The Emperor Has No Clothes [Video]It was one of Kickstarter’s most successful campaigns. Its inventors sought $8. Watch Senna Online Freeform. The project: the Pono. Player, “a revolution in music listening.” It was designed to play back music files that use up to 2.

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MP3 files that gave the first pocket music players a bad name.“Everyone who’s ever heard Pono. Music will tell you that the difference is surprising and dramatic,” Pono wrote on Kickstarter. They tell us that not only do they hear the difference; they feel it in their body, in their soul.”In Pono’s Kickstarter pitch video, famous musicians react to the Pono sound they’ve just heard. That music made me feel good. Much better than I’ve felt in a long time listening to music,” says Norah Jones. This gives it to you as good as you can get it,” says Tom Petty.

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MP3 [the old format] is like seeing a Xerox of the Mona Lisa,” says Elvis Costello. Neil Young, celebrity founder and driving force for Pono, points out that MP3 is a compression scheme. It was developed in the era of music players with limited storage capacity; the idea was to shrink the music files by discarding music data from the original recordings. But these days, storage is copious and cheap. So why are we still compressing our music? Why can’t we listen to our music the way it was recorded in the studio, according to the musician’s original intentions?

The Pono Player, once just a Kickstarter prototype, is now a product that anyone can buy, for $4. To hear the magic, you’re supposed to buy all new music—high- resolution audio files—from Pono’s new music store (ponomusic. Pono using a new Mac or PC loading- dock program (Pono World).

Albums cost about $2. You’ve got to admit it: The argument for the Pono Player sure is appealing — that we don’t know what we’ve been missing in our music. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. I’m 5. 1 and a former professional musician. I know how to listen. But when I bought Pono’s expensive remastered songs and compared them with the identical songs on my phone, I couldn’t hear any difference whatsoever. I got worried. Is the Pono story a modern- day “Emperor’s New Clothes” fable?

Were those famous rock stars just imagining things? There was only one way to find out: conduct a blind trial, using identical songs on identical headphones, comparing the Pono with a standard audio player — an i. Phone. So that’s what I did. You can watch the process in the video above. The player. The Pono Player is big (5x. Toblerone chocolate bar. The company says this shape permitted its designers to choose larger, higher- quality audio components and to separate them enough to prevent electrical interference — but you can’t carry it comfortably in a pocket.

There’s an eight- hour battery, 6. Pono’s highest- resolution songs), a memory- card slot for another 6. On my player, the lower edge of the screen stopped responding to taps after one day, which made navigation difficult. The test. How does it sound? I found 1. 5 volunteers, ages 1. Each subject put on nice headphones — Sony MDR 7. Saturday in the Park” by Chicago, “Raised on Robbery” by Joni Mitchell, and “There’s a World” by Mr.

Pono himself, Neil Young). I bought these songs twice: once from the Pono store, in high resolution, and once from the i. Tunes store. Each subject then listened to the same songs again, using standard Apple earbuds. I connected both the Pono Player and an i. Phone to an A/B switch; I instructed my test subjects to flip back and forth between the two at will.

The subjects would not know which player was A and which was B. In fact, after each song I disconnected both players and reattached them to the A/B box, sometimes the same way and sometimes the opposite way, so that the subject could never get lazy and keep proclaiming, for example, that B sounded better. During playback, the subjects were free to compare the two playback sources with as much scrutiny as they wished. After each listen, the subject announced a sound preference: A, B, or neither. The results. The results surprised even me. Whether wearing earbuds or expensive headphones, my test subjects usually thought that the i.

Phone playback sounded better than the Pono Player. Among those who could hear any difference, I asked how much difference there seemed to be. I wanted to see whether this was some astounding, worthwhile improvement or perhaps partly imagination. On average, my participants said that when they heard a difference at all, it was about 1. Fourteen of my 1.

Explaining the results. The results baffled me. The Pono video shows dozens of professionals reacting very differently to their A/B tests. How could my results be so different? Well, first of all, they listened to the Pono in a car, instead of on headphones in a controlled environment. What the heck?) Anyway, just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I also conducted a couple of A/B tests in my car. If anything, there was even less audible difference.

So I wrote to Pono — and heard back from Neil Young himself.“Of approximately 1. Pono to low resolution MP3s,” he wrote, “all of them heard and felt the Pono difference, rewarding to the human senses, and is what Pono thinks you deserve to hear.”Aha — there’s a key phrase in there: low- resolution MP3s. My test compared Pono files against Apple’s i. Tunes files, which come in 1. Kbps AAC format (more on formats below). That’s much better than the radically compressed MP3 files of 1.

There’s another factor at play here, too: Pono is going to extraordinary lengths to acquire remastered versions of the songs in its catalog. If we are looking for a popular master and find it has not been sampled at the highest rate, we try to access it and, with the cooperation of labels and artists, maximize the recapture at the highest resolution,” Neil Young wrote to me.

We reach out to the creators, if they are still with us, to include their knowledge in the mastering. Sometimes they will even supervise it. This is a long process, but we are providing the absolute best available and pushing for improvement in resolution for maximizing the labels/creators’ art whenever possible.”Clearly, if Pono’s testing involved a remastered, high- resolution audio file going head- to- head with an original, crummy MP3 of the same song, you’d hear a difference. The thing is, that’s not a fair test.

The music we buy today from i. Tunes, Amazon, Google Play, and similar online stores has much higher quality than low- res MP3 files. Why would you spend $4. About high- resolution audio. When geeks talk about music- file quality, they bandy about two numbers: the bit rate and the sampling rate. In simple terms, these measurements specify the volume and frequency ranges of a music file. This article explains them well — but the short version is that, up to a point, higher numbers are better.

Music CDs, and the downloadable songs you buy, are sampled at 1. Hz. The songs you buy from Pono, on the other hand, go as high as 2. Hz. That means more bits of data per instant of sound, and more (smaller) instants per time period: higher resolution. It’s like having more color data and more pixels per inch in a photo.

In theory, the higher these numbers are for a music file, the closer it sounds to what the musician recorded. In practice, though, there’s an infinitude of footnotes, exceptions, and variables.

What headphones you’re using. How and when the recording was made. Whether the recording was originally recorded in analog, or in high resolution, or just converted. Whether the discarded frequencies are, in fact, audible to a human being.

Now, Pono is absolutely clear on one thing: “You will hear the difference.”But scientific studies say you won’t. Here’s one written up in the journal of the Audio Engineering Society; here’s one from The Guardian. They say that the human ear can’t even detect audio quality beyond what’s on a CD (1. Hz). High- resolution audio includes more music data, yes — but it’s sound you can’t hear.

The store. The Pono store is very new, and it shows.