Missed this for a while, but Anax, did the production Pono still sounded mushy with both the Leckerton and UERM?

Yes, it should be in the update.

Atkinson's review from the current issue of Stereophile.

http://www.stereophile.com/content/pono-ponoplayer-portable-music-player

LOL!

"I wasn't surprised to find that the player didn't have the lowest distortion in the high-end universe."

"While this kind of filter is generally felt to be subjectively preferable—Ayre Acoustics' well-regarded QB-9 uses the same filter when its rear-panel switch is set to Listen (footnote 2)—it is associated with a slight loss of top-octave audioband energy and poor suppression of ultrasonic images."

"In fact, almost all the spectral lines you can see in this graph are the result of the slow-rolloff reconstruction filter with 44.1kHz data."

I did feel the Pono was a little slow and warm...

Did you read the "manufacturer's comment" from Charlie Hansen?

Did you read the "manufacturer's comment" from Charlie Hansen?

Yesh. IMO, lots of primo stuff.

Lets start with Bruce:

"Fast-forward 34 years. To celebrate [the film's 35th] anniversary, it was decided to go back to the original 30ips, 16-track analog masters, archive them at 24/192, and do new mixes in high resolution. The resulting mixes brought forth all the excellent room tone and natural reverberation of the 20th Century Fox Scoring Stage that the 16/44.1 recording lacked. It was a revelation."

Obviously all 30ips tape equipment is capable of 24-bit 192 kHz BW and flawless. Now don't let the link below fool you:

http://www.endino.com/graphs/

"Neil had this dream, that someday there would be a system that reproduced the music exactly as we heard it in the studio before it became a CD with 22% of our soundfield or, worse, the lovely 3% of MP3, and that was the beginning of Pono."

Neil had a pipe dream. CD is a 17.927654% of our soundfield, while lovely MP3 is 3.14159265358979…%. Furthermore, if the original recording was a mere 76.2873% due to whatever crap they had at the studio back then, Pono's awesome-sauce will move the bar up to 89.8930012% by adding all that 192 kHz of irrecoverable goodness.

"After a long 35 years, we've finally got a proper audio playback instrument that truly is representative of the music."

Daz right! Throw away the rest of your POS audio equipment you gear-whored over the last 35 years. Pono is here!

"One last question to those who say that you don't need more than 16/44.1 or can't hear above 20kHz: Why would any of the artists, producers, and recording engineers be happy with less than they've heard in the studio? High-resolution audio is here to bring back the emotion and joy of listening to music. That's what Pono is all about."

The Porno eco-system will bring back all that >20 kHz goodness whether the original masters had it or not.

Lets move on to Charlie:

"Price: A high-performance audio system will range in price from several thousand to several hundreds of thousands of dollars. The PonoPlayer delivers the musical satisfaction of systems costing hundred of times more."

Pono will bring a $100k simile in your face for just $400. So forget that $30 Sansa Zip/Clip piece of crap. Your phone sucks ballz.

"Knowledge, skill, and experience: On the Ayre website, we recommend that people purchase Jim Smith's book, Get Better Sound. The reason is that, in my experience, equipment is at most responsible for only half of the final sound quality of a music-playback system. The other half requires knowledge, skill, and experience in myriad areas—room acoustics, vibration control, EMF fields, RFI, mechanical properties of materials—and, perhaps above all, a commitment of time and a passion for experimentation."

Disagree. Equipment is responsible for 22.989938% of the quality of sound. 56.8962% is all due to the quality of the studio's Faraday cages. Whatever is left is due to the artistic work of the recording/remastering engineer and to a much lesser extent to the skill of the musicians.

"As JA found, at some point the numbers become meaningless. The ambient noise of our listening situation makes the noise floor of the PonoPlayer a moot poin t. It still delivers the musical goods: the ability to feel the intent of the performer."

Noise floor is a moot point cuz you will be hearing your Pono in very noisy conditions: on planes, while fixing the pavement, or torturing some evil-doer. And cuz it delivers the musical goods.

"...if the user connects lower-impedance headphones and/or drives them at higher and higher levels, the output impedance drops further. It becomes a self-correcting situation so that the PonoPlayer can drive even the lowest-impedance loads without difficulty..."

According to JA "Both outputs had an output impedance of 3 ohms across the audio band, though this varied slightly with level and load impedance...". So JA and all of his not-as-we-heard-it-in-the-studio AP stuff is wrong about this "slightly" non-sense. The Pono tanks to [undisclosed-but-not-slight] impedance levels if your cans have little ohms in them.

"The end result is that the PonoPlayer is the only portable player to date that will drive virtually any headphone to satisfying levels, regardless of impedance or sensitivity, without the need for an external headphone amplifier, especially when used in balanced mode."

Finally! a portable that will melt your HE-6! I would say to throw away all your POS portable equipment now, but most folks likely already did a few sentences ago.

+++

Again, while I didn't dislike the Pono, IMO it was a bit slow and dark sounding to me.

Charlie's comments are not selling the player to me.

I ask to clarify, because it seems difficult to believe. 100% volume level in single ended usage is not very-loud or "too-loud" on almost all tracks using so-called high-end headphones? The pono can't put at least 10mW+ into any ( <600ohm) headphone in single ended mode?