Neil Young’s brainchild didn’t stack up too well against Apple’s popular iDevice, though results are questionable

Feb 3, 2015 13:52 GMT  ·  By

Tests carried out on Neil Young’s Kickstarter-founded PonoPlayer which allegedly boasts some insane audio spectrum have revealed that a regular music player like the iPhone does the same job, probably even better, and for less money.

Videotaping musical legends dropping their jaws while experiencing the Pono player’s HD audio, songwriter Neil Young successfully raised $6.2 million in funding to get the hardware manufactured in bulk, and the players in pledgers’ hands (and is now probably swimming in a lot of leftover cash).

Whether or not David Pogue (NY Times columnist) has a personal vendetta with the people behind the Pono, he decided to put the player to the test using regular folks. Because, you know, they’re the ones who will do most of the buying. An iPhone was also thrown in for comparison.

The results were embarrassing for Neil Young’s team, and quite favorable for the Apple team. Most of the times, the iPhone was chosen as the player that sounded better, while many of the tests ended up with the participants not knowing which one to choose. In other words, the difference not only was negligible, but in many cases it wasn’t even in favor of the Pono.

One of the subjects was a sound expert. While he didn’t weigh in on the Pono’s audio quality, he did say that you simply cannot expect to feel a real difference using non-pro headphones.

Congrats to Mr. Pogue for his idea and the apparent public service; however, I do have to stress one thing: those test subjects don't seem to know an awful lot about music or what they're supposed to pick up on during their testing. Which, you know, kind of matters when you test people's ability to interpret audio.