Neil Young Begins His Long Mission Towards True Audio Fidelity With Pono, A New Popular music Service And Device

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Singer-songwriter-rocker Neil Young has been speaking about complications with modern audio codecs for decades. He was mad 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 target is to try to rescue the art kind that I’ve been exercising for the past 50 years. We reside in the digital age and, sadly, it’s diminishing our popular 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 just has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. … The benefit of the digital age has required individuals to select between quality and convenience, however they shouldn’t have to make that selection.”

Luckily old Bernard Shakey understands a few people with some tech chops and is launching a service tentatively called Pono that will permit folks to switch, download, and play high quality songs on a user designed specifically for the service. He displayed his little player – a prismatic device that appears like a cross between a Shanzhai PMP and a box of Toberlone – on Letterman last evening and he ’ s aiming to offer 192kHz/24-bit audio files to purists who demand to hear every aural nook and cranny.

Young is working with labels to move the initial master tapes from each artist featuring a number of albums from Bob Dylan and additional greats. Young states the “ audio doesn ’ t get dummied down ” when played on the Pono.

While seemingly Quixotic, I think it ’ s lovely that Young is preserving this effort also in the face of an onset of reasonable bit-rate monstrosities. High quality new music has long been the provenance of the rich and/or aged and, although I suspect this will appeal even more to the older listener, a minimum of Young is dealing with one of the barricades to dulcet, high quality tracks.

by means of TheVerge



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