Nice video of someone taking the Pono player apart:
Seems like good attention to analog output stage. Would love to get my hands on to measure it
. But for now, this data shows a good effort toward building an audiophile type portable player.
A bit more data from the author above on the tear down: http://mikebeauchamp.com/2014/12/pono-player-teardown/
And his subjective feedback:
How does it sound?
It came pre-loaded with Neil Young’s “There’s a World” in 24/192 and I think it sounds great with headphones. The mix sounded more dynamic than I was used to, but that’s more about the mastering and not necessary about the high definition of the audio file. In the next few weeks I hope to be running a few tests on the sound quality though to see I feel a difference. I’ve been listening to FLAC files on my old iPod video running RockBox for years. I can tell the difference between badly encoded MP3’s and FLAC files no problem, but I’m not entirely convinced that “high resolution audio” is something I can distinguish compared to CD-quality FLAC files from the same source. But I’m open minded and I have a decent set of headphones, so I’m looking forward to posting more tests soon.
Seems like good attention to analog output stage. Would love to get my hands on to measure it
. But for now, this data shows a good effort toward building an audiophile type portable player.A bit more data from the author above on the tear down: http://mikebeauchamp.com/2014/12/pono-player-teardown/
And his subjective feedback:
How does it sound?
It came pre-loaded with Neil Young’s “There’s a World” in 24/192 and I think it sounds great with headphones. The mix sounded more dynamic than I was used to, but that’s more about the mastering and not necessary about the high definition of the audio file. In the next few weeks I hope to be running a few tests on the sound quality though to see I feel a difference. I’ve been listening to FLAC files on my old iPod video running RockBox for years. I can tell the difference between badly encoded MP3’s and FLAC files no problem, but I’m not entirely convinced that “high resolution audio” is something I can distinguish compared to CD-quality FLAC files from the same source. But I’m open minded and I have a decent set of headphones, so I’m looking forward to posting more tests soon.
