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Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter

Posted by samzenpus on from the I've-been-a-miner-for-a-format-of-gold dept.

Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Jose Pagliery reports at CNN that the 68-year-old rock star unveiled his startup, Pono, at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas raising $1.4 million in a single day. Young has developed a portable music player that stores high-resolution recordings and promises to deliver all the delicate details that get chopped out of modern-day formats, like MP3s and CDs. 'Pono' is Hawaiian for righteous. 'What righteous means to our founder Neil Young is honoring the artist's intention, and the soul of music. That's why he's been on a quest, for a few years now, to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music.' With 128 GB of space, the PonoPlayer can carry about 3,200 tracks of high-resolution recordings while an MP3 player of the same size can hold maybe 10 times that many songs. Young says the MP3 files we're all listening to actually are pretty poor from an audio-quality standpoint and only contains about five percent of the audio from an original recording. But isn't FLAC already lossless? What makes Pono better?"

15 of 413 comments (clear)

  1. It IS FLAC by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    If the submitter/editor had bothered to do even the slighted research into "Pono", they'd have found that it's just a branded FLAC.

    1. Re:It IS FLAC by goombah99 · · Score: 5, Informative

      Pono music is an ecosystem to sell music in FLAC audio file format: 1) production of FLAC files from existing recordings, 2) a dedicated player, and 3) a web store to sell FLAC files.

      The problem with FLAC is how does one get FLAC? you could use your own encoder to record a CD in FLAC. But then you just have CD quality Why not reach back to the studio quality if you are going the FLAC route?. Cause you don't have access to that. But now you do-- the PONO ecosystem does that. And if you wanted to play that FLAC file, well your mp3 player might not play it and if it does it probably has a lot less memory than you would like. soe PONO players are chubbier in memory. And finally what if you are one of those people who likes to roll there own and prefers to just buy it pre recorded. Well agains the PONO ecosystem is there for you.

      --
      Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
    2. Re:It IS FLAC by Wdomburg · · Score: 5, Informative

      HDtracks, eClassical, Linn, Bandcamp. All carry 24-bit, high resolution audio.

      This expands the ecosystem; it doesn't create it.

    3. Re:It IS FLAC by Swampash · · Score: 3, Informative

      I've already got a bunch of devices that play lossless audio: my iPod, iPhone, and iPad.

    4. Re:It IS FLAC by amaurea · · Score: 4, Informative

      Apparently this link hasn't been posted enough times yet. It addresses both your first question (partially) and your second question (in huge detail).

      The video you're comparing to is being treated no better than audio. It's simply that human eyes are much better than human ears, so to give a comparable experience much higher bitrates are needed for video than audio.

  2. Reality check by jaffray · · Score: 5, Informative

    Monty (of Ogg and Vorbis fame) on 24/192 Music Downloads, and why they make no sense.

    1. Re:Reality check by Megane · · Score: 3, Informative

      tl;dr: the only useful purpose for 24/96 or 24/192 is extra bit depth for mastering and mixing. Otherwise the ultrasonic frequencies that you can't hear anyhow can actually interfere with each other and cause audible distortion.

      --
      #naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
    2. Re:Reality check by CRCulver · · Score: 3, Informative

      I can personally guarantee* (*worth nothing, not redeemable for anything) that sound studios will not start producing multiple mixes just for the audiophiles.

      They already have started, in fact. It's very common for the vinyl edition of an album to be less of a loudness wars catastrophe than the CD or MP3 digital downloads because vinyl customers tend to overlap with audiophiles. Two albums I can name off the top of my head where this was done are R.E.M.'s Accelerate and Rush's Clockwork Angels. After buying the CDs and hearing how they were brickwalled, I was happy to have supported the artist by buying at least something, but then I went to a torrent site, downloaded a vinyl rip and now play that exclusively on my home stereo.

  3. Re:you've got to be kidding me by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 4, Informative

    'Polynesian' is language family spoken in various Pacific countries such as New Zealand (Maori), USA (Hawaiian) and Chile(Rapa Nui).

  4. Re:LOL by roca · · Score: 4, Informative

    No, we already know it's snake oil. See for example Monty's writeup:
    http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmo...

  5. Re:you've got to be kidding me by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 3, Informative

    Didn't I write "language family"?

  6. Re:Coastline Paradox & Audiophilia by Hamsterdan · · Score: 1, Informative

    No. LPs sound better because they aren't mastered with everything at 11

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

    When CDs go back to having some dynamic range, they will outperform vinyl

    --
    I've got better things to do tonight than die.
  7. Re: Double blind tests? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Do any of you guys have ears? If you have heard live music vs an mp3, the loss of audio info is very obvious. Many mp3 files--especially rock music--are horrible. Neil is not in this to make money. He's got plenty. He's passionate about music.

  8. Re:LOL by flyingfsck · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yah, well, obviously you are not an electronic engineer and don't understand sampling, filtering and audio signals.

    --
    Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
  9. Re: Double blind tests? by Gunboat_Diplomat · · Score: 5, Informative

    Do any of you guys have ears? If you have heard live music vs an mp3, the loss of audio info is very obvious. Many mp3 files--especially rock music--are horrible. Neil is not in this to make money. He's got plenty. He's passionate about music.

    A number of double blind tests show that almost no one are able to hear the difference between properly encoded 320kbps and original, including those that are absolutely convinced that they do. The mind is a beautiful thing.

    The main problem with Neil is that he is mixing up different issues. Is overly dynamically compressed music a real problem? Absolutely. But that is the mixing and mastering, not related to format. Are there bad low-bitrate MP3 encodings out there? Absolutely, but with higher bitrate and better encoders being the norm it is a problem going away on its own. Are there any reasons at all to go lossless? there is one; if you want to keep the ability to re-compress to different formats/bitrate, then you can avoid compounding of compression artefacts across multiple generations (sort of like how you shouldn't jpeg a jpeg).

    And don't get me started on the various snake oil attempts to describe why higher bitrate and higher samplingrates are needed, actually, just read this: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmo...