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I love NY more than most, but he is a retrogrouch in the worst way when it comes to music. The reality is most people are perfectly happy to listen over heavily compressed files thru crappy ibuds or pay a for airpods with mediocre sound quality all in the name of convenience. Modern overproduced music sounds fine on that setup, because it was engineered to. His solution was absurd and egotistical - the Pono was a solution to a problem that didn't exist (kinda like Tidal is now). Portability and quality don't intersect much, and most people don't carry around the quality of headphone to take advantage of the better signal response - convenience always wins out. He's also ignoring that it's never been a better time to be an audiophile. Ultra high bitrate/bitdepth FLACs are common now which offer literally an order of magnitude more information than a CD. And there is sufficient bandwidth to distribute them. Mastering is now vastly better, and more easily backed up (compared to the horrible loss of a massive Universal library we only recently found out about). Very high quality DACs are common now, and easily available for under $200. Add in a good set of cans, and you've got a killer setup without dropping a grand on a whole rack and another grand+ on speakers.
Since we're on a bike forum, here's my (crappy) analogy - it's like how modern carbon bikes are all identical and soullessly pumped out of Asian molds all fairly identical with similarly bland black finish, and all ride and look about the same. Compared to the days of steel and mythical craftsmen and the magical ride quality of certain tubesets and Italian airbrushing. But these carbon bikes blow steel away performance-wise, and are produced in huge numbers, and a halo bike from only a decade ago sells for peanuts on the used market without really giving up any performance advantage. There will always be an appreciation for both, but steel lovers are an increasingly dying breed. Kinda like vinyl.
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