Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio

Hugh Pickens writes "Kia Makarechi reports that Neil Young isn't particularly concerned with the effects of piracy on artists but is more concerned that the files that are being shared are of such low quality. 'It doesn't affect me because I look at the internet as the new radio,' says Young. 'I look at the radio as gone. Piracy is the new radio. That's how music gets around. That's the radio. If you really want to hear it, let's make it available, let them hear it, let them hear the 95 percent of it.' Young is primarily concerned about whether the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint. Young's main concern is that your average MP3 file only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording and is pushing a new format called Pono that would be 'high-resolution' digital tracks of the same quality as that produced during the studio recording. Young wants to see better music recording and high resolution recording, but we're not anywhere near that and hopes that 'some rich guy' will solve the problem of creating and distributing '100 percent' of the sound in music. 'Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, his legacy was tremendous. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.'"

Comments

FLAC

[Trintech]

Isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?

Re:FLAC

[robmv]

Looks like the name is trademarked, so this looks like a way to request money for "Pono compliance"

Re:FLAC

[characterZer0]

FLAC can handle up to 8 channels, up to 32 bits per channel, and a sampling rate up to 655350 Hz.

Redbook CDs use 2 channels, 16 bits per channel, and 44.1kHz sampling rate.

FLAC is lossless from perspectives of much higher quality that CDs.

Re:FLAC

[Desler]

Audiophiles prefer vinyl because they think it gives better sound because they prefer the analog artefacts. In the real world, on average vinyl records and LP players were of pretty low quality and could be easily beaten by a properly mastered CD and even a mid-range CD player hooked to a decent AMP. The benefit is you save thousands of dollars on snake oil audiophile gear.

Re:FLAC

[Anonymous Coward]

You are full of nonsense. First of all, FLAC supports 24-bit samples and up to 655kHz sampling rate. Nobody can hear the difference between 16/44 and 24/96+ if they don't know which is which and vinyl is inferior in every measurable way. You don't have bat hearing so there is no need for high sampling rates and the dynamic range of music fits well within 16 bits. Very few people even have a room/system that can reproduce 16-bits of dynamic range even if there was that much to listen to on the recording. Which there isn't, because almost all music, which didn't have 96dB range in the first place, has had the dynamics mercilessly crushed out of it. The quality of filtering algorithms is such now that has eliminated the any benefit at all to higher sampling rates, as revealed by double blind tests.

Perhaps you meant the music sounded better in the studio right after the musicians/producer finished mixing it and before it was sent off to some jackass who calls himself a "mastering engineer" and crushed the life out of it and clipped all the peaks.

Re:FLAC

[Desler]

It's not rubbish at all. You've fallen for audiophile myth..

Not a step up.

[pavon]

No, it's not a step up. No-one has ever been able to reliably distinguish a 24/96 recording from it's downgraded 16/48 version in a properly conducted double-blind test.

It is absolutely necessary to oversample when acquiring data (since all analog filters have some roll-off), and it is good to use higher dynamic range when mixing to keep the repeated rounding errors below the noise floor. But once the final recording it is mastered, there is no benefit to distributing or listening to the result at higher than 16/48.