The key thing to realize is that there are a lot of pieces in this signal path (bits to brain). The best you can do is start with the highest quality source possible, and then focus on minimizing the reduction in quality which happens at each step past that.

His intentions are good with choosing a high quality source. However, the idea that a portable music player is going to have a good enough DAC, good enough analog amplification / filtering, that the user will select good enough headphones, and will be listening in a low enough noise-floor environment (sitting absolutely still in a dead room with the A/C turned off) to be able to come anywhere close to hearing the difference made by that high quality source is laughable.

Is it possible to detect the difference between 320kbps streaming and 192kHz/24bit lossless? Sure, you'd see it on an oscilloscope. But could you hear it through $50 ear buds while walking down the street?

One way to reason about sound quality is to mentally model it as two sounds mixed together: a loud, perfect signal, and a much quieter distortion signal. For humans, loud sounds mask quieter sounds, and if the amplitude difference is great enough, you simply can't perceive the quieter sound at all.

Now, take that one step futher: model the sound as a loud, perfect signal mixed with five or six small distortion signals (A, B, C, D, etc, each representing a step in the path from bits to brain). Neil's player reduces distortion signal A by a tiny fraction. Great! But that reduction is only perpectible if it isn't swamped by distortion signals B, C, D, E, and the noise floor created by whatever environment you happen to be sitting in (ultimately, "is this reduction in distortion swamped by the noise floor created by the sound of blood rushing through the veins in my ears?")

    I was there.
    AM radio kicked streaming's ass.
    Analog Cassettes and 8 tracks also kicked streaming's ass,
    and absolutely rocked compared to streaming.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pono_%28digital_music_service%...

The service offers "higher" sound quality, so of course he can write "it's about sound quality." But in fact this is only about trying to bring attention to his own service. Still I can't imagine it won't remain a specialized market, offering only "more bits" that anybody not doing remixing can't use. Better use of the bandwidth would be offering more channels -- then the users would at least be able to hear individual instruments -- but that would give them "too much power," more than having the sources of the software -- music is easier to understand and reuse than the code.

I stream stuff when I am on the go and to discover new things. He basically dropped out of my casual listening and discovery framework and all I will remember him for is "Rocking in a free world".

Plus, he is trying to sell his Pono service - meh.

So taking a violin sound and then playing it out of a speaker, you're playing into a totally different environment and it's going to sound different. If you've also captured the sound of the environment in which the violin was played, you're then also playing THOSE sounds into a different environment. The reverb still gets affected by the environment your speakers are in.

I think the closest you can get is binaural recordings done with mics worn on your own ears and then played back using suitable headphones.

Even that still doesn't cover the tactile dimension of sound (think about the feeling you get when bass goes through large stage monitors). There are products that try and reproduce this - I haven't tried any of them but would be eager to, as I primarily listen to music with headphones.

Nor does it cover spatialization properly either - without some form of processing, the sound source won't stay in position when you move your head.

A bit off-topic, but the more I think along these lines, the more I imagine the ideal music delivery medium being dry multitrack recordings with mixing and reverb supplied as metadata that's then applied with real-time audio processing. That'd be pretty wild!

Well, 'nearly' impossible. Google 'FLAC streaming service' and you'll find tidal.com. I don't know if there's any other. If you don't pay for music downloads, then finding them isn't a problem [1] but rather troublesome.

Most people don't know FLAC exists and they don't care about sound quality. Take a look at the top 100 music torrents on thepiratebay [2]. None of them is FLAC.

[1]: https://thepiratebay.gd/top/104

[2]: https://thepiratebay.gd/top/101