 This my friends is the Pono player. It's a $400 portable audio player conceived by Canadian music legend Neil Young's company Pono. A word that means righteous that raised over six million dollars on Kickstarter in early 2014. And while normally I would refer to a device like this as an MP3 player, and it certainly does play back MP3s, that term feels inapplicable here because Mr. Young sought to create something much greater than that. No, what Mr. Young envisioned was an entire ecosystem where artists, record labels, and music lovers can cooperate to bring music listening enjoyment to a new level by making high resolution audio tracks both easily available and enjoyable. Does it deliver that or is it the worst kind of snake oil nonsense that I've seen in quite some time? I guess we'll find out won't we? Cooler Master's Case Mod World Series is your opportunity to show off your modding skills and win great prizes. Entries close February 7th 2015. Click now to learn more. Let's begin with a physical overview of the unit. It's a triangular prism for some reason. I guess Pono predicted what would happen with the whole bend gate iPhone 6 plus thing and chose what is not only the most bend resistant possible shape, but also one that would be extremely difficult to use. If you were to store the player in your back pocket. At the top of the unit are two three and a half millimeter jacks that can be used in four different modes. This one is for standard headphones and has variable volume control. While this one simply outputs at a constant volume and is intended for use in the car or anywhere else where an external app would take care of volume adjustments. If you want to use both jacks then there are two different modes. One is Pono Share which lets two people listen to the same thing at the same time and the second is Balanced Output where each connector is dedicated to left and right audio. Something you'll need pretty specialized equipment or some modding to take advantage of. On the bottom is a micro USB port for charging and thankfully simple drag and drop music file transfer and a flap to cover the mic. Micro SD expansion slot. Pono's site says max 64 gigs to go with the 64 gigs of internal memory for a total of 128. But online I found lots of references to a compatibility with 128 gig micro SD cards. So I suspect their site is a little behind in the recent advancements in micro SD capacity. Which brings us around to the front. There are three buttons on the Pono player. Volume up, volume down and the middle button. Which handles play and pause and then hold for power. And Pono earned some kudos from me for these buttons having both distinctive shapes that are easy to feel for when you can't see them. And a satisfying tactile feel then promptly lost all of that kudos and then some the instant that I looked at the two and a half inch touch screen on the front. Holy crap this thing is bad. I don't remember the last time I saw this. Such an atrocious display with abominable viewing angles like this on a device that costs more than a hundred bucks. To Pono's credit the navigation of their apparently Android based operating system is fairly simple and intuitive. Mostly. Swipe sideways to sort music in a variety of different ways or access system settings. Scroll up and down to go through lists. Touch to play and swipe from the bottom for track controls and cover art. But there are some pretty yeah we're new at this type quirks too. The display auto rotate can be glitchy as heck. The device lacks a wake sleep button for the display so you just have to wait for it to time out. Then interact with the buttons so change the volume or pause your music to wake it. There's no typing based search for your music library. I guess thanks to the tiny screen so if you're looking for a music library that's a good choice. You can either slow scroll manually or quick scroll by letter down the right hand edge but that option only pops up if you start slow scrolling first. Something that I thought we'd taken care of a number of years ago. None of that stuff really bothered me though when I was just using the device and if the Pono player was cheap I likely wouldn't even mention it. But the Pono isn't cheap which raises a lot of questions for me. What did they spend all that money on? The screen sucks. There's no wireless connectivity of any kind so forget streaming your Spotify music through its amp or anything like that. And the battery life is truly abominable with its 2950 mAh battery delivering a mere 8 hours of playback. I had Discmans 15 years ago that could do better than that. Now hold on a minute Linus. This isn't some Swiss army knife device. I don't give a rat's patoot if it Bluetooths or Red Tooths or toothpicks. How does it sound? Will it cause my soul to rediscover music? Will it transport my soul to the next level? I don't know how it works. I'm not sure how it works. It's not a good idea. It's not a good idea. It's not a good idea. I don't know what to do with it. It's not a good idea. It's not a good idea. Will it cause my soul to rediscover music? Will it transport me to a sublime musical experience? No of course not. Don't be silly. I decided on my Sennheiser HD 600 for most of my listening tests but spent some time with my IE 80s as well since it is a portable player. And I threw everything I had at this thing. Some high bitrate Mozart flax, obviously converted to Apple's lossless codec for the iPhone that I purchased back when I did my geek out review. Some top 40 crap, both flax and mp3s. Some rips from a couple of bare naked lady CDs I had lying around and... Anyway, output volume was leveled across my test devices, an iPhone 6 and the Pono player for apples to apples mobile devices with an O2 and ODAC used periodically as a sanity check. I used my X-TEC sound level meter and a 1 kHz test tone at 80 decibels to level everything off. And in spite of Pono's claims that their player will