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Neil Young's Xstream - doomed, or simply destined for failure?


Anderton

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Yes, it's another streaming service, exclusively for Pono users (how many are there, anyway?). Called Xstream, here's an article about it.

 

Two things stand out...first, the claim that "Unlike all other streaming services that are limited to playing at a single low or moderate resolution, Xstream plays at the highest quality your network condition allows at that moment and adapts as the network conditions change. It’s a single high resolution bit-perfect file that essentially compresses as needed to never stop playing."

 

So...you're going to buy high-res files that, at least if you have internet like mine, probably won't play back at hi-res. I think Tidal pretty much proved that people aren't willing to pay for higher resolution, and this is even more limited because it requires having a Pono player.

 

I predict "epic fail" but who knows...

 

 

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It was probably designed as a way to try to get people to buy into Pono... but they could give away free high-res streaming and people still aren't going to flock to that piece of garbage. Bad form / shape, and yet another device to carry around.

 

Face it Neil - people already take their phone with them. They don't want another gadget - especially one with such an impractical shape. Come up with a way of streaming 24 bit uncompressed audio that will work with the phones people already have and you'll have a winning formula. And all that really is going to take is a big increase in overall bandwidth...

 

 

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I found out some more info...the article cited didn't mention that the Pono player itself is no more. That the streaming service is a "Pono project" and doesn't depend on the player.

 

Well, look on the bright side. If you bought a Pono player, you can use it for...uh...well...hey, anyone got any ideas for how to use a dead Pono player?

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"A southern man don't need pono around anyhow".

"Gonna live with an xstream server, so I can be happy the rest of my life"

"Doesn't mean that much to me to mean that much to Neil"

"Well hello Mr. Soul I dropped by to pick up a sponser"

"and in the end, the love you make is equal to ignoring Neil".... whoops, wrong song

 

In that posted article, Neil states he's gonna release every song he's ever recorded very soon on xstream. Every song. High quality grunge with out-of-tune guitars, many times recorded with a few sm57's over at SIR rehearsal's untreated, traffic-noisy room with amps buzzing, 60hz hum interference, out-of-tune singing, and droning D-notes on .008 gauge strings, through a hodge-podge of vintage stuff Neil acquires, strung together with a spaghetti hill of quarter-inch and xlr cables that are constantly being stepped on while rehearsals are forbidden and raw crummy sound is favored but in ... a commitment to "high quality sonics" Yeah!!!! Count me out! Neil knows what we want and need. By the way, does "very soon" still equal 52.5 Neil years? Is the median time between Neil quitting stuff still average 4.2 years?

 

Yes, this is epic epic news. More epic than usual. High quality epic.

 

As to leftover Pono players, this video has a yummy tip that can easily be adapted-

 

 

 

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As to leftover Pono players, this video has a yummy tip that can easily be adapted-

 

 

 

Cookumdano! ;)

 

I prefer more active and effective forms of destruction... setting aside the ones that could get someone hurt or that the government would frown upon, a sledgehammer is a good, effective and legal tool that could be utilized to take care of the job quickly... (don't forget to wear safety glasses!) :lol:

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Every now and then, I wonder what eve happened to Pono. I'm not surprised that it failed in business. However the concept is still alive and well. At CES this year, I saw two or three portable and several tabletop high resolution D/A converters that sell to the consumer market for in the $700 - $1000 range.

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What a lot of people in the biz don't realize is that the majority of the listening audience doesn't care about pristine audio quality.

 

What Pono and others are doing is trying to sell grass-fed steak for lunch to a McDonalds or Burger King eating public.

 

Sure Hi-Fi is better, you know it, I know it and the public knows it but they don't care and don't want to pay for it. They just want to hear the music and sing along with the lyrics.

 

Remember, before mp3 files the public bought Cassette Tapes when they could have bought Hi-Fi LPs and simply recorded the tape for their car or Walkman.

 

Before that it was those horrid 8 tracks that often changed tracks in the middle of the song (song fades, clunk clunk fades back in and finishes)

 

Before that 46rpm records.

 

Sure there are audiophiles out there. We have a friend who tuned his listening room using spectrum analyzers, noise generators and formulae. He has McIntosh tube amps, tube preamps, and high end everything else. He feeds new gear in the system when something better comes along. But there are millions listening to low bitrate mp3s on tinny earbuds or speakers.

 

I agree with Craig - epic failure.

 

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When you played them at 46 RPM, the songs were shorter and there was more room for commercials. I'm not kidding - before there were various radio edits of pop songs, some stations would speed up the turntables. It made the records sound a little brighter, have a little faster beat, and indeed it made enough time to squeeze one or two more commercials into an hour.

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When you played them at 46 RPM' date=' the songs were shorter and there was more room for commercials. I'm not kidding - before there were various radio edits of pop songs, some stations would speed up the turntables. It made the records sound a little brighter, have a little faster beat, and indeed it made enough time to squeeze one or two more commercials into an hour. [/quote']

 

I have perfect pitch, and I always used to notice whenever a station pulled that trick and sped up the turntables. WTH? Everything's sharp! :mad2:

 

Edits used to really tick me off too... I'm sitting there enjoying a song I really like, and BAM! Edit! WTH? :mad2: And some of them were so poorly done I often suspected they were done by someone at the station and not the original engineers.

