The upcoming Sony ZX2

There's a bit of noise about Sony's upcoming Walkman, which the digital talking heads seem to be mistaking for a portable Android tablet (such as how the mobile landscape has evolved very quickly).

It is, rather, a portable high-fidelity device (at a price) which, despite the naysayers, has a certain cachet and demand.

I've been a loyal fan of Sony since my first portable Sony radio from the '60s. I've since bought many Sony Walkman devices, and though the critics drubbed them, they do have a devoted following. (Recently, for example, I used one of my two Sony MZ-RH1s to record Paul McCartney and Mindy Smith--because, after a decade, they just work, and there's nothing quite like the portable Sony recorders on the market.)

I'm tempted to buy one when they go on sale, but probably won't. They're too expensive, for one thing. Plus, I have the Pono. Not as elegant or refined, to be sure, but just as good at rendering high-fidelity audio--and it's a lot less expensive.

More time with the Pono player

I have quite a handful of hi-res audio files, which I have been sampling on the Pono.  Some observations:

There's quite a bit of debate online among audiophiles about the degrees of quality about this-or-that hi-res master, for example.  I haven't spent enough time obsessing over this to have a fully formed opinion, except to say: the critics are right in many cases. Some hi-res files are indistinguishable from the CD version... One example that I noticed: Talking Heads "Fear Of Music."  I'll keep my iPod rip of it. The Pono cannot redeem a poor remaster.  But, so far, these have been in the minority. Currently I'm listening to Steely Dan's "Two Against Nature" (provenance unknown, though it's supposed to be a rip of a SACD two-fer with the underrated "Alive In America" as a bonus).  The audio is clearly superior to CD.  The linked site above says that the then-circulating copy is a rip of a DVDS-audio.  I can't find any reference to a "Two Against Nature" SACD (though I didn't go past page one of Google search).

There was some debate among the early Pono bidders about whether the Pono music store would offer truly new hi-res masters, or simply recycle the stuff already on HDTracks. It's too early to say, except--the Pono version of "Rust Never Sleeps" is *clearly* superior to any other master that I've heard. To me, that's the acid test: when I hear a well-worn album that I've lived with for decades as if it's brand new--like I'm hearing it for the first time--then the Pono is worth the price of admission.

I think that this is where the media critics have gotten lost. Most casual music consumers won't notice, and won't care about (much less hear) the difference between a perfectly adequate 256 K MP3, and a 192khz, 24bit master. But if you have lived with this music and it has become part of the fabric of your life, you *will* hear the difference, because you have internalized every nook and cranny of the sound.

This is of course a niche market, but one that I've been a part of for quite a while.

Some small issues with the Pono that I've noticed: file transfers are very slow, even over USB 3. Not sure what is causing this. And a highly annoying issue: album art. The JRiver media center does not tag every album file with the "official" album art, only the first song.

Day Four (or Five): What's on my Pono? (or, New Adventures In Hi-Fi)

After The Gold Rush (Neil Young)
American Stars 'N Bars (Neil Young)
Back To Black (Amy Winehouse)
CSN&Y 1974 (came with the Pono)
Fear Of Music (Talking Heads)
Harvest (Neil Young)
The Idler Wheel (Fiona Apple)
The Raven (Rebecca Pidgeon)
Remain In Light (Talking Heads)
Retrospective (Rebecca Pidgeon)
Rust Never Sleeps (Neil Young)
The Shape Of Jazz To Come (Ornette Coleman)

Pono Player: Day Two (or, the experience of the early adopter)

I've gotten my Pono player to upgrade the firmware and I've added some albums. Neither of these tasks were very easy, but they weren't impossible, for a reasonably savvy end user to accomplish.  Just the normal hickups of an early adopter process.