make everything from the high definition tracks on their web store to the crappiest mp3s sound better, no matter how long I sat in a dark room with my eyes closed listening to the same segments of song over and over again, no matter what track from what genre I listened to, I just couldn't hear a compelling argument for why the Pono player has any right to exist, especially at this price point, other than as a transparent attempt to bilk non-tech savvy people for money with empty promises of an experience that it simply can't deliver. But lioness, there are so many testimonials from everyone from audiophiles to regular people to Neil Young himself who are saying the Pono player is an experience unlike anything else. And yeah, I guess so. But while Mr. Young talks a good talk about making high quality audio tracks available to the masses, something I actually very strongly agree with, what he ignores is that the bitrate has very little to do with the quality of a track past a certain point, while mastering technique has everything to do with it. And I don't know whether it's ignorance or willful deception, but I can't take anything the guy says seriously about this when he gets on camera and talks about the superior dynamic range of analog media versus CDs, when even laymen like me know that's categorically incorrect. Analog has so much dynamic range that when it hits you, it hits you with a full envelope of dynamics. And I really hope it was some misinformed peon at Pono that got quoted by Engadget as saying that the engineering being done by Iyer allowed the Pono player to have no amplifier per se. What does that even mean? It runs on pixie dust? Sheesh. Player aside though, and Mr. Young has made it abundantly clear that they don't really even want to make players forever, presumably because letting someone else make the Pono certified HD audio players than selling music to those customers online is much more lucrative, Pono can still do some good in the world if it raises awareness about the importance of high quality audio files and makes them more accessible to more people. But my cynicism hat here is whispering in my ear that... what's that? Gryffindor? No, wrong hat. Here. Thank you. Is whispering in my ear that from Pono's actions they don't appear to care about any of that, because if they did, there wouldn't be a snake oil indicator on the player to tell you you're getting the best possible experience solely because you obtained the song from their store, when in truth there are plenty of other places online to buy equally high res audio that won't light up that indicator. If they cared, they would be educating about the importance of quality mastering versus loudness mastering, rather than trying to convince people they need 24-bit, 192 kHz files to hear everything when it's been empirically proven that they actually sound worse. And their store might let me buy Don't Know Much by Linda Ronstadt by itself, instead of forcing me to spend $125 on her entire 80s studio album collection in order to get the highest quality version. So move along, everyone. While your experience may vary if you're one of the few people with extremely difficult to drive electrostatic headphones or other exotic solutions, as far as the other 99.99% of people are concerned, the only reason the Pono player can apparently deliver 80-90% of the performance of a $27,000 amplifier, according to the designer of both, is not because it is made of magic, but because there was nothing special about that amp either. It's all in the way the information is being spun to you. Speaking of spin, I don't really need to put any spin on today's episode sponsor, Ting, because their business model really speaks for itself. Ting only charges their users for the amount of service that they actually use. That means whether you're a power user or you only have a smartphone out of necessity and you'd be happier with a Syncophone than that, you'll be paying a fair amount for the service that you use. No locked in 200 minutes of talk, however many megs of data, just what you actually need and use every month. They operate on the Sprint network, so anywhere with good Sprint service will have good Ting service, and starting in February, so in about a week here, they'll be running on a GSM network, meaning that you'll be able to use about 80% of the smartphones available in the market today, including the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus. One big thing with Ting is that they will actually tell you how much you would pay on Ting before you sign up exactly. Just head over to linus.ting.com and use their savings calculator to enter your last few bills, and they'll spit out how much you would have paid by switching to Ting. So give it a try, they'll even give you 25 bucks off a new device or 25 dollars in service credit. Pretty awesome offer from a pretty awesome mobile provider. Thanks Ting for sponsoring this episode, thanks you for watching it. Like this video if you liked it, dislike it if you thought it sucked, leave a comment if you have something else to say. I'm sure it's going to be a flame war down there though, so unless you got your flame retardant suit on, you might just want to stay out of the comments on this one. Speaking of flame retardant suits, Linus TechChip shirts are fully flame retardant, so you're going to want to buy those over on the link in the video description. If you're not flame retardant, please don't light yourself on fire with Linus TechChip shirt, we assume no reliability for etc etc etc. Also linked in the video description, you can give us a monthly contribution, or you can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code, so every time you buy a Pano player, I'll make 32 dollars. I'm still not going to recommend that you buy it, because I don't need your 32 dollars that badly, but apparently Mr. Young does. Thanks for watching, and as always, don't forget to subscribe.