Search Results for: pono

Neil Young went on the Verge’s podcast this week to complain about digital music again, as he is wont to do, and promote his new book, which features his complaints about digital music. It’s all a load of nonsense gatekeeping. He started off with a rant about streaming music services, and an analogy to streaming video:

You have to associate visuals with audio so you can make the comparison. For instance, if you’re watching a show on […] Hulu or Netflix or, you know, whatever. And you’re watching it and […] you notice that, every once in a while, it gets really fuzzy looking; it’s like, it’s not clear. And then it comes back. […] You know how it gets soft and really fuzzy looking and not really there? And then eventually the signal improves and it comes back? Well, when the signal comes back to perfect, that’s where we were up until the digital age began. Okay? Basically, that’s where everything was at. Analog was all there; everything was clear like that. Now, if you take the softest-looking thing, that’s where we’re at now. That’s where Spotify is, that’s where Apple Music is. That’s where the streaming companies are streaming the lowest common denominator of quality to avoid having dropouts.

I recognize that Young is making a non-literal comparison here, but it’s actually pretty apt for proving his argument wrong. Lossless music would use far less bandwidth than streaming video services do today. It’s totally doable to offer streaming lossless audio — something which, incidentally, Spotify offered for a while. Tidal continues to provide a lossless streaming tier. Young even states later in the interview that he could see a way to do lossless streaming on his discontinued Pono player.

Young claims that there’s no way to hear the difference between lossy audio, lossless audio, and an entirely analogue audio chain; it’s something that, he says, you have to feel. As Fake Steve Jobs once wrote:

So over the holidays I purchased a copy of “Abbey Road” on vinyl. Not a special reissue on fancy 180-gram vinyl. Just an ordinary original copy from Capitol, but in mint condition, never opened. Fired it up on the Linn-Naim rig at home and oh my God. It’s like discovering the Beatles all over again. No wonder we all loved music back in the Sixties and Seventies. First of all, the music was just so friggin good. And what is it about vinyl? It friggin breathes, and I don’t know how or why.

Young says that he’s old enough to know when music sounded great, and that younger people have no idea how good it can be because they have no basis of comparison if they have only ever listened to digital music. Well, Mr. Young, I happen to have a large collection of digital music in lossy and lossless formats, and a moderate collection of vinyl records, new and old. I have many of the same records in a mix of these formats, and I have some background in music.

This argument is utter garbage. I’ve written before about how human ears physically cannot tell the difference between the highest-resolution studio masters and “standard” lossless files. The difference between high-bitrate lossy formats and lossless formats is possibly audible, but it’s not as vast a chasm as people like Young claim. But whether there is any difference to be heard largely depends on how records are mastered.

The thing that makes most music sound bad is that it’s mixed poorly and sonically compressed to hell — and that can happen in the analogue world, too. In an Audio Technology interview (PDF), engineer Jim Scott confirms that virtually everything on the Red Hot Child Peppers’ “Californication” was recorded on vintage Neve analogue equipment to tape — and that album is notorious for sounding like crap. There’s none of the “warmth” and “depth” Young claims to hear in analogue recordings.

For what it’s worth, I love my record player. I have some great-sounding albums in my collection, some of which are quite old original pressings sourced from the best quality a ribbon of audio tape can offer. There’s something of an experience to listening to a physical record that builds on top of the music it contains, as expressed particularly well by Trent Reznor. But I am not at all convinced that the audio quality is more “pure” or reflective of the true musical performance than a decent quality digital file.

Young also spent time denigrating those who make music on their laptop. Apparently, that’s not okay; people should not be doing that if they want their music to be real.

This sort of thing really chaps my ass. Everything about Young’s argument screams that he values the erecting of unnecessary barriers to creating and enjoying art. It isn’t evidence-based; there’s little legitimacy to the idea that analogue audio chains are inherently of higher quality than digital equivalents. His claims echo those who say that you can’t make real music with samplers, synthesizers, or on a computer.

Of course, Young dismisses that his argument is in any way elitist. He says that everything used to be analogue, which means that everything used to be of a higher quality; now, because everything is digital, analogue is a niche and, therefore, quality is a niche and has become unfairly expensive. But if you remove from his argument the fiction that delivery methods are currently the biggest barrier in music audio quality, then his argument remains solely that people should not use computers to make or listen to music. And that’s exclusionary to the people who just want to create their art — even if Young thinks otherwise.

