Pono - новый аудиоформат и плеер от Нила Янга

[Virgil]

Привыкайте говорить только от своего имени.

ты просто любишь спорить о пустом!
Кароче завязывай спорить!

Вы сегодня что-то в ударе, батенька.

[Virgil]

Many of the more technically inclined have asked for more details about what is so special about the Pono Player design. Charlie Hansen, founder of Ayre Acoustics, and one of the major con****utors to the technical audio circuit design of the PonoPlayer that will ship in October, provided the information in this memo to share with you.

But first, let’s be clear that we have no publishable measured “specifications” for the PonoPlayer as of our Kickstarter campaign. While we have a basic design that is a working prototype, and it sounds great today, we have been evolving the design of the Player throughout the last year, and will continue to make changes through the next month or so, as we approach our handoff to manufacturing for October shipments.

When we have stabilized the design of the Player and built a sufficient number of test units, we will being to measure the audio specifications of the Player, and will have those “specs” available at shipment.

One of the primary reasons we chose a crowdfunding platform was to raise the necessary funds to completely finish the design of the PonoPlayer. So, obviously, we can publish “specs” on an unfinished product. We belive our backers understand this idea. So, now, on to the design of the Player.

For the best audio experience, we begin by getting the highest resolution audio recording available from the labels. Our goal is to deliver to the consumer the file that is the closest possible representation of what the artist heard in the studio when the album was being made.

Our singular aim during the development of the Ponoplayer was to build a device with one purpose: the playback of music at the highest possible level of performance given the boundaries of the design. This design called for a small, portable structure capable of storing high-resolution digital files and converting them to analog music, thereby providing a more-than-fulfilling experience for the listener. This product wouldn’t function as a phone, WiFi router, Bluetooth transceiver, portable gaming platform or GPS widget. Any additional features would only detract from the resolution of music in its fullest dimension, and thus, the enjoyment we know possible when music is reproduced with this level of fidelity.

The music is downloaded and stored in a format called FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), a widely accepted, robust, industry standard. It allows for the compression and subsequent storage of large audio files without the loss of critical data. All information stored on the original file can be retrieved with zero loss once the FLAC algorithm decompresses the file. This provides the best of both worlds: compact storage and high potential fidelity. Founded by Charles (Charlie) Hansen (chief engineer and product designer), Ayre has been designing and building high-performance, award-winning home audio electronics for more than 20 years. With their feet firmly planted in both the digital and analog domains, we felt they were the perfect choice for a partner that could design an audio circuit capable of championing the difficult and delicate challenges of high-resolution audio playback.

Everything Ayre has ever made has had fully balanced, all-discrete, zero-feedback analog circuitry. Even Ayre’s digital products employ custom digital filters. The reasoning behind the use and implementation of every one of these technologies is to fortify the presence of the signal and defeat noise in the path of that same signal. Without this, the rendering of high-resolution music would be a futile task, as the listener wouldn’t be able to hear the actual benefits of high-resolution audio.

In the Pono Player, Ayre began their work by designing the circuitry after the main processor retrieves the audio data from the memory and presents it in "3-wire" form - audio data, bit clock, and word clock. They chose the just-released version of ESS's top-of-the-line ES9018. It has two channels, comes in a very small package (5 mm square), and is extremely customizable, able to tackle the rigors of sensitive, low-level signal path design.

The filter generally favored by Ayre is a minimum-phase digital filter (to eliminate pre-ringing), with a "slow" roll-off, to minimize the overall amount of ringing (ringing can be thought of as an oscillation in the digital signal, causing all sorts of errors if misconstrued as actual signal to be converted to analog, which is engineer-speak for music). For the Pono Player’s D/A (digital-to-analog) converter Charlie went a step further and used a moving average filter for both the double and quad sampling rates because it has no pre-ringing, no post-ringing, no overshoot, and no undershoot (these create inaccuracies in the rendering of digital signal and sacrifice fidelity). In other words, it has none of the digital artifacts (digital artifacts also add to distortion and occlude signal) at all.

The DAC chip’s output comes in the form of current, so Ayre designed a proprietary, fully discrete, fully- balanced, zero-feedback current-to-voltage stage. This then goes to a fully discrete, zero-feedback buffer stage to drive both the headphone output and the line stage output. The output impedance is roughly 5 ohms, allowing the Pono Player to drive any headphone on the market with minimal frequency response errors.

[schatten]

Сабр, значит..

[dikiss]

А знаете, почему именно Pono?
Да потому что это слово у всех подсознательно ассоциируется с ****O.
А как известно, секс (не сам процесс, а намеки на него, провокации и т.д...) - великий козырь в сфере маркетинга.
А еще слово "Поно" звучит как "Боно", что в свою очередь является отсылкой к фронтмену группы U2, известным под этим погонялом.

