, however, is done at the expense of the “dynamics” in a recording: the various levels of highs and lows, loud and quiet. This audio information can contribute to a more “spacious” and even “lifelike” quality in the sound, but including such information also results in a generally lower volume. This recording practice of using high DR compression to pump up the volume is colloquially known as the “loudness war” in the sense that many music engineers and producers seem to be literally competing to produce louder records. (The film This Is Spinal Tap illustrates this attitude best, but it’s sad that we’re talking about real-life music industry people here. You can find also out more about the loudness war here.) We should note here that it doesn’t matter what resolution a recording is offered at if its DR is compressed all to hell: a CD-quality squashed recording will sound squashed at 192 kHz. And this is where it gets really interesting.

There is an informal online resource called the Dynamic Range Database (probably community-maintained) where the DR levels of various music albums and their various editions have been measured and recorded. True to his word, most of Neil Young’s albums feature relatively healthy DR levels. Young — or the recording engineers he worked with — seems to have made sure the music he released didn’t fall victim to the loudness war. The same goes for Sting, Patti Smith, and Tom Petty. But many of the artists featured in the aforementioned video — Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie Vedder, Beck, Foo Fighters, Arcade Fire, and Dave Matthews Band — have continued to release albums that follow the loudness war trend, and many of them are part of PonoMusic’s Artist Signature Series where fans can get limited-edition PonoPlayers. Interestingly, two of the most notorious cases where the sound quality of artists’ releases were decried by fans are Metallica’s Death Magnetic and the Red Hot Chili Peppers’s Californication. And yes, there are you can pay an extra $100 for Metallica and Red Hot Chili Peppers PonoPlayers.

The PonoMusic promise — as presented on their website and on Kickstarter — sounds disingenuous at first (many of the those featured in the video look like they were trying to say nice things simply to be nice to Young), but quickly borders on hypocrisy. As a music listener, I would ask, for example, would Death Magnetic and Californication be available on PonoMusic when it launches? Would they feature the same levels of DR compression? Or would they be remastered to sound better than what we have hitherto heard? To be fair, PonoMusic never exactly promised its offerings would be remastered for the best possible sound: “exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio.” But they do say this: “They’re amazed by how much better the music sounds — and astonished at how much detail they didn’t realize was missing compared to the original.” It almost sounds as if they’re guaranteeing that PonoMusic content will sound better than the original master material. Somewhat contradictory.

I’m a skeptic, so I imagine their official response to feedback about poor sound would be: If the artist and engineers saw fit to release an album with high DR compression, then we must respect their artistic choice and offer the album as is.

Once the hype machine spins down, I believe PonoMusic will prove to be less than “pono.” To be truly righteous, Young and PonoMusic would have to seriously address the industry-wide issue of DR compression and try to reverse the trend through education and persuasion, which could take a long time with little chance of success. Instead, they opted for the simpler, easier route: use Young’s influence to hawk a new music service offering high resolution content and accompanying hardware and software for playback. This puts them one-up against existing music services like iTunes (which doesn’t offer high-resolution content) and HD Tracks (which doesn’t have accompanying digital audio players and software). Done and done.

Resolution, dynamic range compression, digital filter, zero feedback, tons of money, and political clout: none of these can capture the “art of sound in time” like the human imagination can.

So, where does all this leave mid-fiers like me? The Random House Dictionary defines music as “ an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.” Resolution, dynamic range compression, digital filter, zero feedback, tons of money, and political clout: none of these can capture the “art of sound in time” like the human imagination can. It doesn’t matter if I’m listening to a 256 kbps AAC using my iPod while I’m on the bus or I’m listening to a DSD file played uncompressed on an Astell & Kern through Audeze headphones at home. Once the music plays and your mind fails to make a connection, nothing else matters. If you keep thinking about how a higher bitrate or more expensive digital-to-analogue converter would improve what you’re hearing, you’re missing the point.

Access to music wherever and whenever you want is also more important than bitrates. I will continue to enjoy whatever music I already have (my CDs ripped into FLAC for playback on my computer), and music services like Spotify that allow me to access music that’re hard to acquire and also try out new albums before buying them. I may buy from HD Tracks, Pono, and eClassical whenever the price is right while I wait for the loudness war to end (which may happen in the near future).

--

--

Roy See

Ex-librarian, ex-editor, ex-teacher, and rogue scholar