I found this web page while researching ways to rip high resolution audio. Very interesting.

http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html#toc_su

Very interesting read. It really depends on the equipment playing these high res files. And some bloody good speakers.
A basic set up will probably not perform any differently.
I sat in Geff's living room and we compared a few songs on different sources, pressings etc and there is a huge difference on some instances.
The high res Yes tracks are considerably better sounding than the CDs. The Grateful Dead is miles better.
However not all are, mastering has a lot to do with it too.

I largely agree with Ranasakawa.

Ever since "Pono" (Which is NOT a format) Repeat after me: Pomo is a player, NOT a format; there has been a lot of anti-hi-rez propaganda coming out from people who have (usually) financial) & (sometimes) psychological investment in 16/44 & mp3.

I fully agree with Ranasakawa on both mastering & gear. You have to have at least half decent gear to hear a significant difference (Pioneer, Yamaha, Kenwood, etc isn't going to show much difference) AND it's all about the mastering; poor mastering can destroy hi-res; probably even worse then it harms MP3; as Linda has pointed out the basic MP3 codec tends to be less shrill then lossless.

Re 196/24: I have heard some arguments that in some cases 96/24 sounds better. Don't know if i believe it; i can tell you especially with Acoustic Music, but also with the best Mastered R&R, hi-rez DESTROYS CD, Heck I even heard Madonna's Like A Virgin album in true audiophile quality tonight! And that's 100% with my ears, NOT with waveforms.

Volume compressed (loudness wars) Hi-res is at least as irritating as cd, perhaps even more so.

As I posted in another thread earlier tonight, what surprises me abut Pono is the lack of advertising. Unless they step up the advertising dollars, get a bunch of exclusives & lower the price, HD Tracks, PSM & Acoustic Sounds are going to kill Pono.

"Modern playback fidelity is incomprehensibly better than the already excellent analog systems available a generation ago" That is largely an untrue statement; though in the last 10 years, high quality Digital has dropped from at MINIMUM of $3k to $1k or less, while the cost of high quality analog gear has stayed largely the same.

"Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space."

The person who write that is either:

A. An absolute idiot
B. Works for I-Tunes
C. Used to work for Stereo Review "all gear sounds the same"
D. All of the above.

That is the most untrue musical statement I have ever HEARD.

BTW, there are several similar articles that came out recently. Someone has a vested interest (likely financial) in seeing high-res fail. By the way, the ridiculous statement above would also HAVE to include ALL blu-ray audio, dvd-a & SACD. Haven't many hear found those formats to be superior to cd & (god forbid) MP3?

Actually, he states some very sound (and correct) technical information. I spent 20 years as a signal analyst, so I'm pretty familiar with what he had to say about the Nyquist rate and resulting harmonics and distortion.

But he's also correct about confirmation bias and this being a subjective rather than objective argument, and calling him an idiot doesn't make him any more wrong or you any more right.

Have you ever compared a well mastered hi-res version of a song on good equipment with your ears vs an mp3? Even in a double blind test?

Neil Young is not a businessperson, he's a musician with a beautiful vision about how music should be recorded, distributed and listened to. I get the impression from his interviews that he expected Pono to be successful for genuine, positive reasons -- that enough people crave hi-res audio who would respond favourably to the Pono concept -- and he wasn't interested in doing some big, hype-driven marketing push to reach the much bigger audience for whom music is just a minor part of their lives and they don't care much about sound quality.

Unfortunately, yes, it might mean that Pono will get destroyed by HDTracks, et. al.

Of course, once Amazon and iTunes enter the hi-res market, they will in turn destroy all of those sites.

Yep to all. I do believe that NY believes in what he's doing, & in this world one has to have a "sexy" marketing campaign to be successful, especially with the massive changes (which as you know I agree with) he's trying to bring about.

And yes, it's sad, but you're right: the Giants could kill this entire 'scene" with one stroke. Unless they were bought out by Super D as I've speculated, HDT is just a little indie label called Chesky Records. & they're the biggest of the bunch in the USA. (QUOBUZ seems to be the biggest in Europe)

IMO, NO company should have that much power, not only the banks & oil companies.

But that's not a valid argument against what he's saying, because the argument about compressed vs uncompressed formats adds the wrinkle of additional encoding of the actual recording, so in essence adding yet another layer of errors. As I read the article, he's basically saying that mastering of the recordings at 24/196 is pointless, which is a separate argument from the MP3/CD/Hi-Res media issue.