One final point: Young frequently references Steve Jobs whenever he argues about audio quality, even going so far as to claim that the two of them were collaborating on a new iPod. He has also said, numerous times, that Jobs only listened to vinyl at home. While Jobs did, indeed, have a pretty serious record player, I have found zero evidence — aside from things Neil Young has said — to suggest that Jobs did not listen to digital music at home. On the contrary, a 2016 auction featured a portable Sony CD player that was apparently used frequently by Jobs in his kitchen. It seems pretty crass to lie on behalf of a dead person.

Anna Washenko, for Radio & Internet News:

Tidal is facing allegations that it has inflated subscriber numbers. Norwegian newspaper Dagens Næringsliv claimed that it has obtained internal reports that show Tidal only had 350,000 subscribers in September 2015. That same month, owner Jay-Z had tweeted that Tidal was “1,000,000 people and counting.” The publication also said that in March 2016, Tidal had 1.2 million activated accounts and 850,000 subscribers, even though it announced publicly that it had 3 million subscribers. Tidal has not issued a comment yet about the claims.

For comparison, Apple Music has twenty million paying subscribers and Spotify has over forty million. It’s not looking good for Tidal. Also of note: I can’t find any information on the number of Pono Music subscribers, but their homepage has been “under constructionsince July.

The highly-anticipated followup to Frank Ocean’s 2012 “Channel Orange”, “Blonde”, was released yesterday. Like most records with a similar calibre of precedence, it debuted exclusively on a single platform — in this case, Apple Music and iTunes — as opposed to having a wide release across multiple outlets.

And, for some reason, it was this very decision that made longtime music industry commentator and grouch Bob Lefsetz think that fans are getting the shaft:

[The music industry has] come through the digital wars scathed, but it’s well-prepared for the future. Streaming has won and it’s been fan-friendly.

Until now.

[…]

But in music, you can find everything you want to hear, right at your fingertips.

Until now.

“Now”?

The gist of Lefsetz’s piece is that the exclusive-to-Apple Music release of “Blonde” is, somehow, the canary in the coal mine of the music industry. That its exclusivity is, somehow, a symptom of a music industry that doesn’t know how to build a fanbase and is, instead, spitting in the face of everyone from committed fans to casual listeners.

But, for some reason, Lefsetz is only angered now by the release of Frank Ocean’s record on Apple’s platforms.

Exclusive releases are nothing new. Back when people bought CDs, retailers clamoured to offer bonus tracks exclusive to their copies of the record. Taylor Swift’s “Fearless”, for instance, was released in twelve different versions, including four retailer-specific editions. Each had its own set of bonus tracks or videos, and many editions were country-specific. A Taylor Swift fan would find it difficult and expensive to acquire all the versions of her record.

While exclusive releases aren’t a new concept in the slightest, I’ve mentioned them a fair bit this year because of their increasing role in the rollout strategy for new music on streaming services. My stance has long been — and remains — that exclusives can be frustrating for many fans and likely do not decrease piracy of a new record, but they’re an important feather in a streaming service’s cap at little to no risk for artists — more on that in a bit.

Tidal’s numbers surged after Kanye West made his new record exclusive to the platform earlier this year, though the release also ranked highly on popular torrent trackers. It’s a gamble and a bit of a gimmick, but it can work fine for everyone involved.

However, the way that Lefsetz sees it, exclusives like this are nothing more than marketing:

[Most] people don’t give a crap about the new Frank Ocean album. We’ve got an industry that promotes marginal products that appeal to few and makes them unavailable to most people? That’s hysterical!

The biggest act in the business is Adele, and her music sounds like no one else’s. She can sing, the songs are well-constructed, and they appeal to almost everybody. This is the music industry that used to triumph, it’s one being left behind, as insiders pursue a pop game wherein the youth are everything and if you can’t get it on the radio they don’t care.

This is an utterly ridiculous argument. Ocean’s last record debuted in the number two slot in the United States and United Kingdom, and has been certified gold.

Meanwhile, the notion that Adele is being “left behind” is absurd. It was heavily marketed worldwide and became 2015’s highest seller after just three days. The only way she was being left behind was her decision not to release the record on any streaming services at all — it was, in effect, exclusive to a CD release. (And, yes, there was a Target edition, too.)

Funny how the press wasn’t interested in Major Lazer’s “Lean On,” which ended up being the biggest track of the year on Spotify.

“Lean On” was written about by Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, Billboard, Entertainment Weekly, MTV, Spin, and NME — to name just a few of the most popular music publications in the world. Many of those even put it on their year-end lists. I’ve no idea what argument Lefsetz is trying to make here, but it is — as he would put it — hysterical. (Exclamation point.)

