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Neil Young Pushes Pono, Says Piracy Is the New Radio

Posted by timothy on from the canadians-tend-to-be-smart dept.

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.'"

15 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. FLAC by Trintech · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    1. Re:FLAC by Zandamesh · · Score: 5, Funny

      Makes you think of ponies.

      --
      Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
    2. Re:FLAC by robmv · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    3. Re:FLAC by Mordok-DestroyerOfWo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Well, I read the headline as "Neil Young Pushes Porno". So there is that.

      --
      "Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
    4. Re:FLAC by characterZer0 · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
    5. Re:FLAC by Beardo+the+Bearded · · Score: 5, Funny

      That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording. Pono is a try to capture like 100% of what the musician get on the studio tapes.

      Nah, just throw a hum on there at 60Hz and they'll tell you it's magical.

      --

      ---
      ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
    6. Re:FLAC by Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    7. Re:FLAC by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

      FLAC is lossless from an audio CD perspective.

      No, FLAC is lossless. 99.99% of us just have no higher quality source material to encode than standard audio CDs.

      If a studio (or semi-indie artist) wanted to release 40 channels of 32 bit 192KHz raw data, FLAC could encode that just fine. Of course, that would take basically one DVD per song to store (roughly 1GB/minute given FLAC's typical 50% compression ratio), but it could do it just fine. :)


      That's why audiophiles prefer vinyl, because it captures more sound from thestudio recording.

      Sorry, but that doesn't even hold true from the "analog = better" point of view. Vinyl has a lower dynamic range, a lower maximum frequency, and much much lower stereo separation, than an audio CD. Audiophiles prefer vinyl simply because their "hipster douche" persona requires it.
      Keep in mind that audiophiles also prefer $600 ultra-low-oxygen digital interconnects with hand-wavy allusions to "bit slew".


      And as for the appeal to audiophiles, vinyl, and all things Steve Jobs... I got a kick out of TFA: "When asked if Young had approached Apple about the idea, Young said that he had, in fact, met with Jobs and was "working on it," but that "not much" ended up happening to the pursuit."

      Perhaps the fluffy dead-celebrity endorsements would work better if said celebrity had actually shown an interest in this new format?

    8. Re:FLAC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    9. Re:FLAC by Desler · · Score: 5, Informative

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

    10. Re:FLAC by AAWood · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But recording at "better than human hearing" isn't enough, because as those sounds are altered, processed, mixed, overlaid and resampled over and over and over again, you lose fidelity. You don't need your original recordings to be good enough for human ears, you need them to be good enough for mixing boards and DSPs and all kinds of hardware, after dozens (hundreds?) of changes. You need the end product to be good enough for ears.

      (And to nip the obvious counter-argument in the bud; obviously the genre of music and recording method are important here, and if there're not many steps between what's being recorded and what's being sold then, sure, it's not such a big issue.)

  2. Poor choice of name by damn_registrars · · Score: 5, Funny

    I read the headline to say "Neil Young Pushes Porno". Maybe this format should have opted for a different name...

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    Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
  3. Re:Oh... by tippe · · Score: 5, Funny

    What, were you hoping for pictures? Have you ever seen Neil Young???

    *shudders*

  4. Not a step up. by pavon · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:I'll buy an 'R', Alex by 93,000 · · Score: 5, Funny

    I'll buy an 'R', Alex

    "What is 'The wrong gameshow host'".

      -- correct --

    "Thanks Pat. I'll take Minor mistakes that get trolled on slashdot for $300."

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    Sweet informative mod.