The Pono developers chose the JRiver Media Center to manage both the Pono player and associated audio files, and although it seems to work reasonably well, most problems seem to stem from the JRiver software. It's totally unreasonable to expect Pono to build a custom media center from the ground up to work with the player, so licensing a copy of JRiver (retail cost, $49.98--not cheap) is a good compromise.  I notice that it takes a few steps, performed in the correct order, to get the JRiver software to recognize the Pono player. First, you plug the player in to the computer; then, you have to click through a couple of choices on the player (correctly) before the device is recognized by the OS and mounted by the file system (which I prefer--I like to actually see what's there).  Upgrading the Pono firmware takes several clicks on both the device and on JRiver to work correctly, and unintuitively, you have to eject and disconnect the Pono player (assuming you have made the correct clicks) for the firmware to install.  Some users had difficulty with this, but I was able to do it.

Basically, I think that most of us have been conditioned by iTunes to behave in certain ways and expect our media devices to do certain things, and unlearning this will take a few minutes. In many ways, JRiver and Pono are throwbacks to the early 00s, before iTunes obliterated the portable music media ecosystem. I don't have a problem with it, in my Old Skool way. In many respects, the Pono player is very much like an early 00s MP3 player (albeit, with more sophisticated DA converters), and those of us who hate iTunes (even while embracing its ubiquity) will like it.

I fully expect that all these glitches to be ironed out by the Pono team in the coming months, and I don't mind being a beta tester for Neil. (It's the least I can do to thank him for giving "Pocohantas" to the world.)

Will the Pono player sound "better" than my six (or seven) iPod Classics running 256 K MP4 files?  I think so, but it will all come down to how the digital files are mastered. If you've used HDTracks, then you know that some tracks sound better than CD quality (44.1kHz/16bit), and others don't--it depends on what the record label provides. You can take a digital recording originally mastered at 16bit and blow it up to 192kHz/24bit, and sell it for twice the cost of a CD--but it will still "sound" no better than 256 K iTunes CD rip.  This is the snake oil that critics accuse HDTracks of trafficking in (rightly so, though HDTracks is simply using what the record label provides). Will Neil Young be able to strong-arm the record labels into providing decent masters?  Let's hope so.  At the very least, one thing that I *have* noticed in the Pono store is that all tracks are at least CD-quality, including one album (Talking Heads, "Bonus Rarities & Outakes") that is only available elsewhere in the iTunes store in lossy format.  So if you're like me and refuse to pay good money for lossy iTunes downloads, you can support Pono and your fav recording artists by purchasing lossless versions at Pono Music (and other hi-fi audio retailers like CDBaby and AcousticSounds).

Pono player--received today (Christmas present to myself)

Those who stumble upon this post--and know what Neil Young's Pono music player is--are probably early adopters, like me. I got one of the limited editions (chrome CSN&Y).  It's currently charging. I already have hi-rez music to copy to it... Definitely all my Rebecca Pidgeon hi-rez... Duke Ellington's "Money Jungle"... The list is endless. Pono is jumping into the hi-rez party at just the right time, because the music has been available for a while, just waiting for the right audio player to play it. But will it succeed?  Don't know, don't particularly care. I speak as the owner of at least (possibly seven) iPod Classics--the last two purchased last year, before Apple stopped making them. There will always be a market (although a niche one) for portable audio players. I don't care if they make millions--I just need one.

So will the music sound different, and will I be able to tell?  The first is a maybe, and the second is a probably.  I think that my biggest limitation will be headphones. Not sure which model to buy--except to say that it probably won't be Beats by Dre.

American Top 40, May, 1977

It's a very-rare 4-day weekend for me, so I actually had time to listen to some Casey (recorded via Dar.fm).  It's strange listening to this stuff, mostly because the bulk of this music never really left the radio. But there's always a song or two that I distinctly remember not remembering. And it's interesting for me to see what my now-refined musical palate thinks of the stuff I listened to as a teen. I didn't make note of exactly what week this show was from (but it was the week that Barry Manilow had his "third Number One hit," "Looks Like We Made It").  As usual, I skipped over about half the songs, including the aforementioned. The few notable songs from the playlist:

Slave, "Slide". Slave was a funk band from Ohio that I had never heard of. Their hit from that week, "Slide," sounds as solid as any funk song from that seminal period, and I can't believe that it was not more of a crossover. I don't remember hearing this song, ever.  I've added it to my Amazon Prime funk playlist. Thank you, Casey, for that one.

