Pono Player

» see ponomusic.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

audiophile portable players were a us-and-japan niche. pono was a kickstarter object in that niche. by 2014 i was 30, owned an iphone, and listened to streaming spotify on bluetooth headphones like everyone else around me in ankara. neil young had a different theory of how music should be heard, and built a $399 toblerone-shaped player to prove it. the player arrived and the theory did not survive contact with the market.

ponomusic launched its kickstarter on march 11 2014. the campaign hit its $800,000 goal in less than 24 hours and finished at $6.2 million from over 18,000 backers. the device shipped to backers in october 2014 and went on general sale in february 2015 at $399. it was a triangular cross-section player about the size of a tv remote, designed by ayre acoustics in colorado, running an ess sabre32 dac and supporting flac at 24-bit 192 khz.

the ponomusic download store launched alongside the device, selling high resolution albums from the three major labels. yahoo tech's david pogue ran a blind test in 2015 where listeners failed to consistently prefer pono files over standard itunes downloads. the store shut down in july 2016 after apple acquired omnifone, the backend provider. neil young posted the project's death notice in april 2017, citing label costs for keeping the high-res catalog stocked. xstream, the streaming pivot young announced in '17, never launched.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

anyway, pono showed up at the back end of the portable-music-device era. by 2014 the iphone had already absorbed the music player category and apple had killed the ipod classic the previous september. pono was selling against a device people already owned in their pocket, with a single-purpose form factor and a $399 price tag.

the audiophile pitch was that smartphone dacs and lossy streaming files were undercutting what the original recordings actually contained. neil young carried that pitch personally and put his name behind every kickstarter pitch video. the press cycle in 2014 was friendly because young is a credible witness, and the kickstarter backers signed on for the cause as much as for the device.

~ the unraveling ~

honestly, the blind tests killed it. pogue's yahoo test was the loudest, but several follow-up trials by other reviewers reached similar results, with listeners failing to identify which file was pono and which was an itunes m4a once they could not see the device. the audiophile community pushed back on the test methodology, although the general press concluded the audible benefit was within margin of error for most people. once that perception set in, the $399 price became impossible to justify against an iphone you already had.

the other problem was content. high-resolution masters of catalog material were expensive to license per album and not always available, since pre-1990s recordings often lacked masters at the required fidelity. the ponomusic store stocked a partial catalog with gaps that the customers noticed. apple's acquisition of omnifone in 2016 took the store's licensing infrastructure offline and pono never rebuilt it.

~ what got buried with it ~

anyway, pono buried the standalone portable high-res player as a viable consumer category. astell&kern continued to ship $1,000-plus daps for the audiophile core, although as a mass-market kickstarter object the category did not survive 2017. high resolution audio itself migrated into streaming services (tidal master and later apple music lossless) where it costs nothing extra and runs on the phone you already own. neil young moved on to xstream and then to direct political activism against spotify, leaving the toblerone on a few collector shelves.

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