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Back in the vinyl club DJ days, they used to speed up everything - gave it more energy. And listening to some older songs I think the engineer on the session must have sped up the tape. They certainly aren't in tune with my tuned guitar, synth or sax.

 

But then bands do the same things, and when I make backing tracks, I often adjust the tempo. But with live bands or digital, we aren't bothering those with absolute pitch.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

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I find it interesting that all PCs now come with 24 bit sound cards, many of them with surround outputs. Perhaps it's time for the mp3 standard to be updated to accommodate 24 bit x 44.1k audio, maybe with accommodation for a subwoofer channel?

I'm not here to start a p*ssing match about the merits or lack of merits of mp3. But it does seem to be the defacto standard for internet audio. So it needs to stay with the tide to remain there, IMHO. I suppose the max encoding rate may need to increase from the current 320k. But I'm not well versed on the technology...

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320 kbps is pretty much the "wall" for MP3. I think we'll see a transition to FLAC over the next year or two, with MP3 still included for legacy and low-bandwidth situations. Microsoft has pretty much abandoned WMA in favor of FLAC.

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I find it interesting that all PCs now come with 24 bit sound cards' date=' many of them with surround outputs. Perhaps it's time for the mp3 standard to be updated to accommodate 24 bit x 44.1k audio, maybe with accommodation for a subwoofer channel?[/quote']

 

320 kbps MP3 is pretty good, and most MP3'd music has sufficiently little dynamic range with peaks that are very close to or at full scale, making 24-bits resolution pretty irrelevant.

 

What's more significant is that most modern computers come with at least a terabyte disk drive, and people are using cloud storage pretty commonly now, so there's no good reason to encode audio files to make them smaller. But there will always be those who want to have 2000 songs on their phone, which rarely has more than 64 GB of storage and may not have a data rate available that can stream high resolution high speed PCM files. So there will be a need for legacy file formats for a while.

 

 

 

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I have perfect pitch, and I always used to notice whenever a station pulled that trick and sped up the turntables. WTH? Everything's sharp! :mad2:

 

Edits used to really tick me off too... I'm sitting there enjoying a song I really like, and BAM! Edit! WTH? :mad2: And some of them were so poorly done I often suspected they were done by someone at the station and not the original engineers.

 

Edits still tick me off. We have one classic rock station in Houston and I think they edit 95% of the songs they play. If it's "Classic", how can you edit it? Would you cut off Michelangelo's "David" at the knees?

 

Maximize the commercial airtime...That's what that is all about.

 

 

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Edits still tick me off. We have one classic rock station in Houston and I think they edit 95% of the songs they play. If it's "Classic", how can you edit it? Would you cut off Michelangelo's "David" at the knees?

 

If it means fitting a few more commercials in per hour? You bet the typical Program Director would!

 

 

 

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<...snip...> But there will always be those who want to have 2000 songs on their phone, which rarely has more than 64 GB of storage <...>

I have >10,000 songs on my digital Walkman, 128GB with very little overhead for the OS. Most are ripped too low for serious listening, but since I only play it in the car which has plenty of ambient noise when driving down the highway, it doesn't matter to me.

 

When I'm home and seriously listening to music, the Walkman isn't involved at all.

 

But still, the average music consumer doesn't listen like the average musician or audiophile does, they don't know the difference, and don't care. They just want to hear the song.

 

The things we miss hearing on Lo-Fi devices, they never hear in the first place. (Sadly.)

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

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But there will always be those who want to have 2000 songs on their phone, which rarely has more than 64 GB of storage and may not have a data rate available that can stream high resolution high speed PCM files. So there will be a need for legacy file formats for a while.

 

Times have changed...I have an Android phone that takes 128 GB micro SD cards you can load up with songs (and the battery is user-replaceable). For a few more bucks, I could have gotten a phone that supports 256 GB cards.

 

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People coming late to the party have two strikes against them. PONO came late and so is Xstream.

 

The Dvorak keyboard is actually must faster than the QWERTY, but we all know how to use the QWERTY.

 

There have been many transposing alternatives invented to the black-and-white piano style keyboard, but most of us already know how to get along with the piano keys

 

Many years ago IBM realized their error letting Microsoft own the OS, and they came out with OS2/Warp which if you can believe the tech writers, was superior to both Apple and WIndows at the time, but it failed.

 

Linux came too late as well.

 

And Microsoft is having a very difficult time getting into the phone game, because they came around too late.

 

Banks mostly use COBOL for their computer systems, because it's too much work and to expensive to change it. I read that retired people who know COBOL are making big bucks for working on banking gear because it's not taught anymore.

 

If you come late to the party, you need a VERY convincing benefit to get people to cross over.

 

Back to better music fidelity:

 

The CD for music was improved with the SACD and Blu-Ray for music, and the SACD was even back-compatible. But the greatest bulk of the consumers can't hear the benefit and don't care.

 

It's very difficult to predict what the public with go viral over. If I knew, I'd go into the consulting business, as a lot of companies would pay big bucks for that information.

 

Insights and incites by Notes

 

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Times have changed...I have an Android phone that takes 128 GB micro SD cards you can load up with songs (and the battery is user-replaceable). For a few more bucks, I could have gotten a phone that supports 256 GB cards.

 

The LG Harmony phone offered by Cricket claims to take a microSD card up to 2 TB. I searched on Amazon and they don't have microSD's anywhere near that. But I suppose the time is coming.

 

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