this my friends is the pano 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 6 million on kickstarter in early 2014. and while
normally i would refer to a device like this as an mp3 player and it certainly
does playback 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 bendgate iphone 6 plus thing and chose what is not only the most bend
resistant possible shape but also one that would be extraordinarily
uncomfortable to sit on 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
modes for you 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 micro sd
expansion slot pano'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 microsd capacity which brings us
around to the front there are three buttons on the panel player volume up
volume down and the middle circle button which handles play and pause and then
hold for power and panel 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 touchscreen on the front holy
crap this thing is bad i don't remember the last time i saw such an atrocious
display with abominable viewing angles like this on a device that cost more
than a hundred bucks typano'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 uh 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 have a lot of music 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 panel player was cheap i likely wouldn't even
mention it but the panel 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 milliamp hour battery delivering a mere eight 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
patoo to fit bluetooths or red tooths or toothpicks how does it sound 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 600s
for most of my listening tests but spent some time with my ie80s as well since it
is a portable player and i threw everything i had at this thing some high
bit rate 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 ladies i had lying around and
anyway output volume was leveled across my test devices and iphone 6 and the
pano player for apples to apples mobile devices with an o2 and odac used
periodically as a sanity check i used my extect sound level meter and a one
kilohertz 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 panel player has any right to exist especially at this price point
other than as a transparent attempt to build 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 panel
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 bit rate has very little to do with the quality of attract 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 has so much dynamic range then when it
hits you it hits you with a full envelope of dynamics and i really hope
it was some misinformed peon at pano that got quoted by engadget as saying
that the engineering being done by ire allowed the panel 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 then selling music to those customers online is much more
lucrative pano 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 pano'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
kilohertz 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 panel player can apparently deliver 80 to 90 percent 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's
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 cinco phone 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 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 just like 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 uh unless you got your flame retardant suit on might just want to
stay out of the comments on this one speaking of flame retardant suits Linus
tech tip shirts are fully flame retardant so you're going to want to buy those over on the link in the video
description they're not flame retardant please don't let yourself on fire with a Linus tech tip shirt we assume no
reliability for etcetera etcetera etcetera 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
pono player i'll make 32 dollars i'm still not gonna recommend that you buy
it because i don't need your three to two dollars that badly but apparently mr young does thanks for watching and as
always don't forget to subscribe
you