[micha13]

что то не слышно ни чего о плеере

[Kilmister]

micha13 ну а как иначе? когда рожали поно - не знали, что китайцы рынок оприходуют

[micha13]

неужели они испугались китайской продукции?

[Virgil]

Player Progress

Over the past six weeks we’ve built over 100 PonoPlayers in the US and in China that incorporate the Ayre audio design. This design uses discrete components rather than off the shelf Integrated Circuits for the amplification stage after the DAC (Digital-to-Analog Convertor). Charles Hansen, founder of Ayre, likes to compare the use of discrete components to baking a cake from scratch versus using a Betty Crocker cake mix.

The use of more than 100 additional components has provided a challenge to fit everything on the circuit board, but with a monumental effort from our Semaphore engineers, we managed to do just that in record time. We are using these units to run a gamut of testing including physical and audio.

One physical requirement we wanted is for the PonoPlayer to survive a 1-meter drop onto a wood floor on all five sides and 6 corners. Unfortunately we didn't quite achieve this in the first set of tests. We went back to our mechanical engineers at Lime Lab, who have made some changes to the mechanical enclosure. In tests just conducted we now survive the 1-meter drop. We don’t believe any of you will ever drop your PonoPlayer from 3 feet on to a hard surface, but we are engineering the case that way regardless!

Testing PonoPlayers for extreme temperatures Part of a comprehensive suite of over 40 tests Testing PonoPlayers for extreme temperatures Part of a comprehensive suite of over 40 tests

We have conducted our preliminary EMI (electromagnetic interference) and ESD (electronic static discharge) tests that need to satisfy the regulatory authorities including FCC and CE. With a few changes that we will implement, we expect our design to pass when we test with production-level models.

Audio experts that include Charles Hansen, Neil Young, Bruce Botnick and others have analyzed the audio quality through listening tests. Based on theirs and our extensive listening testing, we have achieved a level of performance that is everything we have hoped for.

Bruce (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Botnick) conducted his own tests and reported the following:

In my mixing studio, I listen to the best sound every day from Analog to the highest Digital sampling and highest bit rates.

My tests were to take a 30 ips NAB Analog 2 track stereo master and transfer it from a ATR-104 Analog tape recorder with Aria Class A electronics to Digital at 192k/24 bit ProTools XI • HDX, using Ayre and Black Lion professional A/D and D/A convertors.

The first process is to convert the 192k/24 bit WAV music files to 192k/24 bit FLAC and then convert the FLAC music files back to WAV and back into the Pro Tools session.

The second test is to stack the WAV and FLAC music files in Pro Tools, with one format out of phase and see if there is full bit for bit cancelation and the round trip is 100% accurate. There was full bit- for-bit cancellation.

The third step is to play both the WAV and FLAC music program against the original 30 ips NAB Analog 2 track stereo master and do a blind listen for differences in the sonic landscape between formats. That test was superb in that the listeners couldn’t tell which format they were listening to. For the final process we did the previous test, this time against the PONO player. The blind tests were amazing, as again the folks listening couldn’t tell which was which.

Charles Hansen’s no compromise analog circuitry for the PonoPlayer is open with beautifully accurate musical reproduction, excellent imagery with accurate room tone and reverb, true HiFi reproduction without compromise.

Charles Hanson has listened to ten players and he found the performance to be comparable to his own products that cost thousands of dollars.


A Message from Charles Hansen

Charles Hansen will be offering some of his comments in these updates to help explain more about the player’s technology. This month he discusses negative feedback, something unique to a portable device and something being used in our player.


99.999% of all amplifiers made in the last 70 years use negative feedback. There is only one thing you have to remember about negative feedback: Negative feedback is a very easy way to improve the measured performance of an amplifier. The problem is that it makes it sound worse....

Specifically, adding negative feedback will lower the steady-state distortion (test equipment measures steady-state signals, but music is anything but steady-state). It will also extend the bandwidth (frequency response). Finally, it will lower the output impedance. All of these things seem like good things, and they are very easy to measure, so everybody uses it.

The problem is that negative feedback makes the circuit sound worse. Nobody really knows why. My best guess is that it messes up the time response, but nobody has been able to measure it, and there are all kinds of mathematical "proofs" that say this is not the case. Negative feedback compares a scaled-down version of the output signal to the input signal. Since no amplifier is perfect, there will be differences. The negative feedback pre-distorts the input signal opposite to the distortion that the amplifier creates so that the final output signal is closer to the input signal.

It is very clever. The problem is that feedback can only attempt to correct a problem after the damage has been done. One cannot go back in time and fix the signal before it is distorted by the imperfect circuit.