But this isn’t about exclusives, per se. According to Lefsetz, this is something vastly more sinister:

Because there’s a conspiracy between Apple Music and the industry to change the game, to get everybody to pay for a subscription by putting hit content behind a paywall.

Setting aside the first part of that sentence, which I will return to later, so what?

From the perspective of a fan not willing to subscribe to a bunch of different platforms — that is, virtually everyone — exclusives can be a pain in the ass. But putting a much-anticipated new release behind a paywall is a very good thing because getting people to pay for music is also a very good thing.

Lefsetz:

We need a free tier. We need a place where casual fans can experience new music. We’re in the business of building lifelong fans, but how do you do this when you can’t hear the music first, when you’ve got to overpay to experience it, that’s a twentieth century model but we’re deep in the twenty first!

I think it’s funny that Lefsetz complains about paying for music being an old business model, as the free tiers of services that offer them — Spotify, Pandora, and so forth — are effectively a light re-imagination of radio. Spotify, for instance, only allows shuffle mode to non-paying members, and they insert ads and assorted other tracks into the stream. Pandora users on the free tier have a skip limit.

Update: Reader “Charles” has written me to say that the desktop version of Spotify does allow listeners in the free tier to select tracks on demand. The mobile version is shuffle-only. The rest of the limitations I described, including limited skips and plenty of ads, seem to apply to the desktop version equally.

Meanwhile, I don’t think Frank Ocean — or any other artist — is bothered by not offering their newest record to people who will consume it for free in a legal way. Their gamble is that they’ll get a decent agreement from Apple or Tidal for making their album exclusive to the respective platform.

Those who will ante up for the opportunity of listening before anyone else are probably fans, so that’s fine for the artist and for the platform operator. It’s likely that these kinds of exclusive contracts include a small slice of revenue from new subscribers who, within a specific timeframe, listen to the artist’s new release.

Listens from existing subscribers, meanwhile, are likely paid out at a typical rate. Meanwhile, the album will be uploaded and torrented by a wide range of people, from casual listeners to committed fans that don’t want to — or cannot — pay for a subscription.

What does an artist lose by not uploading the record to Spotify or Pandora? My guess: almost nothing. Both platforms pay notoriously poor royalty rates, and the free tier of both platforms mandates a lower quality experience through forced shuffling. Ocean is the kind of artist that cares deeply about all aspects of his record, including the track order. I bet he’d rather have someone not pay for his record and listen to it in the correct order than to receive a measly royalty rate from a non-paying user of a streaming service listening to the album in the wrong order.

Now, back to that “conspiracy” argument:

Apple should be investigated by the government for antitrust. How do you compete with the world’s richest company that’s got endless cash on hand? You can’t. It’d be like expecting hillbillies to get into Harvard if slots went to the highest bidder. The rich get richer and the rest of us… we’re left out, just like in America at large, which is why Bernie and Trump got traction, the usual suspects doing it for themselves have rigged the game in their favor, and now the music industry is trying to do this too.

I’m not sure why Lefsetz has chosen to associate a weeks-long exclusive release of an album he apparently doesn’t care much about to a populist political movement in the United States, or a classist argument, but it’s silly.

I’m not sure where the antitrust angle comes from, either. Not all new releases are exclusive to Apple Music. Some of this year’s highest-profile albums have been, while others have been exclusive to Tidal. Some lower-profile releases have been exclusive to one of those as well, including Neil Young’s newest. None that I can think of have been exclusive to Spotify because it’s not that friendly to artists.

If Spotify wants their own exclusives, perhaps they should pay artists better.

Is there a conspiracy here? Only insomuch as artists, labels, and Apple executives have vouched for the idea of listeners paying for music. This doesn’t prohibit users of the free tiers of Pandora or Spotify from ever hearing “Blonde” — it just means they have to wait a couple of weeks to do so, or they can buy the album on iTunes without subscribing to Apple Music. Simple.

Longtime readers will know that my favourite celebrity-driven lossless streaming pet project is not Tidal; it’s Neil Young’s Pono. Debuted in 2012 but not released until 2015, the Pono Player was Neil Young’s attempt to rescue the world from the supposedly muddy waters of other streaming music services. And, I’m just guessing here, it hasn’t been a rousing success. Christina Warren, Mashable:

But now, in an ironic twist, the first track off of Young’s latest album, EARTH, isn’t available on Pono. The track is a Tidal exclusive.

First, I’ll note that Warren’s source is Digital Music News, which we’ve briefly discussed as being, uh, unreliable. But this isn’t a rumour about Apple coming from them; it’s just news.

Second, Tidal does accomplish many of the goals with which Young launched Pono: the tracks are lossless, and the service is artist-centric. However, it isn’t available at the mega-high bit depths and sample rates as Pono, which makes it — by his own marketing — unlistenable.

