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?"

Comments

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like snakeoil. So that means it'll be eaten up by the idiotic audiophile crowd.

Re:LOL

[lgw]

Awesome link, thanks.

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

There are a few real problems with the audio quality and 'experience' of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we're not going to see any actual improvement.

First, the bad news

In the past few weeks, I've had conversations with intelligent, scientifically minded individuals who believe in 24/192 downloads and want to know how anyone could possibly disagree. They asked good questions that deserve detailed answers.

I was also interested in what motivated high-rate digital audio advocacy. Responses indicate that few people understand basic signal theory or the sampling theorem, which is hardly surprising. Misunderstandings of the mathematics, technology, and physiology arose in most of the conversations, often asserted by professionals who otherwise possessed significant audio expertise. Some even argued that the sampling theorem doesn't really explain how digital audio actually works

If I had a nickel for every time an audiophile tried to explain to me that CDs can't capture "fast transients" or "20 kHz square waves", I could afford some genuine Snake Oil[tm]! Hint: the ear is mechanical, not magical, and the eardrum can only move so fast. Anything steeper than the rise rate of a 20 kHz sine wave just ain't happening.

I just want a proper DAC without audiophile markup! My home amp has 7 of them (the chip is about $25 per, not breaking the bank), but each one is a 20 watt heater so I can't use it in my bedroom in the summer. I'd love to find a nice 2-channel DAC to use with a headphone amp for <$100, with HDMI and SPDIF in - anyone seen one?

So much marketing, so little fact

[PhrostyMcByte]

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?

Re:Title

[Ol Olsoc]

"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.

Double blind tests?

[flyingfsck]

I challenge any 68 year old rocker to a double blind test to hear the difference between MP3 and Pono.

Re:Reality check

[KozmoStevnNaut]

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.