The portable music player is alive and well. Pono Music’s PonoPlayer just crossed the $5 million milestone on Kickstarter, making it the fourth most funded project in the site’s history. Twelve thousand backers have pledged enough to pre-order the device. And there is still 16 days to go on its campaign. Read More
When Neil Young revealed Pono on the Letterman show, he mainly talked about how the high-fidelity music service would work. Now that Young and his team have announced an early 2014 target launch, it’s looking more likely that Pono might actually happen. In a statement posted on Facebook, the team says it will launch both its online music store for high-quality audio and its player — an updated version of the one shown on Letterman — at the same time. Young claims the service can replicate the quality of music played in a studio, but we’ll have to wait until next year to find out if it can actually deliver. Sadly, Team Pono isn’t sharing other details, but we’ll keep an eye out for future updates.
[Image credit: CBS]
Filed under: Misc
Via: Evolver.fm
Source: Pono (Facebook)
Singer-songwriter-rocker Neil Young has been talking about problems with modern audio codecs for decades. He was angry at CDs back in the 1990s and most recently he lashed out against MP3s and digital audio compression at a popular tech conference, saying “My goal is to try to rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years. We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it … It’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art. The MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
Luckily old Bernard Shakey knows a few people with some tech chops and is launching a service tentatively called Pono that will allow folks to convert, download, and play high quality music on a player designed specifically for the service. He showed off his little player – a prismatic device that looks like a cross between a Shanzhai PMP and a box of Toberlone – on Letterman last night and he’s aiming to sell 192kHz/24-bit audio files to purists who demand to hear every aural nook and cranny.
Young is working with labels to transfer the original master tapes from each artist including a number of albums from Bob Dylan and other greats. Young says the “audio doesn’t get dummied down” when played on the Pono.
While seemingly Quixotic, I think it’s charming that Young is maintaining this effort even in the face of an onslaught of low bit-rate monstrosities. High quality music has long been the provenance of the rich and/or aged and, although I suspect this will appeal more to the older listener, at least Young is tackling one of the roadblocks to dulcet, high quality tracks.
Neil Young isn’t shy when it comes to embracing new technology, something he put beyond question with his latest appearance on The Late show with David Letterman. The artist took the opportunity to reveal plans for his high-fidelity Pono music service. The aim is to tackle the poor quality in which he believes most people receive their music these days — the humble MP3. Young’s offering would comprise a three-pronged approach, including a music store with high-resolution recordings, a digital-to-analog style conversion technology, and portable hardware to listen to it all with. The simple intention is to offer music as it was originally intended to be heard, but at this time there’s no detail as to what this actually entails (sorry specification fans).
According to Rolling Stone, the big three labels are interested, and the goal is to unify, rather than diversify, the quality of recorded content. The Pono players (that yellow wedge you see above) will serve up your existing catalog, but you’ll likely need to re-buy some of your collection if you want the holistic experience. With no cards fully on the table, we’re at the ransom of Young’s celebrity endorsements, which all claim that the benefits are tangible. Young, of course, says “You can’t get better than this, this is what they do in the studio,” but until we get some details, or ears on, everybody knows this is nowhere.
[Image credit:CBS]
Continue reading Neil Young’s Pono music service wants to democratize high-quality audio (video)
Filed under: Home Entertainment, Portable Audio/Video
Neil Young’s Pono music service wants to democratize high-quality audio (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Sep 2012 07:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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