Some Quick Thoughts On Neil Young's New Music System, Pono, Designed To "Bring Back...The Goosebumps"

No, have not heard for myself Neal Young's new Pono audio player, but I like the idea behind it.  For the sake of time (or rather my limited available right now) I won't go in to too much, but I did wanna just quickly make some comments.  (Likely complete with typos and grammatical errors.)

Forgetting the cost of Pono (about $100 more than an iPod Touch) and the comparatively smaller number of tracks currently available (only about 600K) the notion of better fidelity has been haunting the digital age pretty much since its inception.

There's a lot of talk for studio folks about recording higher resolutions, but the final products always seem wind up as far lower res mp3s.  And in some ways that's ok.  If nothing else the mp3 has increased accessibility to a far larger library of music than before.  And piggy backing on to that is the reality that in many ways, in today's world, being heard at all, even at lower res, is far better than no one hearing you at all.  It's a trade off.  I'll leave the philosophical discussion for another time as to if it's worth it or not.  (It's an important discussion, but not one there is time for just now...)  Anyway....

I remember the birth of the CD.  The loss of "warmth" and "depth" of sound.  The loss of full sized album covers.  The "sterility."  And so on...

And things have changed.  Compression has gotten better.  And our eases have gotten worse in some ways.  We now tolerate the lower fidelity to the point of many of us not even really aware of what it's lower than, not even aware of the original baseline, yet we cannot handle the slightest "pitchy-ness."  The irony of the loss of art in the whole matter is both ironic and sad.  But also for another discussion.

My point is simply that weather Pono succeeds in the market or not, it's a step in the right direction.  It's attempting to restore the feel of the listening experience to what it once was.  How can that possibly be bad.  And, if it does work, as Neal claims, then it's totally worth the extra money.

Now if we could just get people to actually buy albums again in full instead of almost always ala cart.  Now that would really be something amazing for us to return to.

Here the origin lost i just saw today about Pono:
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/neil-youngs-pono-music-system-almost-ready-to-rock-in-100182858224.html