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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?"
Had to read that twice.
I spent five minutes trying to figure out if Slashdot once again misspelled something, i.e. "porno."
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Sounds like snakeoil. So that means it'll be eaten up by the idiotic audiophile crowd.
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.
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?
Monty (of Ogg and Vorbis fame) on 24/192 Music Downloads, and why they make no sense.
Oh audiophiles, please never change! It is so easy to laugh at your pseudoscience!
I read the other day that these units are going to go for about $400 a piece. While I myself am an audiophile at heart, I just can't see the use cases for this that makes it worth the money.
For a start, when I'm on the go, unless I'm in a plane (which I'm not very often), I can't use noise-cancelling headphones or I have little situational awareness, and the benefit of this higher fidelity is lost. If I'm sitting at my computer, I'd rather access my library through the computer via a nicer interface and still be able to hear the audio for videos I play etc., and I don't have to worry about plugging in or running down batteries.
So I'm left wondering where are the occasions when I'd really benefit from the higher quality on the go, how frequently do they arise, and is it worth the money for more pristine sound in just those cases?
Also, the damn thing is triangular. Where am I supposed to be putting this? It's not going in a pocket alongside my smartphone...
For me, it's nice that someone is trying to produce a product with a higher audio quality, but I don't see myself buying one.
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?
except for that last 1/10% who think they can hear a difference, or the 1/10000% who actually can.
Honestly, it's music we don't need. This is like arguing over whether x264 is sufficient to carry all of the visual information in a motion picture. It's not even close - the best BluRay throws close to 99.9% of the information away, but Neal's reckoning. Thing is, you can't tell. You can't tell in a good set up in a controlled environment, much less in a room where the visual/acoustic treatments aren't designed solely for the experience.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
'Polynesian' is language family spoken in various Pacific countries such as New Zealand (Maori), USA (Hawaiian) and Chile(Rapa Nui).
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.
Obviously Young doesn't understand The Coastline Paradox. At a sufficiently high resolution of measurement, a wave contains infinite information. Any finitely sized digital recording actually contains 0.00000% of the information in the original signal.
Of course, that's only if you include all the information that our brains are incapable of distinguishing. The interpretation of waves by our brains is an inherently fuzzy process, and beyond a certain resolution there is no perceptible difference between a flawed and a perfect recording (even if you had the equipment and sound room to produce a sufficiently high quality set of vibrations in the air to reliably communicate that tiny difference to your tympanic membrane (you don't)).
Or, more succinctly: Extreme audiophilia is bunk.
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Now only is 192 kHz/24 bit silly in general, it's even more silly for a portable music player, that's usually used in places with a higher background noise than your living room. Listening to music above 100 dB SPL in a cafe with noise at 50 dB SPL means you only need an SNR of 50 dB, just slightly more than 8 bits.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
a Monster cable?
Neil Young sellling Diamond dust? Can't we just call him Neil Diamond instead?
Learn to love Alaska
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.
Didn't I write "language family"?
And the dumb will deny that anyone can understand the sampling theorem and the anatomy of the human ear because they can't.
I pity the dumb.
Something tells me....he is going to catch a ton of flac over this.
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Capitalism keeps capital in the hands of the capitalist class, that's it's whole reason for being. The idea behind socialism is to make capital -- not to be confused with money, but the actual "means of production", and so not something that has to be "raised" -- available to workers without having to get some parasitic aristocrats involved. Unfortunately, Marx was not an empiricist and his version of socialism lends itself to abuse by authoritarians; but even his fscked-up version took an agrarian nation barely out of feudalism (Russia still had legal serfdom until 1861!) and turned it into a space-faring nuclear superpower -- and that in spite of bearing the brunt of the cost of stopping the Nazis. Stalin sucked and Marxism has serious flaws, but the whole "OMG socialism failed!!1!" meme doesn't hold up to serious examination.
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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!
Working entirely at low level, you have other options, too. If you have a big home theater, where the distance between main speakers (subwoofers don't really count) varies by more than about 5 feet, you might benefit from a properly-configured delay unit, so the sound arrives at your ears at the proper time, according to its spacial location in the source.
My "crappy receiver" does that already. Perhaps you should look at what a $600 receiver gets you these days.
Learn to love Alaska
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.
A nano/shuffle's entire purpose is to support your workout (shuffle = music, nano adds radio, podcast, and recently BT headphones). It's for folks who have a decent but not large selection of music that just want to use it for a specific purpose.
Nowadays, with streaming radio and decent data plans, the smartphone is definitely better and doesn't even need more than 32 much less 128GB.
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A rip from the MASTERS (I assume you mean final mix) is only sometimes a good thing, after hearing my own bands recordings before and after mastering I want a mastered version please. Mastering is an important step in the recording process, of course we master for quality ensuring there is no clipping or un-necessary compression, however some compression can be necessary to get a good result.
FLAC rips from vinyl do not come close. When a track has been mixed it is mastered for the different media that it will be delivered for. A vinyl master has a shelving filter to remove low frequencies (leaving them in will cause the needle to skip or bounce on the LP), vinyl also has a much smaller dynamic range than a CD and a high noise floor. Next the sound of vinyl is actually very tinny and lacks bass (put your ear near the needle to hear this), this is made up by boosting base frequencies either in the player (or via an LP input that some older stereo's included), so the sound has already been heavily messed with before it's even gotten to your A to D converters.