Neil Young Goes Ahead With Pono Player, Best Quality Music
Speculation about Neil Young's super-high-resolution music player has been making the rounds on the Internet for more than a year, but it seems that the musician is serious about the device and that it will be released sometime next year.
According to Young, the Pono player will be playing the best quality of music you can get.
Young recently showed of a rather clumsy prototype design of Pono - whose name stands for righteous in Hawaiian, he said - without demonstrating it. However, new rumors suggest that Young has a functional device and is currently accumulating a music library and licenses for a music store that would hold 192 kHz / 24-bit recordings. Pono will also cover a "digital-to-analogue conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions". There is not much detail, but Pono is not vaporware, according to Young, and will be released sometime in 2013.
There is reasonable doubt whether a dedicated music player like Pono can be successful in a time when we expect our mobile phones not just to be music playback devices, but entire entertainment multi-talents that can also play videos and run games that we download from application stores. Music streaming via cellular networks will be out of the question for Pono, given the fact that Young's preferred music format consumes about 300 MB of space for five minutes of audio, which makes the data squeezed into a Netflix SD movie (700 MB) look rather small. Even if you were to use music streaming over a commercial DSl or cable broadband network, you would be brand was an excessive bandwidth user if you were to stream more than 30 songs per day on average. Pono will have to rely on massive local storage that would provide room for about 200 songs in 64 GB of space.

While I appreciate true high quality music, 300MB per song may just be a little steep at this point in time.
Can't wait to actually hear the sound quality and see just how much better it is than a high quality CD with a proper sound system.
Then I will just need the music industry to get rid of auto-tuned no talent musicians who can't read / write music or play an instrument and bring back actual musicians.
tolham: Human can hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit, musicians at least. 16/44.1 mp3 could be consider high quality and 90% fidelity. New format 24 bit would be consider ultra high quality with 99-100% fidelity. The difference it's not so big, probably most people won't buy theirs libraries a second time for that but it's a standard that industry must adopt someday. That industry still sell you CD (in wav format) and haven't figure out a more secure format.
If Neil do a great job, it's could be the next big thing. There are tons of IThing too be change.
While I appreciate true high quality music, 300MB per song may just be a little steep at this point in time.
Can't wait to actually hear the sound quality and see just how much better it is than a high quality CD with a proper sound system.
Then I will just need the music industry to get rid of auto-tuned no talent musicians who can't read / write music or play an instrument and bring back actual musicians.
I read Porno Player and thought "I'll have to consider this sometime"
tolham: Human can hear the difference between 16bit and 24bit, musicians at least. 16/44.1 mp3 could be consider high quality and 90% fidelity. New format 24 bit would be consider ultra high quality with 99-100% fidelity. The difference it's not so big, probably most people won't buy theirs libraries a second time for that but it's a standard that industry must adopt someday. That industry still sell you CD (in wav format) and haven't figure out a more secure format.
If Neil do a great job, it's could be the next big thing. There are tons of IThing too be change.
God yes!
Screw the bandwidth considerations.
the only way you can tell the difference between 16 and 24 bit music is if you perform a double-blind test on very expensive professional equipment and train yourself to hear minute artifacts. in other words, there is no perceptible difference in the real world. the sad fact is, human hearing is lousy. 16/44.1 is more than enough fidelity, and mp3 v0 is transparent to 99.99% of people. the industry doesn't need to move to a higher resolution, the industry needs to stop compressing and clipping the sh!t out of the mixes.
pono is going fail, period. there is very little demand for high resolution music, and portable high resolution music is basically impossible. like i said above, in order to even hear the difference you need very expensive professional equipment. as in, arrays of high-end amps. that faux toblerone in Neil's hand can't possibly house the guts or the juice to fully produce 24/192 music. and even if it did, there are no headphones that can fully amplify it.
Indeed. Unless you have $1000 earphones, I doubt you would be able to tell the difference between the common lossless music you can find today and this "super-high-res" stuff.
It's people that spend exorbitant amounts of money on equipment which provide little to no benefit over a decent common audio-replay device thinking that they have "better" years than everyone else, and show affection and attachment to that equipment, like it's the most precious thing they have in life.
I can agree that a BAD quality equipment, headphone or speaker can degrade the listening experience, but once you reach common Hi-Fi standards, there's simply no point in going further.
As for digital recording, there is a large difference between 128kbps mp3 and 192kbps, a smaller but also easily observable difference between 192kbps and 256kbps, and from there to FLAC or WAV 44Khz/16bit also a very tiny difference.
24 bit ? 96 khz ? Seriously, pointless for playback. They are only useful when transferring or mixing sound, because digital processing introduces distortion, which adds up. Using higher formats reduces that effect. But once the sound reached it's final format and gets mastered, 44khz which is double the upper limit for human ear and 16 bit resolution (65.5k signal levels) are WAY more than enough for the fidelity of our old prehistoric ear )
Actually, all these "High Def" things server ONE purpose... and one purpose only. To get more money out of the gullible buyer who "think" that if it's more expensive and has bigger numbers written on it, it MUST be better.
Yeah. Capitalism 101.
And if I listen to Psychedelic Pill (Young's latest album) on headphones, I can easily hear tape hiss on some tracks. Is that the vaunted sound quality that he's talking about? Would his Pono reproduce that hiss with greater clarity?
"... better ears than everyone else."
"...things serve ONE purpose..."
The only reason for using 24 bits for musician is that you get a lot of headroom when you record and mix. When there are a lot of tracks at different levels being summed up it may make a difference, but blindtests show that nobody can tell the difference between 16 bit and 24 bit from a finalized track.
The CD-standard is superior in every way of form compared to even the best mastertape (which seldom are used anymore) when it comes to dynamics, frequency response, distorsion and anything you can throw at it.
That was considered the ultimate before and some still swears to it due to the "Analogue superior character", claiming it has specs (that can't be measured) better than CD in some way.
It is just that people that like analogue like the distorsion that comes with it.
By the way, the notion that this player makes the sound analogue is hilarious. Everything that is in the digital domain have to be converted to analoge. It is called a DAC (Digital to Analogue Converter).
What he is doing is to put just another digital processor (yes digital!) on top of what is already an absurd amount of overprocessing done at the master stage (compression and the likes).
Hell, there was a blind test (german I think) using trained pros (audio technicians, musicians) where they couldn't tell the difference between 128 kbit and 256 kbit mp3 files.