olderroust

What I found most entertaining about the review is that it amounted to an endorsement, and a pretty strong one, of the product. They even thought they could pick out a difference between the high res and CD res audio, and when listening to the same track on pono versus others, they preferred how the pono sounded. And that's with good-not-great headphones and freecycle grade loudspeakers. Anyone who has the kind of system they start by dissing - a good amp, good speakers, good disc transport - is likely reading that review and thinking "worth ordering, if it makes a notable difference on the Ars close'n'play to people who did not want to hear a difference." The heart of my listening setup is 25 years old. In one ear, I have enough of a hearing loss that I have difficulty making out words; it's challenging for me to locate sounds in a room or birds outside. Still and all, I know what I'm hearing. We recently replaced a couch in our living room, and I asked my partner "hey, with the new couch, are you hearing a lot of bass emphasis?" She pretended not to have noticed it; her son also heard it right away, and I've since measured the effect with REW and an SPL and begun addressing the problem (the old couch had fabric extending to the floor and was in and of itself a bass trap; the new one has about 4 inches of air between it and the floor, and exposes 8 feet of new "corner.") After reading the Ars review of the Pono, my question was "hm. Any reason for me to want that? I don't need one in the car, and I've a good enough DAC and amp at the house. If I want to set up a good system at the office or wanted to buy very good headphones, yes, that'd be nice." I just don't need another way of feeding audio to main equipment - if Pono drops a network adapter in the Pono v2 and lets us use it as a media renderer, I'd likely buy one. It'd take the place of the optical and digital transport in a second system, one without a television monitor. It sounds as if I would be able to take the output from a Pono and feed it directly to an amp, and that would be very nice to have.