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from the digital-revolution-blues dept.
Marneus68 writes:
"Pono, the Neil Young-endorsed Kickstarter project, is drawing more and more pledges. Now past the $2 million mark (with an expected goal of $800K), this project aims to create a audiophile friendly FLAC player along with its ecosystem (and by that they mean their own music store and syncing application).
The device itself features 2 audio outputs, one 'specially designed for headphones' and the other 'specifically designed for listening on your home audio system'. The player is controlled by an LCD touchscreen, and its triangular 'Toblerone' shape makes it easy to hold it upright with one hand or to lay it flat on surfaces. The player, which has 64GB of internal memory, comes together with a 64GB microSD card.
The board and its components, as well as a 'pre-prototype' model, are pictured in the project's Kickstarter page.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Friday March 14 2014, @11:16AM
I don't have an iPhone or any other Apple crap. I want a solution that looks nice and doesn't involve a bunch of stupid cables. I never had to have this back in the "old days" when component stereos ruled; everything sat on a shelf and looked nice together, was easy to operate, and didn't have a bunch of cables lying all around. I guess that's just not cool enough these days.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Friday March 14 2014, @04:40PM
Component stereos had TONS of cables... A real mess of spaghetti.
You've failed to name ANYTHING you dislike about ANY of the solutions I've listed.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday March 16 2014, @02:39PM
Are you really that dense? The cables were all behind the stereo, and you didn't have to plug them in every time you turned on the stereo. Once everything was set up, you just pressed the power button and it would play music. With a phone, you have to mess around with a bunch of cables every fucking time you want to play something. What kind of shitty solution is that? It's ghetto.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Sunday March 16 2014, @04:43PM
I have two old smartphones, might be crude but perfectly capable of running TuneInRadioPro app or whatever its called. I do basically what he describes using one of the older phones as a mini-tablet. I have no reason to ever remove the cabling or touch the cabling. From memory the battery only lasts 30 minutes anyway.
There are probably people currently using their first and only smart phone as a phone, but there's enough people with old phones laying around that its no issue to "perma-wire" one into place.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 17 2014, @11:47AM
It still looks ghetto. The whole point of old-style stereo systems was that they looked attractive when installed in a proper cabinet; all the cables were hidden, the components were all the same width (and generally you bought them from the same mfgr so they matched cosmetically too), and they all had nice front-panel controls. You didn't have to pick anything up or fiddle with anything; it was like rack-mount equipment but without the rack. Having cables lying around (as opposed to hidden in the back) totally goes against the point. What you're describing is a solution for people who don't give a shit about appearance at all, and don't mind having a totally messy-looking house with crap lying around, piled on the floor, etc. I guess young people these days like things like that, but in the old days people liked things in their home to look orderly.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Monday March 17 2014, @12:06PM
"young people these days"
LOL that made my day
Aside from that, your description sounds very much like a Roku plugged into the TV (or a small monitor?) perhaps with a decent pair of speakers.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Monday March 17 2014, @01:41PM
Yeah, that's what someone else said here earlier, so I'm going to look into that. They recommended the now-discontinued "SoundBridge" (available on Ebay of course), which sounds like what I'm after: something you stick on your stereo, plug into its Aux inputs with RCA cables, and it just sits there. It's not quite as conformist as regular rectangular stereo components (I think the outputs come out one side for some odd reason), but it has a VFD like regular stereo components and is meant to be stationary.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:48AM
It looks "ghetto" if you make it look "ghetto". If you mount the phone properly, it looks like the control panel on the Enterprise. And as components get smaller and smaller, they can be entirely hidden.
Longing for the days of the huge, clunky POS component systems is like saying you prefer the looks of a giant wooden console TV to a flat-screen, or a Model-T over Mustang... Sure, it's more "orderly"... Uhh, riiight.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday March 18 2014, @01:47PM
A modern Mustang (or any new car) generally has everything extremely well-integrated, and there's no extra cables hanging around. Your phone solution has cables hanging around unless you design and build a custom phone mount it seems. I've never seen any such mounts on the market for Android phones, only iPhones, so you're talking about building something entirely custom.
(Score: 2) by evilviper on Tuesday March 18 2014, @06:56PM
FAR less than ANY flat-screen TV (may only need ONE for power), and FAR easier to hide than a flat-screen TV.
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(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Wednesday March 19 2014, @11:56AM
Huh? I don't know about your TV, but my flat-screen TV is sitting on a low cabinet (the kind designed for modern flat-screen TVs), with a Blu-Ray player on one of the shelves of the cabinet, and no cables are visible anywhere because they're all hidden behind the components.
I suppose if you attached your TV to a wall this could be an issue, but not everyone does that. If you're going to go to the trouble of bolting your TV to a wall with a special wall-mount, you might as well drill holes in the wall and route the cables inside the wall too, since at that point you're building a home theater. For those of us who go the more pedestrian route, we just buy a TV, buy a stand/cabinet for it, and stick the TV on the stand. As long as it's not one of those dumb all-glass cabinets, you won't see any cables.