Gadgetory

this my friends is the paano player it's a $400 portable audio player conceived by Canadian music legend Neil Young's company paano a word that means righteous that raised over six million dollars 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 know 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 masters casemod 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 paano predicted what would happen with the whole bendgate iphone six-plus thing and chose what is not only the most been 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 Panos 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 microUSB port for charging and thankfully simple drag-and-drop music file transfer and a flap to cover the microSD expansion slot paano site says mac 64 gigs to go with the 64 gigs of internal for a total of 128 but online I found lots of references to a compatibility with 128 gig microSD 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 Ponto player volume up volume down and the middle circle button which handles play and pause and then hold for power and Pavel 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 to Panos credit the navigation of there 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 type quirks to 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 timeout 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 Ponto 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 it's 29 50 milliamp hour battery delivering a mere 8 hours of playback I had distance 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 patoot if it bluetooths or read 230 toothpicks how does it sound will it cause my soul to rediscover music well it transport me to a sublime musical experience no of course not don't be silly I decided on my son Heiser HD six hundreds for most of my listening tests but spent some time with my IE 80s as well since it is a portable player and I threw everything I had at this thing some high bitrate mozart flax obviously converted to apple's lossless codec for the iphone then i purchased back when I did my geek out review some top 40 crap both flax and mp3's some rips from a couple of bare naked lady scenes I had lying around and anyway output volume was leveled across my test devices and iPhone 6 and the panel player for apples to apples mobile devices with an o2 and ode acuse periodically as a sanity check I used my ex text and level meter and a 1 kilohertz test tone at 80 decibels to level everything off and in spite of Panos claims that their player will make everything from the high-definition tracks on their webstore to the crappiest mp3 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 paano 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 - there are so many testimonials from everyone from audio files to regular people to Neil Young himself who are saying the Ponto 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 bitrate has very little to do with the quality of a track 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 it gets on camera and talks about the superior dynamic range of analog Media vs. CDs when even laymen like me no that's categorically incorrect logon has so much dynamic range that when it hits you it hits you with the full envelope of dynamics and I really hope it was some misinformed peon at pas no 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 Ponto certified HD audio players then selling music to those customers online is much more lucrative paano 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 Panos actions they don't appear to care about any of that because if they did there wouldn't be a 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 by don't know much by Linda Ronstadt by itself instead of forcing me to spend a hundred and twenty-five dollars 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 paw no player can apparently deliver 80 to 90% 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 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-fone than that you'll be paying a fair amount for the service that you use no locked-in 200 minutes of talk however many Meg's of data just what you actually need to news 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 smart phones 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 team comm 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 to your 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 gonna be a flame war down there though so uh unless you've got your a flame-retardant suit on might just want to stay out of the comments on this one speaking of flame retardant suits Lynas tech tips shirts are fully flame retardant so you're gonna 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 my instictive shirt we assume no reliability for etcetra etcetra etcetra 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 Pollin pono player I'll make $32 I'm still not gonna recommend that you buy it because I don't need your $32 that badly but apparently mr. Yeung does thanks for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe