But it was with hi-rez recordings that the PonoPlayer shone brightest. The first recording this baby boomer purchased from PonoMusic World, for $27.49, was the remastered Deluxe Edition of Led Zeppelin's IV, and the first track I played was, of course, "Stairway to Heaven" (24/96 FLAC file). The blue PonoMusic World light between the output jacks lit up as it should.
I don't think I had heard either the unique character of the electric-piano bass line or the rather cheesy quality of the echo on the guitar intro quite so clearly before. This was with the original mix; the bonus Sunset Sound mix of this song included in this edition has a warmer, less electronic reverb, and the channels are reversed: the acoustic guitar is on the right in the intro, rather than the left. But both mixes had that glorious blend of acoustic guitar and Fender electric 12-string in the bridge that leads into Jimmy Page's Fender Telecaster solo, and each was reproduced in all its awesomeness by the Pono, with the Sunset Sound mix a little more dynamic, and not distorted at the climaxes like the original. (While the measured dynamic range in the 45-year-old original's verses after the drums enter is 23–24dB—a sad comment on modern rock recordings, with their typical DR of 10 or lower—the SS mix's DR was even better: 27–28dB!)
For this review, I used the PonoPlayer's conventional unbalanced output. However, the two 3.5mm jacks can be used to send a balanced output to suitable headphones, separating the left- and right-channel outputs across the two jacks, which Michael Lavorgna felt offers a worthwhile improvement in sound quality. The special adapter cable required by my Audeze LCD-X headphones, fitted with two stereo 3.5mm plugs, hadn't arrived by press time, so I will report my impressions of the PonoPlayer's balanced-mode operation in a Follow-Up.
Portable Comparisons
Since I reviewed it in August 2013, the Astell&Kern AK100 portable player ($899) has been my constant companion on my hour-long commute to and from the Stereophile office. As I reported in my review, the AK100 offers more refined-sounding highs with more top-octave air than does my iPod Classic 160GB, and makes the iPod's midrange sound coarse. With Sennheiser HD650 headphones, Beck's "Heart Is a Drum" (24/96 ALAC file from Morning Phase, Capitol/HDtracks) sounded warm, clean, and detailed through the AK100, the double-tracked lead vocal localized at far left and right, and the central bass guitar and snare drum immersed in a dome of ambience and reverberant effects. Changing to the PonoPlayer, with levels necessarily matched by ear, the balance was a bit warmer, but with more body to the sound of Beck's voice. The midrange was sweeter, and the low frequencies were both a little more extended and better defined. Through the Audeze LCD-X headphones, which have a more transparent midband than the Sennheisers, the AK100 sounded more extended in the top octaves, but still lacked a little vocal body compared with the Pono. With the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro in-ear monitors I use for my commute, the bass line that underpins the magnificent use of flanging on the piano in Beck's "Unforgiven" sounded more majestic through the Pono than through the Astell&Kern. This may well be purely due to the fact that the PonoPlayer's output impedance is less than 5 ohms compared with the AK100's 22.5 ohms. As the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro averages 18 ohms in the lower midrange and bass, and 11 ohms between 8 and 10kHz, rising to 30 ohms in the low treble, this variation in impedance will shelve down the lower mids and bass by 1.4dB more than the low treble when driven by the AK100 as compared with the PonoPlayer. (With its 3 ohm output impedance, the Pono's level in the bass is down by 0.5dB with the Ultimate Ears compared with the level in the low treble.)
Unlike the Toblerone-shaped PonoPlayer, the Astell&Kern fits into my shirt pocket, and will already play DSD files as well as PCM up to 192kHz. But the Pono has the edge in sound quality; it will take up residence in my tote bag for commutes.
