Until the polarizing introduction of Neil Young’s portable PonoPlayer, the $6.2 million Kickstarter behemoth, high-resolution music downloads had been a low-controversy, high-priced niche audio market for several years.
Can you hear the difference between a 44.1-kilohertz, 16-bit file (CD quality) and a 192/24 high-resolution download? Of course you can, says David Chesky, who co-founded the HDTracks (www.hdtracks.com) hi-res download store in 2008 with his brother, Norman. Chesky, a composer who is also the producer and artistic director at Chesky Records in New York, says it doesn’t take a golden ear, only a pristine recording and the right equipment connected to your computer.
Q: Is Pono good or bad for your business?
A: Everything is good for business. Pono is just one of many, many players on the market. Sony has this amazing new Walkman series coming out. The more people make devices, the more it says hi-res is real, not the lunatic fringe.
Q: Is it possible both sides were right on Pono: Some people will hear a difference with hi-res music and some won’t depending on the source material and the quality of playback equipment?
A: Yes. Those two things and the quality of listening headphones. Look, the reality is if you’re listening on the subway, [hi-res] doesn’t matter. It’s where you are and what you’re listening to. Let’s take a vinyl LP. I can go to my kid’s room and put a record on their Fisher-Price stereo and it’s going to sound awful. I could play the same LP on a great system and it will sound amazing. You have to have the source material and the means to get the resolution off the source material.
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Q: What are the minimum equipment requirements to hear the difference with a hi-res file?
A: For at-home playback, a few-hundred-dollar DAC [digital-to-analog converter] like an AudioQuest DragonFly ($148.99, http://www.audioquest.com), Meridian Explorer2 (www.meridian-audio.com, $299.95) and up. Then there are [software] products like Audirvana ($74, http://www.audirvana.com) or Pure Music ($129, http://www.channld.com/puremusic) that make your Mac sound better or JRiver ($69.98, http://www.jriver.com) for Windows. To hear the difference, you really have to buy one of those players.
Q: You can buy a vinyl LP sourced from a digital master, which defeats the purpose of an analog LP. Is this the same sort of thing happening now, with people wondering if some hi-res files are actually only upsampled CDs?
A: What a record sounds like is something aesthetic, but we have to validate it as hi-res. We do this with computer waveforms. When we get our content in [from music labels], it’s checked. We decide whether it’s a CD or a hi-res file and what the sample rate is. The waveform pattern gives it away. It’s like a fingerprint. You can’t hide it.
Q: But a lot of what is sold as hi-res is not actually hi-res. No wonder people don’t hear much difference.
A: That is a problem. When anything starts to get successful, people want to monetize it, cheapen it, lower the bar. The new hi-res will be the MP3 in five years. That’s not what we’re about.
Q: Last year, there was a rumor that Apple was going to start selling hi-res, 96/24 files on iTunes. Would that be a game-changer?
A: If McDonald’s started giving you gourmet meals, most people wouldn’t want to shop there.
Q: What about streaming? A lot of people say downloads are is replacing the CD, but streaming will replace downloads.
A: That’s a possibility.
Q: People care about high-resolution video but they’re much less passionate about high-quality audio. Why?
A: It’s a philosophical question that has nothing to do with technology. Music is a little more abstract. When you watch TV, you can just sit there and vegetate. When you listen to music, because it’s more abstract, you have to bring a lot to it. A lot of people do not want to make the effort. Why was it in the ’60s and ’70s, every guy wanted a great high-end system? That was the thing. Now it’s not. And, actually, the technology is much better now. I think about this all day long and bang my head against the wall.