The end of pono?

At Princeton some people could do all the work required in
a semester in 2 weeks, some had to work 14 hours a day
every day of the semester.
And then there were those who had all their work done by a recent summa cum laude grad who daddy paid 100 K a semester.
Edison did all the above.

"Conversion by Codex is not the same a native playing a high res recording. That is like having a stereo record playing on a monaural system. It plays all the music but it is not in Stereo.
The iphone-6 uses the DAC chip make by Cirrus Logic 33821201 a custom chip made only for Apple. It is perhaps possible that this chip could produce native hi res throughput, however it appears Apple dummy downs (limits) the chip with software or the chip is not capable of hi res regardless of the operating software. It’s all proprietary, however one thing is for sure i phone 6 cannot produce native hi res music playback.
Swdealmaker (Threads | Answers | This Thread)"

I'm not sure I see where you are going with this. With your dac chip example, I don't think its the same as comparing stereo to mono. A lot of companies make dac chips to play the same format. Take Redbook CD, for example. There are any number of dac chips made by different manufacturers that conform to the Redbook standard. With your Apple example, are you saying that the chip in an iPhone is not really playing a supported format like mp-3 or ALAC, and its really just playing some proprietary format that's something else, and we're just not aware of it?

I don’t think many will hear any difference between Hi Res and Red Book on the pono player as it requires a trained ear and a very revealing system. I think it will come to the same end as SACD. Most folks could not hear the difference and would not pay a premium for the discs. For the record I love SACD and Hi Res downloads.