[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-...