Taking on the status quo is never an easy task. We were up against an established and convenient way of hearing music that had ingrained itself in the public consciousness and was accepted across the board.
Having to shutter our Pono business was a giant disappointment to me and to all of our Pono supporters, employees, and investors. We spent so much time, effort, and money to do what we believed and still believe to be so important. Our vision resonated with numerous investors who made contributions to support what we all believed in, and I met like-minded people wherever I went who thanked me for our efforts. I am grateful to all for their support. I’m convinced Pono’s existence was a very important step toward the goal of improving the audio quality of music and bringing back the feeling—just not the last step.
THE PONO EFFECT
Pono raised awareness way beyond the audiophile community and encouraged discussions about audio quality, even controversial ones, among the media. While we were never able to get actual competitive sales data, we believe that, in its first year, more Pono music players were sold than any other brand, and that our download store was selling a greater percentage of high-res content than anyone else. We became synonymous with quality audio and the destination for high-res downloads.
FIRST TO BRING HIGH-RESOLUTION MUSIC TO THE MASSES
Before Pono, high-res music players had been focused on audiophiles. Pono was the first to bring a high-quality player and high-res music to the mainstream music lover. It was easier to use and offered better performance than any other player. But it was not a phone.
Pono created a community with tens of thousands of supporters worldwide. They bought players and downloads and contributed to our vibrant and growing community forum. Each of them became an advocate for our mission. Now, even though our music store is gone, high-res downloads continue to be available from other sites around the world and play on Pono players to the delight of their owners.
NOT PROPRIETARY
Pono never used a proprietary file format or limited what you could do with the downloads our customers bought, something the industry is once more attempting to do indirectly by using Meridian’s MQA compression scheme. While I applaud the industry’s effort here to offer higher quality, using a proprietary format that manipulates the audio and requires compatible hardware is shortsighted and another costly and greedy mistake by the record companies supporting it. I don’t think that will ever work. It comes at a big cost.
Pono was able to demonstrate to the tech industry that a small team could deliver a solution far superior in its audio quality and simpler to use than what anyone else was offering.
HIGH RES
More companies are now embracing high res, following Pono’s lead. Sony introduced a line of affordable high-res players and a high-res initiative across many of their products, putting listening stations into retail stores to demonstrate its benefits. New players were introduced by Onkyo, FiiO, Shure, and Astell&Kern. There are even a few smartphones such as top-of-the-line LG and Samsung models that have built-in high-res music players. Even among the streaming services there’s a movement, albeit slow, to improve quality. Tidal offers streaming with near-CD quality and MQA; Qobuz, a French company, is offering high-res streaming; and Murfie is offering a service to stream their customers’ vinyl records and CDs at their full resolution.
Did they all do it because of Pono? Not entirely, but we certainly raised awareness, and brought in educated new customers who better understand the advantages. The Pono player has become the gold standard, the product many audio reviewers still use as the benchmark to measure new players, asking “How does it compare with Pono?” or “Is it as good as Pono?”
VINYL
Quality music is making a comeback. It’s a slow one. In addition to the proliferation of quality music players, we’ve seen a revival of vinyl sales for both my albums and those of my artist friends, and it now accounts for one of the industry’s largest areas of growth. It’s certainly not because of convenience. I think it’s mostly because of vinyl’s amazing audio quality. A note of caution, though: all vinyl is not equal. If it comes from the analog master, it will be great. If it comes from a high-resolution file, it could also be great. If it comes from a CD, mastered through a super-high-end DAC, then it will be better than a CD, but nowhere near legacy analog vinyl or high-resolution vinyl quality.
STREAMING MUSIC
Over the years, my friend and former Pono board member Gigi Brisson often said to me, “Neil, can’t we try streaming?”
I would reply, “There’s nobody who can stream the true quality of music.”
As I said, I was wrong. That was one of my biggest mistakes, not listening to Gigi. She was not limited by her technical knowledge and recognized that high-res streaming would be of huge value. I was in a technical box and was sure that streaming technology couldn’t do it. It hadn’t been done at that time, and it would take a few more years before the problems that kept it from being practical were solved. I was blind to that.
