The much-hyped PonoPlayer developed by Neil Young and others to supposedly blow away iTunes and other compressed music formats may be just that: hype. A test run by Yahoo's tech writer David Pogue suggests that the average listener not only can't tell the difference between Pono and iTunes...they even prefer the latter.
The test was simple: Pogue downloaded three songs—"Raised on Robbery" by Joni Mitchell, "Saturday in The Park" by Chicago and "There's A World" by Young—in both Pono and iTunes formats. He then had 15 volunteers representing a variety of age demographics listen to both songs through a high-end pair of Sony headphones. They then listened to the songs again using a pair of iTunes earbuds. After listening through all each song in both formats through the respective headphone options, test subjects answered whether they preferred the audio of "A" or "B," not knowing which was which.
The results were damning: When using high-end headphones, test subjects reported that iTunes was the best sounding 20 times (out of 45...three songs considered by 15 subjects). Twelve preferred Pono and 13 couldn't tell the difference. When they switched to the cheaper earbuds, 22 preferred iTunes (compared to 12 for Pono again and 11 with no opinion).
Some could argue that the test subjects weren't experienced music listeners, which may have caused the issue. Even if that were true, the supposed difference between iTunes (maybe 12 kHz) and these tracks available at full 192 KHz capability, would be noticeable. Theoretically. Pogue is himself a musician and audio expert, and he claimed to have not been able to tell the difference. The only complain that can be made against his findings is that the sample size of test subjects was too small to give relevant findings. Which is at least partially true.
We haven't given Pono a try yet so we can't comment. We'd recommend you demo them before you leap however.
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