David Pogue reviews the Pono Player for Yahoo:

The company says it has 2 million songs for sale, but 90 percent of it is in 44.1kHz format — no better than what’s on a CD. The remaining 10 percent, the good stuff, the remastered high-resolution songs, is hard to find.

[…]

At 96kHz (which is still not 192), there’s one album each from John Mayer, Kid Rock, Harry Connick Jr., David Bowie, Sting, Carole King, and Blake Shelton. Out of Tony Bennett’s 68 live and studio albums, only two are available at 96kHz.

The Pono store is almost completely devoid of high-res classical music, which is baffling — wouldn’t classical fans cherish high audio quality as much as rock fans?

If anything, classical music — with its much greater dynamic range — would be the most beneficial from higher-resolution audio formats. This whole thing feels like some kind of sham. Take this part of Pogue’s review:

You may remember that 14 of my test subjects said they didn’t hear enough difference to justify buying a Pono. The 15th guy, however, said, “I would and I did!”

That is, he was already the owner of a Pono.

I pointed out to him that in my test, even he had preferred the sound of the iPhone. His reply: The Pono may not actually sound better, but it delivers more emotion.

Re-read that sentence, but mentally change the subject from the Pono Player and sound quality to putting a drop of honey in your water every day for supposed health benefits. It feels as dishonest as any sort of homeopathic health claim.

Update: Sam Machkovech reviewed it for Ars Technica (via Michael Tsai):

Want to use studio-quality headphones with your new audio player? They better come with a 3.5mm adapter, because Pono doesn’t support any larger jacks. If you happen to own a pair of headphones with two “balanced XLR connectors,” you can plug them both in for supposedly improved sound.

I don’t get this decision at all. Isn’t this supposed to be for “audiophiles”?

We took the Pono Player on the go for an entire day, which proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare. This isn’t just a bad device to put in a pocket—the triangular shape feels noticeable and obnoxious in your pants pocket—but it’s also lousy in a messenger bag. The creators elected not to include a hardware “hold” button of any sort. As a result, the volume and multi-function buttons got pressed on a regular basis during our testing—meaning this thing reached its maximum, incredibly high volume level so quickly that we had to rip earbuds out.

Gross.

Tyler Hayes, Fast Company:

From the outside looking in, the state of the music industry is tough to figure out. Streaming music was up 54% last year, but so were sales of the decades-old vinyl format. At the CES gadget extravaganza this week in Las Vegas, wireless products have been abundant—Google even announced a new wireless streaming initiative for connected speakers called Cast for Audio—but hardware makers also appear to be doubling down on high-end audio gear. The kind of equipment that’s typically meant for those with supersonic hearing, not average consumers.

Setting aside the woefully incorrect use of the word “supersonic” here, nobody has hearing good enough to notice the difference between a CD-quality file and whatever Pono is selling. Hell, most people can’t tell the difference between a mediocre quality MP3 and what’s on a CD. Hayes is just writing up the marketing package here.

If the trend in the music industry has been for people to stop paying for music, then the companies selling audio products are going to start targeting the outliers who still want to savor music that sounds like it just dripped from the musicians’ instruments. And if companies like Samsung, Sony, and Panasonic can make high-end audio equipment cool in the process, maybe more people will get serious about music.

I’m someone who still pays for music. I’m serious about music. This sort of stuff makes me feel like I’m getting ripped off, not like it’s “dripping from the musicians’ instruments”. Nobody gets serious about music by buying expensive audio gear. At that point, they’re not listening to the music — they’re just listening to the gear.

My favourite dead horse is alive and well, so it seems. The PonoPlayer will be available next week for $400 — a steal when you compare it to Sony’s ludicrous $1,200 Walkman. But the PonoMusic Store is live now, so I thought I’d go take a look.

On the homepage, I noticed that they were featuring Foo Fighters’ “Sonic Highways”, which is one of the worst-mastered albums I’ve heard all year. Though it may be a reasonably high-quality 44.1 kHz, 24 bit version, I bet it still sounds just as brickwalled as the iTunes version. So I added “Something From Nothing” to my cart.

And that got me thinking: I wonder if one of the worst-mastered albums in history is on Pono. Surely I couldn’t find something that sounds as bad as the Red Hot Chilli Peppers’ “Californication” on an audiophile music store. But, much to my surprise, it’s there. I added this to my cart, too — the full album, because you can’t, for some reason, buy individual songs for this album.

