Pono is getting close and by the looks of it they will have no trouble getting the required backing money.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-musicOf note is the fact that Ayre Acoustics were heavily involved with electronic design - a very good thing.
WRT electronics here's some tech stuff from
The PonoPlayer was designed with a “no compromises” approach to sound quality. We partnered with the engineering team at Ayre (www.ayre.com) to include some of their world-class audio technology in our PonoPlayer. The Ayre team describes their contribution to the PonoPlayer design as follows:
• The digital filter used in the PonoPlayer has minimal phase, and no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made (including music) always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural" and harsh.
• All circuitry is zero-feedback. Feedback can only correct an error after it has occurred, which means that it can never correct for all errors. By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry with wide bandwidth and low output impedance, there is no need for unnatural sounding feedback.
• The DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip being used is widely recognized in the audio and engineering community as one of the best sounding DAC chips available today.
• The output buffer used to drive the headphones is fully discrete so that all individual parameters and circuit values and parts quality can be fully optimized for the absolute finest sound quality. The output impedance is very low so that the PonoPlayer delivers perfectly flat frequency response and wide volume range using virtually any set of headphones.
It looks like they've done everything right and it is not an exclusive system, will play any FLAC files - smart move!
This little player should sound great - there's no two ways about it.
Z
