When I wanted to demo Pono music to my artist friends, I did it in my car because it provided an ideal environment for listening to music. I’ve always loved listening while driving, because of how good music can sound and how few other distractions there are. You don’t need fancy equipment, just a quality stereo analog amp and a few speakers, typically two in the front, two in the rear, and a subwoofer. Traveling down the road listening to music as the world flies by is one of my great joys.
For my Pono demos, I used an analog system in my seventies Cadillac. I used just the stock speakers that were in it, feeding various resolutions to the analog amp and speakers. Pure. I did have a good analog amp in the trunk feeding those speakers, but I didn’t change the speakers. I didn’t want to tear the car apart.
Of the hundred or so artists who listened to the Pono demos, choosing the resolutions they could listen to “on the fly” and comparing without stopping the music, 98 percent chose high-resolution listening over all of the other formats. These included CD, MP3, Apple files, and others. That was a straight-up listening comparison and the choices were conclusive. Artists definitely can feel the difference, but it’s a difference everyone can feel, although some may not be able to recognize it in a test situation. It’s a feeling over time. The more you hear, the more you recognize the value of good-sounding music. You feel it. That is what music is. It is subtle but huge.
Today, all of the audio systems in cars are digital, as is the music. However, rather than using a high-quality DAC to convert digital music to analog at the source and using analog components to amplify it and drive the speakers, manufacturers do something much different. Unfortunately for music, it sounds pretty bad.
I visited a number of auto manufacturers for discussions about the deteriorating audio quality in automobiles. I’ll give you a few examples of my own experiences.
LINCOLN
I had been corresponding with Alan Norton in the Lincoln division of Ford Motors, who worked on their car audio systems and was investigating how to bring high-res sound and better audio to the future Lincoln models. I liked Alan, and he was encouraging. He contacted me after he bought a Pono, writing about how much he loved its sound, and inviting me out to meet the head of the Lincoln division and the audio team. They wanted to show me what they were doing to try to integrate a Pono player in one of their cars.
I was excited and flew to Ford’s headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, for a visit. We all met in a huge conference room, and I remember it well. There were a lot of folks, people from Lincoln’s audio equipment manufacturer and experienced Ford people. One of their assistants brought Starbucks coffee to everyone. This was about the same time my targeted recording “A Rock Star Bucks a Coffee Shop” was released, criticizing Starbucks for supporting the repeal of the Vermont law requiring GMO disclosures on foods. Of course, I was polite and didn’t say anything—but I didn’t drink the coffee.
The Lincoln team described the audio system they were working on. They talked about how feature-populated it was. The system was based on digital technology, with many new features that I thought had no real connection to true audio quality. For example, they explained that the speakers had to be “time-aligned” because the car is moving fast. The speakers have to be corrected as the car travels, so that sound gets to the back of the car at just the right time, or something like that. They described how the playback also needs to be time-aligned and balanced because of the characteristics and shapes inside of the car. Their solution required each speaker set to have its own converter to go from digital to analog and would use a digital signal processing chip and a digital amplifier chip to process the audio signals. The solution, I understood, was different-sized speakers for different areas of the car.
Thinking about the car audio presentation, I tried to keep an open mind. In my purist view, this was completely bogus. First, you would not be driving anywhere near the speed of sound for there to be any difference from the front of the car to the back. Second, I felt the extra components compromised the sound; even if they made a difference with effects, they started out with inferior sound right out of the gate. I’m sure they believed some of this was an improvement, but they were presenting ideas and concepts that made little sense to me.
In my way of thinking, for the best audio quality, signal processing should only be done once, while going from the digital file to the analog amplification that drives the speakers. Because they utilized so many cheap DACs and low-cost digital amplifier chips in so many places throughout the car to enable “features,” replacing them all with really good ones would be too expensive. It would have sounded better and been much cheaper if they had used just one top-quality DAC to feed high-quality analog amplifiers.
The entire architecture of their car, all of these special effects that they described, and the number of speakers were pushed by their designers and component manufacturers, but were just there to make them and their customers think that they’re getting something more.
It’s great marketing, but it has nothing to do with the quality of the sound. While they could use many digital features to change the soundstage to resemble a concert hall, boost the bass to create a rumble, or any number of things, none of that provided better audio. The components just made it sound more degraded, more synthetic. The system was polishing a turd. That’s why, today, new cars just don’t sound as good as they used to. Digital overkill.
I mean, it’s weird. I used to be able to listen to an AM radio in a car and get more out of the music than I get out of any of the new cars today.
More real sound. More music. More feelings.
PONO IN A CAR
After the engineers described what they were doing, we all went downstairs to a test car in their lab to listen to their system and try out Pono. I asked them not to use their existing digital amplifiers, DACs, or any of their sound-shaping systems. Just play the Pono’s high-resolution music directly through an analog amp that was wired to a few of the crucial speakers.