Then I went to check out, and started filling in my billing information. And it was only at this point that I found out that PonoMusic is only available in the United States right now, which is odd, because Neil Young, one of the guys behind Pono, is Canadian.

I wasn’t able to find out first-hand whether the version of “Californication” on Pono uses the same awful-sounding master as every other version of it, including the vinyl. Happily, by the time I tried to buy the album, some others already did and shared their thoughts. Justin Denman:

Okay, I’m the guinea pig for you all. I purchased Californication. IT’S BRICKWALLED to the max. The 96kHz/24bit is useless, and I feel ripped off. It’s very frustrating, but hopefully I’ll save everyone else some money by sharing.

Gross.

Whenever I bring up the Pono, I always have to second-guess myself as to whether it’s worth investing time and effort into writing about the tech equivalent of homeopathy when it’s probably a niche product that few will ever buy. And then I see that the Pono Kickstarter has closed as the third highest-grossing Kickstarter campaign of all time, and, coincidentally, that people actually still buy homeopathic remedies.

Kirk McElhearn (via Michael Tsai):

However, if someone really wants to provide “music as it was intended to be heard,” they’d do a lot better to look at the mastering process that’s been destroying music in recent decades. Colloquially known as “the loudness wars,” music producers, prodded by record labels, use dynamic compression to increase the overall volume of music, making it sound horrendous. Since, in general, louder sounds better, or brighter, when you compare two songs, producers have been cranking up the volume to make their songs stand out. But string together an albums worth of overly loud tracks, and it’s fatiguing. But it’s a war of attrition, and our ears are the losers. No high-resolution files will make this music sound better, ever.

I’ve been working on an article of my own on the Pono, but I think McElhearn nails the biggest problem with high resolution audio: the source files directly from the studio are generally terrible. It doesn’t matter if you listen to “Californication” in shitty YouTube quality or via the finest amplifier $150,000 can buy; the original album is mastered so horribly that it’s an affront to proud owners of ears.

Daniel Rutter takes on Neil Young’s stupid Pono music player:

The argument put up against this by 24/192 enthusiasts is that the much higher sample rate and rather smoother waveform capture esoterica like ultrasonic instrument resonances which, on playback, combine to give a noticeably better sound.

Most instruments do not output such frequencies, and almost no microphones, speakers or headphones work significantly above the normal human audio range either. So, unsurprisingly, these opinions are shot down by blinded testing. And, equally unsurprisingly, if Neil’s done any blinded tests of Pono, he’s keeping them a secret.

I like Neil Young; I like most of his records, and I like that he’s trying to raise the bar for the quality of online music distribution. But this 24/192 product is completely nutty.

Unsurprisingly, the crowd who thinks that there is a noticeable difference between 24/192 audio and the 16/44.1 audio of a CD is as resilient and stubborn as homeopaths, conspiracy theorists, and others of a similar calibre. So, naturally, Rutter received letters, and they were not kind:

Astonishingly, there’s no nutty audiophile product that someone doing an uncontrolled listening test doesn’t swear works. Not one! Every one’s a winner, baby!

Unless you do a blinded test. Whereupon, to a first approximation, none of these things work.

I’ve been over this before: you are a human being. Your ears are decent, but they cannot tell the difference between CD audio and high-test studio-quality audio. You probably can’t tell the difference between a very high quality compressed format — 320 kbps or V0 MP3, or 256 kbps AAC — and a lossless format (I can’t).

Here’s a comparative: grab your remote control, face the infrared blaster so you can see it, but not towards your face, and click a button. Don’t see anything? Now grab a camera, and point the infrared blaster of the remote towards the lens while clicking a button. Depending on your camera, you’ll see anywhere from a faint flickering to a giant glow being emitted.1 The human eye can’t see infrared frequencies, but your camera’s CCD can.

Imagine, for a minute, that infrared were not dangerous to human eyes. Now consider a company releasing a television which they consider a breakthrough because it can display infrared. That’s the visual equivalent of the Pono.


  1. If you use a smartphone made in the past few years, you probably won’t see much, as most newer smartphone cameras have an IR filter built in to capture better images. ↥︎

Neil Young has appeared on the Late Show with David Letterman to promote Pono, a high-quality digital music service that will launch next year. Rolling Stone reports that Pono will be comprised of a music downloads store, a tool that converts digital audio files into analog-sounding recordings, and a series of audio players. Young showed off a prototype Pono player to Letterman, and the design is nothing if not unique — it’s a bright yellow triangular prism with a small screen and simple controls. The player will, according to Young, play back Pono master files with “the best sound anyone can get.”

If you want to be That Guy, you can pair it with Beats headphones.