Pono Player review: A tall, refreshing drink of snake oil

One of my Ars colleagues hadn't yet touched the Pono Player—the Neil Young-championed portable music player, nearly one year out of its successful Kickstarter and finally ready to make a mainstream hullabaloo about higher-resolution audio. However, he already "wrote" the review.

"You know how every once in a while you buy the $40 bottle of wine instead of the $8 one, thinking you're gonna have a special dinner or something?" Senior Reviews Editor Lee Hutchinson wrote over instant message. "And you get home, and you make the salmon or the pasta or whatever and you light the candles? And you pour the wine, swirl it like they do in Sideways so that it looks like you know what you're doing... you bring it to your lips and after smelling it—it smells like wine—you have a sip? And it's like… yeah, I guess this tastes good or something, but really it just tastes like wine?

"The Pono Player is kinda like that, but for music."

Specs at a glance: Pono Player
Screen	2.5"
OS	Android 2.3
CPU	ARM Cortex-A8
RAM	256MB
Memory	64GB (plus additional 64GB MicroSD card included)
Ports	Micro USB, MicroSD card reader, 2 x 3.5mm headphone jacks
Size	5" x 2" x 1" (13cm x 5cm x 2.5m)
Weight	4.6 ounces (130g)
Battery	"Up to 8 hours"
Starting price	$399.99

I stole Lee's take, because the Pono Player's sales pitch must deal with this exact sort of hurdle deal. That's especially true if the device is targeting the likes of many Ars readers or staff, who know better than to buy into the advanced-technology snake oil so often pushed on A/V geeks. Around the Orbital HQ, we've laughed off countless cables, circuit boards, speakers, and "advanced" displays—all smothered in gold in one way or another—that, when it came right down to it, didn't make a squat of difference (or certainly not enough to command some ridiculous asking prices).

To many, Pono's trying to do just that. "You need this device to hear music the best way possible"—in a music-playing world where everybody has a perfectly good media player in their smartphones. Yet, Pono's push to deliver a not-crazy-expensive FLAC player has a surprisingly low number of peers. We're not foolish enough to describe a $400 player (with no built-in speakers, by the way) as a bargain, but that's chump change compared to the bonkers price of $1,200 that Sony slapped onto its latest Walkman. If you're gonna buy a dedicated music player that costs as much as a TV, at least this one's only in the Vizio range.

Personally, I consider myself the kind of customer Pono has in its sights. I'm a gadget hound, a rabid every-genre-under-the-sun music consumer, and a person who doesn't want to build a massive, $1,000s-strong stereo system. Give me a nice pair of headphones and an effective, all-in-one way to max out the sound they receive, and I'll be in jazz-snob heaven.

Up until now, I've gotten my special-ear-time fix from my MacBook Pro, whose hard drive already has hosts of my music and whose headphone jack supports high-res audio output of 96kHz. If I'm really, really paying attention, I can pick out the differences between a variable bitrate MP3 and a larger FLAC file of the same song on my Audio Technica ATH-AD900 headphones—or I'd like to think that, at least. It's rare that I fret over the bass resonance and cymbal shimmering of a song while going about my day.

That's the perspective I came from when I finally located, purchased, and turned on a Pono Player. Neil Young wants us to believe that higher-res audio files played through his banana-colored Toblerone will improve our music-loving lives. I'm here to say that he and his team are kinda full of crap—though that doesn't negate the amount of quality found in this little, weird-looking thing.

Is that a Pono Player in your pocket...

As of press time, if you want to purchase a Pono Player right now and you didn't already put $300 of early-bird-discount faith into the hardware's Kickstarter campaign—many of those units have shipped—your only option is to walk into a Fry's Electronics store. We checked online to learn that a few Fry's locations near Ars staffers' homes had them in stock on January 22, at which point I rushed to my nearest super-sized computer parts shop.

I'd already placed an online order to ensure that a Pono would be waiting for me at the massive checkout line, so I wandered through the store to see what its display might look like. I was hoping for a cardboard cut-out of Neil leaning back with eyes clenched shut in the middle of a guitar solo, only his guitar had been digitally replaced with a bright-yellow Toblerone-shaped thingie. Instead, I found... nothing. After speaking to two clueless staffers, a third one told me that "the guys in video games were talking about that thing," so I went to the game department. A 19-year-old asked if I wanted to place an online order so that the back-room staffers could fish a Pono out. "We're supposed to get a full retail display pretty soon, I think," he told me.

The Pono Player sold at Fry's comes in the most non-descript cardboard box possible, its only giveaway being a $399.99 price tag on one of its sides. Open that box up, and you'll find a far more handsome, wooden, Pono-branded box—in a square shape, shockingly—that unfolds to reveal the player and its accessories. (No cheapo earbuds, which we kind of appreciated, to be honest. Why waste another $5-8 on headphones that Pono's target audience would detest?)

Pono Player's primary face contains a 2.5-inch touchscreen and three hard buttons: two for volume, along with a multi-function play/pause/skip/power button. Their plus/circle/minus arrangement, with the shapes cut to be the whole of each button, is more attractive than a standard square or circle button design, but it gives the unit even more of a toy aesthetic than its yellow paint job already does.

The body is covered in a smooth, rubberized plastic, meaning fingers can easily rub across its sides while still finding traction if the unit rests in your hand; the player is just a tad smaller than a grown-up hand. The primary face is the largest of the three, since, yes, the Pono Player comes in an isosceles triangle shape. Pono's creators insisted that the triangular shape was necessary to fit all of the player's parts. After reviewing a recent teardown, we wonder if the capacitors—the major culprit for Pono's circuit board bulge—could have been repositioned for a flatter design without increasing the size all that much.

Want to use studio-quality headphones with your new audio player? They better come with a 3.5mm adapter, because Pono doesn't support any larger jacks. If you happen to own a pair of headphones with two "balanced XLR connectors," you can plug them both in for supposedly improved sound. Otherwise, the two 3.5mm jacks on this device are meant for friends who want to listen to an album on their own headphones at the same time. The hardware comes packed with 64GB of on-board memory, and the box includes a 64GB Micro SD memory card, as well. Should you want to expand your memory, you can add a 128GB card.

We took the Pono Player on the go for an entire day, which proved to be a bit of a logistical nightmare. This isn't just a bad device to put in a pocket—the triangular shape feels noticeable and obnoxious in your pants pocket—but it's also lousy in a messenger bag. The creators elected not to include a hardware "hold" button of any sort. As a result, the volume and multi-function buttons got pressed on a regular basis during our testing—meaning this thing reached its maximum, incredibly high volume level so quickly that we had to rip earbuds out. We soon opted for handheld use, which was fine enough in terms of quickly adjusting volume, skipping current songs, or pausing. However, we couldn't disable the screen turning on every time we tapped the volume dial, and turning the screen off required holding the multi-function button down for way too long (so we reduced the auto-sleep timer accordingly).

The best thing we could say about on-the-go Pono use was that the unit fit neatly into our palm and felt like a media-player version of a drum stick. When this thing was cranked to high volume on a good song, we couldn't help but flick our wrist along and rock out in public.