As an artist, I objected to streaming for many reasons. Streaming was disrupting the industry. Record companies were making all these new deals with streaming companies that many artists could not understand. It became clear that streaming was a boon to record companies, bringing them a windfall at the expense of the artists, who suffered when streaming replaced physical media.
With streaming, the person who wrote the song gets paid, but those who performed on the record get very little or nothing. The digital age has made it possible to cut out the original artists from the profit chain. With that happening, there was really no reason for artists to continue to try to create music if they couldn’t make a living from it.
The industry’s answer to the artists’ loss of revenue was for the artists to make their living by just doing live performances. That was Silicon Valley’s answer, too. We’re giving away your music, taking away your income from selling your recordings, but you can make a living playing live. In 2017, the artists who actually created the music got just 12 percent of the music industry’s $43 billion in revenue. This is the new age of digital music.
I really wanted to make music sound better, and I thought it was something I could do with my life, something of significance. While I’ve made some other contributions, what I saw going on with music, with the quality going downhill, was just so disheartening. I felt I had to do something. I couldn’t listen to my own music anymore, my own recordings. I only listen to what I get at the end of a day’s recording session to check on its quality. No one else gets to hear that anymore.
Looking back, I assumed that streaming would never be able to get to the level of high res, so we went in the direction of high-res downloads and a great music player. But as I said, one of my biggest mistakes was a failure to recognize sooner the impact of streaming and how fast it would replace CDs and downloads. In fact, its impact on the record companies has been so significant that it has kept many of them in the black. My aversion to streaming was not only because of its effect on music quality but because of how poorly record companies and streaming deals treat the artists. That’s another story, and it’s not a good one.
In spite of my personal feelings, streaming cannot be ignored, and to attain my goals I should have taken it more seriously. John Hamm, a few years earlier, had brought up the idea and told me about a company in Asia that was working on technology to improve streaming quality, but we were in the midst of Pono and we never pursued it. That was a big mistake.
OPPORTUNITY
During one of my last visits to the Pono office in San Francisco, I met with our small team and let them know that we couldn’t justify investing more money to rebuild our download music store. The discussions then turned to streaming. Kevin Fielding, our software engineer, mentioned that a tiny company in Singapore had just created a high-res streaming service that was providing Sony classical music at CD and higher quality. They had developed a way to send music over both slow and fast networks, providing the best audio quality possible all the time, depending on the bandwidth available to the listener.
The streamed audio files would be compressed in size—in real time—to work on slow networks and adjust to constantly changing conditions. That meant it would work like current streaming services when the bandwidth was limited but could change to CD quality or higher res, seamlessly, when the bandwidth allowed. At the highest level it would play full high resolution, with no compression. They called it adaptive streaming, and they had been working on it for years, building it on top of an unused industry standard. The bandwidth in some areas is now so high that full high-resolution streaming could be possible at last. I couldn’t get it out of my mind.
The firm, OraStream, was the same company Hamm had told me about. Interestingly, Hamm had found us Charley Hansen (the designer of Pono) long ago and had also found OraStream (the solution to high-res streaming) before I “discovered” it. I wished I had recognized these things right away.
ORASTREAM
When OraStream streamed a music file, it would send a tiny bit of test data to determine the speed of the network and then send the highest possible quality file from among its 15,000 levels, matching its resolution to the available bandwidth. High-speed networks would get high res and slow-speed networks might get MP3 quality. This was all done inaudibly using the industry-standard FLAC file format.
I was very excited by what they had done and asked Phil to investigate and learn more. Phil contacted Frankie Tan, the founder, and confirmed that it worked with all resolutions, although many of their users were listening to CD-quality music, because of the paucity of high-res music.
The company provided us data showing how the service was being used among its subscribers. It showed the average bandwidth used by listeners in many different cities where they received their streaming music. The same music was being experienced from high res in some locations to low-res MP3 quality or below in others, but it all originated from one file. Adaptive streaming has been used in video for years. That’s what makes Netflix possible. But it had been pretty much ignored for audio.
My instant reaction was to see if we could use OraStream to develop a high-resolution streaming service. I became very excited by the possibilities. I realized that it would take a huge effort and a lot of money. It meant starting over completely. I thought of the famous quote from Alexander Graham Bell: “When one door closes, another opens.”
And I thought about John Hamm.