Another song that caught my ear was the one-hit wonder, "Ariel," by Dean Friedman. There's a sort of Billy Joel vibe going with this hippy-dippy song that could only have come from this decade. (Billy Joel has lately been critically reevaluated, though not entirely redeemed.)

My recording of this show included the "musical extra" of "Boogie Nights," by Heatwave, one of my fav tracks of the decade. (In the '80s or '90s I bought a white-label promo 45 with an extended mix.)

Honorary mention: "Smoke From A Distant Fire" from the Sanford-Townsend Band. I was too young to truly appreciate the lyrical nuance of that song in 1977, though it perfectly resonates now.

(There was also a Helen Reddy song in the countdown. I don't remember the name of it, and I mention it solely because I mistakenly thought that it was a Toni Tennille song that I'd never heard, which would indeed be a surprise. I've always quite liked Toni Tennille, for reasons I can't fully articulate.)

Insomnia compels me to offer an opinion of Nicki Minaj's video Only

First, I don't really know who Nicki Minaj is, aside from a few photographs I've seen of her in the celebrity news sections, wearing various outfits. But I'll go out on a limb and guess that she's a hip-hop artist. Contemporary hip-hop isn't my bag, and not for want of trying to make it so. I sampled Kanye's "Yeesus" a while back and found it unlistenable--noise, really.  (To be perfectly fair, I'm not hip to Taylor Swift, either.)  I keep wanting it to be like the golden-age stuff that turned my ears around in the early '90's, but, like trying to bring back the Beatles like we did in the '70s, it ain't happening.

So I'm biased. Still, I was prepared to be impressed with "Only."  I can somewhat dig that Minaj is trying to make a provocative statement by donning Nazi-esque imagery in her video (assuming that she's the one behind such a novel artistic move). On a strictly visual level, she succeeds. By evoking scratchy newsreel footage that pans through a mechanistic landscape of washed-out reds and grays, I can almost see it. Visually, it's quite impressive.

It's when her "lyrics" start rolling across the screen that she loses me. I'd quote them, but I'd have to up the safety level of my blog. And since they're plastered across the screen, I can't just turn off the sound and dig her freaky scene. They are a grotesque parody of the lowest hip-hop stereotypes that we've fallen to in--whatever this wasteland of a decade is called. (The Teens?) No narrative flow, no "story"-- just rants about activities that, in earlier days, would likely get you arrested in Boise and a number of other jurisdictions.

I can only recommend that Nicki dig out some Leni Riefenstahl next time (preferably in the original German) to get this done right. There's art, potentially, there, but I'm not feeling it.  (I'm tempted to recommend that she put on some Tribe to hear some REAL hip-hop, but I know that ain't happening, either.)

Update: Minaj disclaims any credit for the video's composition. The video's director, Jeff Osbourne, explains (Billboard):

First, I'm not apologizing for my work, nor will I dodge the immediate question. The flags, armbands, and gas mask (and perhaps my use of symmetry?) are all representative of Nazism.

But a majority of the recognizable models/symbols are American: MQ9 Reaper Drone, F22 Raptor, Sidewinder missile, security cameras, M60, SWAT uniform, General's uniform, the Supreme court, and the Lincoln Memorial. What's also American is the 1st Amendment, which I've unexpectedly succeeded in showing how we willfully squeeze ourselves out of that right every day.

I think that what Osbourne is trying to say is that he drew a deliberate analogy between symbols of Nazism and American militarism, as a way of highlighting the abuse of power in the latter, in a way that would not be automatically assumed by many Americans, particularly here (where I live, in a deep red state). Certainly something to ponder today, Veterans Day.

It still don't match the lyrics, tho.