Here is the best proof that negative feedback does not work:

IF NEGATIVE FEEDBACK ACTUALLY WORKED, THEN ALL AMPLIFIERS WOULD BE PERFECT, AND ALL AMPLIFIERS WOULD SOUND EXACTLY THE SAME.

Anybody that has ever listened to amplifiers knows that no two amplifiers sound the same. Therefore anybody that has ever listened to amplifiers knows that negative feedback does not work as advertised.

With feedback, it is trivially easy to build an amplifier with any arbitrarily low output impedance that you want. It won't sound very good, but it will have very low output impedance.

That is why no Ayre product ever made has ever used negative feedback. When we started Ayre, there were a few companies that made zero-feedback tube preamplifiers and that was about it.


For more information on this subject and others check out ayre.com.


A Message from John

As the team leader for PonoMusic I just want to say a couple of things – First, thank you again, to our Kickstarter backers for your support, your engagement, and your faith in us, and our mission. As we work diligently to build the PonoPlayer and the Ponomusic.com site and store, we never lose sight of the fact that you made all of this possible. As the name says so perfectly, you “kickstarted” us over the hump to get this product and this whole idea into action so that we could give thousands of people the experience of hearing music as it was created so brilliantly by the artists we all love.


Secondly, as noted in the update above, we are working very hard to make all of this happen, and although we are still a very small team, scrambling a bit to keep everything on track – there are more moving parts to this than we could hope to explain, and we know that consumer expectations are high. We gave ourselves a tall order when we committed to ship the first Players in October and open the store.

So far, (knock on wood), so good… but we have a ton of work to do in a short period of time, and our team is running flat out on all fronts.

Finally, we will ask you, in advance, to remember why we did this – to give you a new experience for the enjoyment of music – that spine-tingling feeling of a fantastic album recorded and mastered as the artist hoped - that feeling that only music at this level of fidelity can produce. We hope that you will focus on the feeling you get when you listen to your Player for a few hours, or a few days at a time. As Norah Jones says in our video, “That music made me feel good, better than I’ve felt in a long time”. We are also hoping that you’ll share the experience with all your friends – we are counting on our Kickstarter backers to be our first sales force – because we know that it is easy to sell something you believe in, and we think you’ll believe in music as you never have before, when you hear the PonoPlayer.

We hope you are all enjoying your summer and we’ll be back to you with another update in late August or early September.

Thanks again,

John

[gemzza]

Я считаю, что записи самого Нила Янга в его магазине должны быть бесплатны для обладателей сего плеера.

[Kilmister]

gemzza, я думаю, что Нил Янг с тобой не согласится.

[gemzza]

Это уже будут его проблемы

[andyDiamond]

Pono Backers Listening Party in San Francisco, 8/1/14

часть 1 http://parttimeaudiophile.com/2014/0...8114-part-one/

часть 2 http://parttimeaudiophile.com/2014/0...8114-part-two/

[DenHK]

Поменялся на наушники b&w p7 , меня заитересовало больше то что делает его компания Ayre, будет доставка в начале декабря!

[toshi]

DenHK, тихо сам с собою?

[DenHK]

DenHK, тихо сам с собою?

Мож с кем то? Или опять один

[toshi]

Поменялся на наушники b&w p7 , меня заитересовало больше то что делает его компания Ayre, будет доставка в начале декабря!

так на что поменял то? и что за Ayre? интересно же

[DenHK]

Поменял свои наушники B&W P7 на плеер Pono limited в хроме! Правда ждать до декабря.
Аyre известная компания в стационаре, в портативе не отмечались, потому и заинтересовался, да и пиар впечатлил!
Посмотрим!

[toshi]

Поменял свои наушники B&W P7 на плеер Pono limited в хроме! Правда ждать до декабря.
Аyre известная компания в стационаре, в портативе не отмечались, потому и заинтересовался, да и пиар впечатлил!
Посмотрим!

с поно ок, да и не дешевле ли просто купить? хотя хром наверное того стоит.
А на Ayre хоть ссылку дай, не нашел в гугле.


ps вру, нашел ауре, сорри

короче бурместер(

[DenHK]

с поно ок, да и не дешевле ли просто купить? хотя хром наверное того стоит.
А на Ayre хоть ссылку дай, не нашел в гугле.


ps вру, нашел ауре, сорри

Компания известная, особо говна не делает, с плеером мне кажется получится неплохо!
В хроме кстати хорош! Ну а p7 как раз и хотел продать , вот так!

[toshi]

Компания известная, особо говна не делает, с плеером мне кажется получится неплохо!
В хроме кстати хорош! Ну а p7 как раз и хотел продать , вот так!

сделать себе подарок на новый год, что ли, раз к декабрю. Пойду чесать затылок.

---------- Добавлено в 16:26 ---------- Предыдущее сообщение было размещено в 15:46 ----------

на кикстартере уже не купить?