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

Title

[bragr]

Had to read that twice.

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.

Re:Title

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Once again, Slashdot fails to deliver on its promise of "Nudes for Nerds" . . .

LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:LOL

[georgeaperkins]

Whether it is snakeoil or not remains to be seen. However, the hardware spec featuring a well regarded ESS Sabre digital to analogue converter and seperate output stages for headphone and line-level loads looks well thought out. The prospect of an extensive high-resolution music catalogue to support the hardware capabilities shows some potential. Over hyped? Yes of course. Celebrity endorsed rip-off? Maybe not - I think this is genuinely a product spawned from an artist's vision. Final thought. Over $1M in 24 hrs, How bloody amazing is Kickstarter?

Re:LOL

[roca]

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

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?

Re:LOL

[sharknado]

Maybe. But don't forget that the analog to digital conversion is itself a lossy process, so the only REAL way to listen to music is to carry around a record player in a briefcase. That's what all the real audio hipsters are doing.

It IS FLAC

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:It IS FLAC

[goombah99]

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.

Re:It IS FLAC

[Wdomburg]

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

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

Re:It IS FLAC

[amaurea]

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.

Reality check

[jaffray]

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

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.

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:you've got to be kidding me

[ChunderDownunder]

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

Coastline Paradox & Audiophilia

[Bob9113]

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.

Re:Too pricey, odd shape?

[ColdWetDog]

Also, the damn thing is triangular.

Actually, no. The Pono's shape would be properly described as prismatic .

Great. A geometry Nazi.

Re:Well

[Mr. Slippery]

Have you ever tried to raise capital in a socialist system? Capitalism makes capital common and available.

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.

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: Double blind tests?

[Gunboat_Diplomat]

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...