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https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-music?ref=popular 寫:The Evolution of the PonoPlayer Design...

Over the three years of PonoPlayer development, we considered many different designs and concepts. One of the early ideas was to make an accessory for a smartphone that contained storage for the music tracks along with advanced audio electronics. The phone’s display would be used to navigate and play the songs, but with the songs would be stored in the accessory’s memory. A Bluetooth connection would communicate between the phone and the accessory to select and play the desired song. This design was dismissed, for now, because it was very complicated to use and required two devices to play music.
We talked a lot about making the player thin, to snap onto the back of a phone so it could be carried as one unit. But that meant you’d need a different player design for each phone model, and we found that it was not possible to put some of the large audio components – required for the best performance – into a thin package. This led us to design the accessory in the shape of a triangular “Toblerone” shaped chocolate bar. It allowed us to use larger audio components and to separate them far enough apart to prevent electrical interference between the various subsystems. It also allowed us to use a large cylindrical battery that’s much more efficient than a flat battery.
Early PonoPlayer Prototypes

It then became obvious that if we added a touch display, we could make the player completely self-contained. It wouldn’t need to be tied to your phone and there would be no interruptions from an incoming call while you were enjoying your music. It would be the best playback device ever for listening to high quality digital music. We realized that music this good deserved a truly purpose built, dedicated device to enjoy it. There was no “Swiss Army knife” good enough for the music we wanted you to hear.
This triangular shape also has additional benefits: it can be held upright for one-hand operation or it can sit flat on your desktop or home stereo system. The display automatically rotates depending on the orientation of the device. But the best thing about this shape is that we were able to include the best sounding audio components with absolutely no compromises. The PonoPlayer will certainly be recognizable on your desk as the unique product it is – the world’s best sounding portable digital music player.

http://www.ponomusic.com/#faq 寫:I'M AN AUDIOPHILE. EXPLAIN WHAT IS SO SPECIAL ABOUT THE PONOPLAYER TECHNOLOGY
The PonoPlayer was designed with a “no compromises” approach to sound quality. We partnered with the engineering team at Ayre (http://www.ayre.com) to include some of their world-class audio technology in our PonoPlayer. The Ayre team describes their contribution to the PonoPlayer design as follows:

• The digital filter used in the PonoPlayer has minimal phase, and no unnatural (digital sounding) pre-ringing. All sounds made (including music) always have reflections and/or echoes after the initial sound. There is no sound in nature that has any echo or reflection before the sound, which is what conventional linear-phase digital filters do. This is one reason that digital sound has a reputation for sounding "unnatural" and harsh.

• All circuitry is zero-feedback. Feedback can only correct an error after it has occurred, which means that it can never correct for all errors. By using proprietary ultra-linear circuitry with wide bandwidth and low output impedance, there is no need for unnatural sounding feedback.

• The DAC (Digital-to-Analog Converter) chip being used is widely recognized in the audio and engineering community as one of the best sounding DAC chips available today.

• The output buffer used to drive the headphones is fully discrete so that all individual parameters and circuit values and parts quality can be fully optimized for the absolute finest sound quality. The output impedance is very low so that the PonoPlayer delivers perfectly flat frequency response and wide volume range using virtually any set of headphones

qlogic 寫:晶片是ESS9018沒錯，硬體大部分是Ayre Acoustics的Charles Hansen設計
kickstarter兩天就超過1萬人預購集資超過300萬美金，遠遠超過原本目標80萬美金