Slashdot Mirror
Neil Young's "Righteous" Pono Music Startup Raises $1 Million With Kickstarter
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?"
Sounds like snakeoil. So that means it'll be eaten up by the idiotic audiophile crowd.
The big problem with music on MP3s and CDs isn't the sample rate, or even the bits used to sample. To sell CDs and MP3s the recording is made as loud as possible and this causes distortion in the sample values. There's no point having 16-bits or 24-bits if the recording doesn't make good use of the full range of values.
Who ordered that?
Yup.
The Loudness Wars rendered most of this moot. :(
Caveat: self-identifying audiophile here, happy to admit I've spent way too much money for very little gain.
What's the output voltage and impedance? Crosstalk? Noise? THD? Dynamic range? If I plug to charge via USB while I'm playing it, will it isolate the noisy power line? You're trying to sell something "audiophile" without mentioning any of this? Really?
He makes a big deal about 192kHz audio. If you're targeting human ears, this is just a waste of space. I'd say the perfect format would be 48kHz/24bit. 48kHz to have plenty of room for a nice frequency cutoff, and 24-bit for music with a high dynamic range, like film scores and orchestral.
How about some features anyone can enjoy, like support for ReplayGain and gapless playback? Maybe make your store highlight music with a high dynamic range instead of offering a 24-bit copy of something with 8 bits of range and frequencies we can't hear?
I would absolutely love to have a compact, objectively transparent player that I can bring with me to the office or anywhere else. I just can't help feeling this won't be it. Too jaded?
I can't believe that $2,000,000 has already been pledged. I assume by "audiophiles".
Hey guys, 99% of mastering these days has been brickwalled. The recordings that you're buying and downloading before encoding, at the mastering stage has already had all "the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo" removed. You can't get that back. In fact, all this device will do is make these artifacts more obvious.
Getting a 30 gazillion kbps FLAC file is utterly pointless when the same data can be represented in a 320kbs mp3 file.
I can personally guarantee* (*worth nothing, not redeemable for anything) that sound studios will not start producing multiple mixes just for the audiophiles. It's just not going to happen. People do not care about this stuff and are happy with their iphones/androids, so the sound studios are not going to bother.
My biggest complaint about the mp3 music player industry is: Why are they still over selling 1/2/4GB devices!?!?!?!?!?
Honestly, I can't even imagine why Apple, Sony, Philips and other large brands that I find in my average tech store even bother to have/sell, but actively promote these minuscule devices. At least 128GB approaches a reasonable size for today's music collections.
To me it is similar to Linus' rant about laptop monitors.
Hmm, the humour and sarcasm seem to have been be lost on you.
"Old man, take a look at my life..."
Grew up with Neil Young and his music. Grew old with Neil and his music, wit, and weirdness.
Neil Young Rocks.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I challenge any 68 year old rocker to a double blind test to hear the difference between MP3 and Pono.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
1. It's FLAC. nothing special.
2. If you're listening to it on $100 computer speakers, you might as well listen to 320kbps MP3s because you're not going to hear the difference on those crap speakers
. 3. Where do you listen to music? At your computer? Are you using the above mentioned speakers? Fail. If its charging via USB how is Pono going to isolate the noise in the USB Bus? If you are listening in your car - fuck off. You are NOT going to hear the difference over he road noise and attention distractions breaking your focus. AND I doubt the speakers or the amps in you car are much better than the junk attached to your computer.
4. Even if you have good speakers - what amp are you using? Your Preamp? Or is it going through some silver faced 1970s Pioneer reciever you got at Hipster Haven for $50?
What this is is very simple: It's a cranky old man who misses the old days of Rock and Roll business model, where music was impressed in spiraled disks - first vinyl, then polycarbonate. Those days are gone, so he's trying to open up some scarcity to create profit. He will fail.
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
One possible reason for a studio to record at greater resolution than is necessary for playback is so as to avoid unwanted audible artifacts generated by the editing process.
Linn and Naim (... very good hifi producers)
More like "purveyors of bullshit". One of their shared key design parameters is "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" (abbreviated "PRaT") and they apply this to amplifiers, DACs, digital music storage etc. etc.
If you think your amplifier influences the "Pace, Rhythm and Timing" of your music, you need a straightjacket.
Eat the rich.
Then we had CD's quality is better then tape, but not quite up to the record.
That is bullshit on a huge scale.
The CD can do everything that even a pristine record can do, and more. You can perfectly replicate the sound of a record using a CD, but you cannot perfectly replicate the sound of CD using a record. That makes CD the clearly superior format. CDs are cheaper to produce, more portable, do not degrade with repeated playback, can replicate any frequency from 0-22kHz with instant impulse response and more than enough dynamic range to reach from 0dB to the threshold of pain on the same track.
Records have only one advantage, and that is more space for artwork on the cover. On every single parameter apart from that, the record is an inferior and useless format. Just let it die, already.
Eat the rich.