[badsock]

The thing is, we've long past the point where it's a difficult task to exceed the the perceptual limits of the human ear. Even the middle-of-the-road DACs are indistinguishable from perfection now, and the rest of the circuit is just ensuring that any noise in the power supply and the output traces are below a certain threshold - not trivial, but the industry has built techniques and for doing this in much, much more demanding applications than audio reproduction, and so it's not like you have to use exotic components or circuit design techniques.

Yes, there's lots of crappy audio kit out there, but it's not hard to get superfluously good stuff either.

I think people just liked the fact that in the 60's and 70's you could make a hobby out of actively pursuing a better sound in amplifiers, and are disappointed that some time in the 80's it became possible to buy gear that was indistinguishable from perfection, and these days it's not even expensive.

Neil Young should have focused on headphones, or speakers - that's an area where there's still detectable amounts of distortion. But that would require something more difficult that attaching a big branding effort to a solved problem.

[stolio]

Isn't this the middlebrow dismissal we're supposed to avoid here? I'm not sure where the ubiquitous, portable, high-quality music players are that make Pono redundant. Are you referring to smartphones?

If you look at actual studies of the performance of smartphone audio you see it's not a trivial task to get right[0], if we're seeing problems on a large company's flagship model like Samsung's Galaxy S5 then this isn't a solved problem.

Playback at home while plugged into a 120V power grid with equipment that only needs to fit into a shoebox is a bit different from playback from a device that's simultaneously a computer and a phone which also happens to have severe space and power constraints (and a giant color touch-screen to boot.)

[0] - http://www.anandtech.com/show/8078/smartphone-audio-testing-...