An MTV interview from '95, interesting in it's own right, but the bits about Giorgio Moroder will particularly amuse Russell:

Choosing solar water heating now over PV later might matter if you where using up all your roof surface area (you're not), and there is a significant difference in efficiency between the two — PV is about 15%; I don't know what solar heating is, but it's unlikely to be much worse.

I found this helpful:

http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/09/dont-be-a-pv-efficiency-snob/

When I was re-encoding my CDs to FLAC and trying to figure out what quality level to use for the vorbis encode to go on my phone, I tested out FLAC->vorbis versus FLAC->LAME mp3 320kbps->vorbis using ABX testing software.

Couldn't tell the difference.

Which isn't to say that transcoding artifacts don't exist, just that I'm unlikely to own equipment in a portable context good enough to pick them up any time soon, and am now much more comfortable buying 320kbps MP3 when FLAC or ALAC is unavailable.

While it might be true that MP3's psychoacoustic model was designed for inattentive, casual listeners in noisy environments, the last twenty or so years of development and tuning on, eg the LAME encoder as well as subsequent generations of codecs has been performed by highly attentive, trained audio engineers in low noise environment on equipment most of us can't or choose not to afford. The whole notion that lossy codecs are inherently inferior in outcome to lossless, let alone vinyl, is just bogus.

What good might result from the existence of Pono is better mastering of existing works, but I suspect not. I'd say Pono will be consigned to the same graveyard of audio technology as SACD and DVD-Audio.