Righteous Bits →
One of my favorite writers, Dan Rutter, explains and dissects many audiophile claims in discussing Neil Young’s proposed Pono platform:
The big deal about Pono is, of course, that 24/192 audio is meant to sound better even than CD, let alone lossily-compressed MP3s or AACs. According to Neil Young, digital-music listeners today, who are almost all listening to music data-reduced via MP3 or some other lossy codec, are as a result enduring sound worse than that from a 78-RPM shellac record.
Seriously, that’s what he says. … And he may be exaggerating a bit, but he is not joking.
And actually, I think that from his own point of view he may be right, in a way. But the only way for him to be right is a terrible one, that leaves me wondering if everybody else is just humouring this old guy with a large wallet.
In response to the many angry letters he got, he went even further in a follow-up.
These two articles took me days to get through because, like the intended procedure for John Siracusa’s OS X reviews, I kept following the links. My favorite two are this for science value and this for humor value — “shocked”!