Yes. I don't just think that; the science, physical objective testing and blind subjective testing all bear that out. Take the experience of sitting at the console out of the mix and play you a purely analog version of that same recording vs AAC/256 and 99% of people will not know any difference. The remaining 1% will be split 50/50 as to which recording sounds better.

Except that in every objective test the iOS devices show a near 0 THD, nearly flat recency response and a nearly perfect dynamic range. While perhaps "technically better" is the case with the Pono, the simple, physical, physiological and demonstrable fact that 100% of humans can not hear the differences you are taking about in any testing case means the different and "bitterness" is simply snake oil. Right up there with Monster 'monitor interconnects' and speaker isolation stands.

Yep. I knew a troll would respond to that in no time.

And the deaf will deny that anyone else can hear the difference between 192 and 44.1 kHz sampling because they can't.

I pity the deaf.

"Old man, take a look at my life..."

Won't do a lick of good, I'm on Bonneville Power.

That was my immediate thought. Any decent system needs to ensure that it isn't running at a loss. To make that happen, they need an accounting system in place.

Rather than a loss, they managed a significant profit. The profit didn't go to the company.

I've seen lots of affiliate systems (sign up for a sight, the referring webmaster gets x%). In the adult industry, it's called shaving. The referring webmaster has a percentage of their sales (I've seen up to 25%), where it isn't recorded that they got the sale. Instead, it is credited to another account. The owner of the system doesn't always know. They see sales come in. They see payments go out. The shaved sales go to one of the developer's accounts (usually to a difficult to trace 3rd party).

If I were the developer, I'd have a friend in another country set up his affiliate account. The "lost" sales get paid out to him. He keeps a percentage, and pays me the rest. It can be very difficult to trace until there is a code audit. The audits don't usually come until the boss knows there's something funny going on. As long as the boss is getting a large profit, they have no reason to audit.

In the rest of the corporate world, it's skimming. Accountants can make it look like the missing funds are going to nondescript costs.

In both skimming and shaving, it becomes obvious when the person doing it gets too greedy. Like, it's difficult to justify that $1M/yr goes to miscellaneous custodian costs. And yes, I've seen exactly that, in a company that only made about $3M/yr profit. Sometimes it goes to consumable costs. It can be tricky to track if they're smart. When they get greedy, smart falls out of the equation.

You need to read up more on economics. Maybe swing by a local college and audit some economics courses.

No, most (all?) of the current in use today is backed by nothing. Well, nothing more than the idea that it's worth something.

I have a $20 bill in my pocket. It's not worth anything. There is a perceived value of it, so I can exchange that piece of paper for goods and services.

If it were backed by anything, there would be an obligation by the issuing party to exchange it for the commodity it was backed by. You can't go to the federal reserve and say "I want to exchange my $20 note for $20 worth of gold". Best case, you'd get a smile, pat on the head, and be sent on your way.

We effectively work with a bartering system. The perceived value of one service or object, for another. You can barter drugs, ammunition, or sex. That doesn't make any of them a currency, even though they'd each be good examples in your description. Actually, I think I like my examples better than the ugly paper in my pocket.

His main idea was that the OS has no business deleting any data generated by the application, that data is mine and uninstalling should only remove the program itself and let me take care of the rest.