Listening in the Big Rig
One of the benefits for the PonoPlayer of having been heavily promoted is that it offers non-audiophiles a true high-resolution source for their systems without it costing an arm and a leg: "This portable audio player uses circuitry taken straight from Ayre's own top-of-the-line products, costing tens of thousands of dollars, for unparalleled sound quality and unrivaled listening pleasure." Accordingly, I used it for several days of music listening, plugging its Line output first into a pair of powered Audioengine A2+ loudspeakers. Wow! Both the Mike Garson Trio and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival recordings mentioned earlier sounded better than you might expect from a system costing just $648: a clean, clear, open treble, a natural midrange, and, in what bass these tiny speakers produce, excellent low-frequency definition.
There's no remote control, of course, and an operational issue emerged: When the PonoPlayer reaches the end of an album, it appears to turn off its output, which can result in a low-level hum until another track is selected. Other than those inconveniences, the PonoPlayer performed admirably with all types of music. This combination would be a superb hi-rez desktop system.
But the real test was to use the PonoPlayer as the front end in my reference system, plugging it into the Ayre KX-R Twenty preamplifier and replacing Ayre's QB-9 USB D/A converter ($3250).
Again, I was impressed. In Peter Skellern's inspired arrangement of the Harry Warren and Al Dubin standard "About a Quarter to Nine," from Skellern's A String of Pearls (24/192 ALAC, needle drop from the 1982 Mercury UK LP, MERL 18), the PonoPlayer readily resolved the singer's multitracked backing voices. It got right the unique sounds of the muted trumpets and trombones in the instrumental break, though I did feel that the double bass sounded a touch woolly. The same was true for the duetting double basses featured in "Don't Give Up," from Peter Gabriel's New Blood (16/44.1 ALAC file from CD, Real World/Virgin), while the rich-sounding acoustic guitar riff in Beck's "Heart Is a Drum" was perhaps a little too rich.
But in light of the PonoPlayer's $399 price tag, this is a minor criticism. And what the Pono got right was the characters of voices—such as Ane Brun's quakey pipes in "Don't Give Up," and Neil Young's shaky vocalizing in the track from Harvest preloaded on the player, "There's a World" (24/192 FLAC).
That last track, of course, lit up the blue Pono LED on the player's end panel. Curious about the robustness of the flag in the data that signifies a genuine PonoMusic World file, I copied this file to my laptop and converted it from FLAC to AIFF using the Max utility, which preserves the file's metadata. When I uploaded the AIFF version to the PonoPlayer and played it, the cover art was still there, as was the artist, album, and genre information, etc. But now the Pono light remained dark. It appears, therefore, that Pono's claim of providing authenticated files is valid.
I finished my listening with some formal comparisons. For the hi-rez A/B tests I used "The Lark," from one of my 2015 "R2D4" choices, Moving Hearts' The Storm (24/192 ALAC, needle drop from LP, Tara 1304). On first listen, with levels matched at 1kHz, the Pono sounded very similar to the Ayre QB-9 fed the same data via USB from my Mac mini running Pure Music. The shrieking skirl of the Uilleann pipes sounded similarly sweet from both sources, and got my toes a-tapping with the same vigor. But repeated comparisons revealed that the Pono didn't have the low-frequency authority of the almost-10-times-as-expensive QB-9, nor was its soundstage quite as deep. On the Peter Skellern track, the voice of this singer from the North of England was more fully fleshed out through the QB-9, sounding both more palpable and better differentiated from the big-band accompaniment.
Even so, returning to the Mac mini/QB-9 after a day of using the Pono as the only digital source in my big rig, I didn't feel I had missed much of the music.
Expecting to fly
Because I have a perverse streak, the last track I played on the PonoPlayer and the Ultimate Ears in-ear monitors before sending off the Pono to be photographed for this issue's cover was a recording from 1937 that Jason Serinus had recommended: the contralto Sabine Kalter singing a Richard Strauss lied, accompanied by pianist Gerald Moore (16/44.1 ALAC). Playing a mono dub from a 78 with no spectral content above 4kHz through a high-performance, hi-rez player would seem a waste of the latter's resources. But there was no musical mismatch: the Pono well differentiated this superb performance from the shellac noise. I'll put to one side such socioeconomic issues as the high price of hi-rez downloads and the resistance of some members of the audio establishment to the sonic benefits of high-resolution music. Considered on its own merits, the PonoPlayer is a well-engineered, high-performance, portable player that is equally at home in a conventional high-end audio system, and is offered at a fair, affordable price. In combination with the PonoMusic World app, it offers a plug'n'play gateway to high-quality music reproduction. I bought the review sample; can't wait for it to get back from the photo session.