They connected the Pono and everyone took turns getting in the car and listening. Many seemed surprised by how good it sounded. We tried a bunch of songs, including mine, some from Adele, and some of their test files. They really appeared awed by it. It seemed eye opening for the engineers, who knew mostly digital and were wedded to it because of all of the tricks you can do with it.
In my mind, superfluous features are the killer of quality. Pure design is the savior.
The Lincoln engineers were smart people but had less understanding of analog audio in this age where everything is digital. Because digital had given them all of these options, they took it to the extreme, and even did something I would never have imagined: they superimposed a special background sound over the audio.
All the music had a drone in it!
Driving as I listened to their sound system, I recognized that something didn’t sound right; something was muddying up the audio. When I asked them about this, they explained that they had simulated the sound of an eight-cylinder engine in the background to create the effect of a more powerful car, masking the real sound from the car’s four-cylinder engine.
I saw what I was up against.
It was crazy. How did that improve audio quality?
TESLA
But it was not only Ford who didn’t get their audio right. I tried to explain some of this to Tesla creator Elon Musk. I wanted him to set up a Pono system in one of his cars. I wanted to tear apart a Tesla and then rebuild it with new components, and then have him compare it to a new Tesla, the way they’re building it now, because I knew it would sound so much better—so obvious that you couldn’t miss it.
When I started talking to him about this, he told me that a Tesla is a digital machine. What he meant is that he and his engineers like the bells and whistles, they like all the back-and-forth manipulation and controls that digital enables. It’s like driving a phone.
Of course, it is possible to use digital controls for analog sound and get the best of both worlds. I tried explaining that simple approach to their audio engineers, and when they discovered what I was getting into, they couldn’t wait to get rid of me. In essence, I was eliminating their jobs. When I spoke directly to Elon, I tried to explain to him that if I could just get audio from the Pono player to the speakers in his car through a wire that plugs in, just to demonstrate it, he would be able to hear the difference as opposed to the signal processing he was using. The sound would live up to the Tesla name.
“Let’s just try using some analog amps and plug in a Pono!” I said. That was what I wanted to show him and let him feel.
But Elon got distracted by the fact that in my “demo” there was a wire that would plug in, and said, “Oh, we can’t have a wire.” He dismissed me completely because of the wire, only there to make a simple demo.
I don’t believe he’s that stupid. That wasn’t it. I figured that he just wanted to get rid of me, and he thought he was already doing a brilliant job with sound. I wasn’t impressed with his lack of willingness to admit that anything could be wrong with his car. It was disappointing that he didn’t want to learn how to improve his great piece of automotive engineering (and it is). But I couldn’t get through to him. It was like his way was great, and what they already had was the best.
He kept saying, “We’re the best. We get all the awards. We’re the best-sounding car.”
And I was going, “Yeah, you’re the best-sounding car and you have an MP3 player in the car? You gotta be kidding me.”
I wanted Tesla to be in another league, as it is with power. But Elon just didn’t get it. A lot of people are like that; they can be brilliant in electronics, brilliant in software, and just very brilliant people. He is. But they sometimes don’t get this. Music. Not everyone hears it. But given a chance, they would feel it.
It’s quite interesting that the leaders of these companies can’t—or don’t want to—hear the difference. But I can hear the difference and I know through math and through physics that analog audio is better. The fewer things you do to the sound, the better it is. Less is more. This philosophy doesn’t work with many of today’s products. To them, more is more. If it’s crap, more crap is better than just a little bit of crap. So, they decorate it.
Someday, if I ever have another big hit record (ha ha), I’ll buy a Tesla and dismantle it, replacing the sound system with one of my own design. I will take it back to Elon and show him what it feels like to hear quality sound in his beautiful quiet car. That would be my Tesla.
With the car manufacturers, I learned that there’s little thought given to the idea of “let’s simplify and make it straightforward.” That way of thinking is gone . . . for now.
If you put four or six, maybe eight speakers in a car, in the right places, and a subwoofer, and a stereo amp to drive it, it’s completely awesome. It’s unbelievable. But no, the digital feature engineers think twenty speakers are better than five, and thirty speakers are better than twenty.
Trying to turn technology into products that can grow and reproduce, to just keep putting more and more superfluous and quality-inhibiting features into those products, is not the way real technology works. I think technology is supposed to be something that serves you to make your life better, to improve lives. Today’s cars are a blatant example of technology not doing that. Complexity is mistaken for progress.
You know, I may end up going to my grave and be banging my head against my gravestone trying to get somebody to understand about what’s happening to music! I’ve thought about that more and more as time goes by, that no one hears the degradation of sound. No one but the hundred artists who listened to Pono in my 1978 Cadillac, including Elton John, Stephen Stills, Norah Jones, and countless other superb musicians. Norah said, “This makes listening fun again!” Time and time again, artists chose high-resolution digital through analog amplification unanimously over all other options.
So, I’m not giving up. This is too important to give up on. I trust artists.