[intopieces]

While personal anecdotes are not typically good for discussions, in this case it's important to compare your equipment against the reviewers: he's using $300 headphones in a quiet room, using well-sourced high-quality music. The original proposition for this device involved unleashing a world of 24bit, 192khz audio downloads, which is not worth it by a long shot [0]. I don't doubt that the engineering inside the Pono player is top notch, but it will require an ecosystem of other top-notch gear to take advantage of it -- including music that wasn't specifically engineered to be played out of a smartphone's earbuds (Mastered for iTunes, for example).

And if you're going to get all that gear together, you're going to want at least decent conditions for listening (quiet, mainly) or those details you paid $400 to get out of the music will be drowned out.

I guess the point I'm making is - who is this DAC meant for? It seems like its attempting to fill a space (or create one) that is already filled.

[0]http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

[xorcist]

You link to Monty's critique of hi-rez audio, yet you speak of how to "take advantage" of a higher quality. But 192 kHz and beyond may actually bring lower audio quality to a human, as ultrasound data may well bring distortive effects into the hearable band unless they are filtrered off. So only in the best case would quality be as good as with normal-rez.