Since I reviewed it in August 2013, the Astell&Kern AK100 portable player ($899) has been my constant companion on my hour-long commute to and from the Stereophile office. As I reported in my review, the AK100 offers more refined-sounding highs with more top-octave air than does my iPod Classic 160GB, and makes the iPod's midrange sound coarse. With Sennheiser HD650 headphones, Beck's "Heart Is a Drum" (24/96 ALAC file from Morning Phase, Capitol/HDtracks) sounded warm, clean, and detailed through the AK100, the double-tracked lead vocal localized at far left and right, and the central bass guitar and snare drum immersed in a dome of ambience and reverberant effects. Changing to the PonoPlayer, with levels necessarily matched by ear, the balance was a bit warmer, but with more body to the sound of Beck's voice. The midrange was sweeter, and the low frequencies were both a little more extended and better defined. Through the Audeze LCD-X headphones, which have a more transparent midband than the Sennheisers, the AK100 sounded more extended in the top octaves, but still lacked a little vocal body compared with the Pono. With the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro in-ear monitors I use for my commute, the bass line that underpins the magnificent use of flanging on the piano in Beck's "Unforgiven" sounded more majestic through the Pono than through the Astell&Kern. This may well be purely due to the fact that the PonoPlayer's output impedance is less than 5 ohms compared with the AK100's 22.5 ohms. As the Ultimate Ears 18 Pro averages 18 ohms in the lower midrange and bass, and 11 ohms between 8 and 10kHz, rising to 30 ohms in the low treble, this variation in impedance will shelve down the lower mids and bass by 1.4dB more than the low treble when driven by the AK100 as compared with the PonoPlayer. (With its 3 ohm output impedance, the Pono's level in the bass is down by 0.5dB with the Ultimate Ears compared with the level in the low treble.)
One of the benefits for the PonoPlayer of having been heavily promoted is that it offers non-audiophiles a true high-resolution source for their systems without it costing an arm and a leg: "This portable audio player uses circuitry taken straight from Ayre's own top-of-the-line products, costing tens of thousands of dollars, for unparalleled sound quality and unrivaled listening pleasure." Accordingly, I used it for several days of music listening, plugging its Line output first into a pair of powered Audioengine A2+ loudspeakers. Wow! Both the Mike Garson Trio and Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival recordings mentioned earlier sounded better than you might expect from a system costing just $648: a clean, clear, open treble, a natural midrange, and, in what bass these tiny speakers produce, excellent low-frequency definition.
Because I have a perverse streak, the last track I played on the PonoPlayer and the Ultimate Ears in-ear monitors before sending off the Pono to be photographed for this issue's cover was a recording from 1937 that Jason Serinus had recommended: the contralto Sabine Kalter singing a Richard Strauss lied, accompanied by pianist Gerald Moore (16/44.1 ALAC). Playing a mono dub from a 78 with no spectral content above 4kHz through a high-performance, hi-rez player would seem a waste of the latter's resources. But there was no musical mismatch: the Pono well differentiated this superb performance from the shellac noise. I'll put to one side such socioeconomic issues as the high price of hi-rez downloads and the resistance of some members of the audio establishment to the sonic benefits of high-resolution music. Considered on its own merits, the PonoPlayer is a well-engineered, high-performance, portable player that is equally at home in a conventional high-end audio system, and is offered at a fair, affordable price. In combination with the PonoMusic World app, it offers a plug'n'play gateway to high-quality music reproduction. I bought the review sample; can't wait for it to get back from the photo session.
