Whether or not consumers are actually willing to pay money for that kind of daylight may be another story — we'll find out next year.

Neil Young’s Pono Hi-Rez Service to Launch in 2014

Disappointed long ago with the music industry’s move towards compressed and usually lower-quality audio in MP3 format, Neil Young has spent the last few years not only trying to build a high resolution alternative, called Pono, but also gather support for Pono from within the music community.

In Young’s memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, he writes about reaching out to Steve Jobs at Apple regarding their typically lossy iTunes service, but with Jobs’ passing in October 2011, Young moved into a new direction. He formed what Craig Kallman, CEO and Chairman of Atlantic Records, considers to be a true non-competitive partnership “to save the sound of music.” The Pono team was further strengthened by members of Dolby and Meridian, plus the Warner Music Group (which had already converted 8,000 of their titles to 192kHz/24bit files).

Beyond the boardrooms, Young snagged a 1961 Cadillac Eldorado for $15,000 and put thousands more worth of high end car audio into it, completing the first Pono portable set-up. In 2011, the Caddy was driven to the Bonnaroo Music Festival in Tennessee, where performing artists could take a break and listen. Groups like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, My Morning Jacket, Mumford and Sons have all raved about the quality. Speaking about the difference between the MP3 version of “Respect” by Aretha Franklin and the hi-rez version, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, says, ”It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference.”

In addition to an online cloud-based storage of hi-rez songs (WMG has committed, Young is in talks with Universal Music and Sony Music), there are plans to release Pono portable players, as well as DACs sometime in 2014. Says Young, ”PONO starts at the source: artist-approved studio masters we’ve been given special access to. Then we work with our brilliant partners at Meridian to unlock the richness of the artist’s music to you. There is nothing like hearing this music – and we are working hard to make that experience available to all music lovers, soon.”

The very first release on Pono, Neil Young’s new high-res playback machine, will be that Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young Live 1974 album. All in 24/192, the highest resolution we can get. Neil has been a high-res fanatic for years, you know.

One has to wonder what Young and his investor’s expectations are with Pono though. Historically speaking, consumers have always gone more for convenience than audio quality, from shellac 78 replaced by less breakable vinyl record, which was replaced by the more portable cassette tape, then having both replaced by the random access of the CD, which was supplanted by easily shared digital music downloads, and now by the even more convenient music streaming.

While increased audio quality might have been a byproduct of the various new technologies along the way, it’s never been the driving force behind any change in format in the history of the music business. In the case of Pono, it hopes to gain market share based on quality alone, since convenient it is not.

For instance, the user must purchase a dedicated player instead of using one of the many devices he already owns, like a music player like an iPod, phone or even a tablet. Then, because the files are so large because of the extended resolution, the Pono user will have to wait for the song purchases to download, something we’re not used to these days. Of course, again because of the file size, there doesn’t seem to be an option for streaming (at least until we learn the technical details of the service), which is now changing the music business in a big way and gaining more steam every day.

Neil Young To Deliver Pono Keynote March 11 At SXSW

Neil Young will launch Pono, his new music player, at the SXSW music conference in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, March 11 at 5:00pm.

SXSW has officially announced Young as a keynote speaker for the conference although they fall short of announcing a Neil Young showcase to unveil his new album ‘A Letter Home’.

Pono is a high-quality music player aiming at the opposite end of the market to those content with poor quality MP3 players such as the iPod.

According to SXSW, “Neil Young has long been an advocate for studio-quality music in the digital age, and laments the relatively inferior sound quality offered by the current services. Pono, built from the ground-up, is his attempt to remedy this problem, and deliver to the listener the exact, full sounds the artist intends. Young – a Grammy-Award Winner and Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Inductee – will certainly go into more detail on Pono and deliver choice lessons from his legendary and storied career at SXSW”.

i can say with 100% conviction that i will not be buying pono, under any circumstances.

even if the '74 CSNY wembley shows are ONLY on pono i still won't buy it.

i believe you can already add pono to the list of tech things that failed miserably:

dual-disc
SACD
betamax
DVD-audio
surround sound
etc
etc
etc

Neil Young on his Pono player at SXSW: 'Once you hear this, you can't go back'

Neil Young launched his high quality digital Pono music player and service yesterday (March 11) at SXSW in Austin, Texas, saying of the player "once you hear this, you can't go back."

The rock legend spoke at the Austin Convention Centre and announced his plans for Pono, which yesterday also launched its Kickstarter campaign. At the end of the event, Young revealed that the campaign had already raised over half its target funds of $800,000 in just four hours, "which is pretty cool" he commented. He also explained that 'Pono' is the Hawaiian word for 'righteousness'.

Pono will consist of a digital music service (PonoMusic) and 128GB portable device (PonoPlayer) capable of storing 1-2,000 high resolution songs. The PonoPlayer is described in a press release as a "purpose-built, portable, high-resolution digital-music player designed and engineered in a "no-compromise" fashion to allow consumers to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible, bringing the true emotion and detail of the music, the way the artist recorded it, to life."

Speaking without notes and pacing back and forth on the large stage, Neil Young explained his reasons for launching Pono, which has been two and half years in the making, and he also explained that he had support from all the major record labels, commenting: "They're all with us, all the record companies".

Criticising the rise of MP3 quality sound and explaining that was the reason behind making his own player, Young said: "I'm a fan of listening loud – I love to listen loud… I like to take whatever it is to the limit." He stated that this was not possible with MP3 and said the music industry also began to slump after its introduction. "Everything started to die – it was because of the MP3 and the cheapening of the quality to where it was practically unrecognisable," he commented, lamenting albums which were perceived to have been made with 'filler' tracks. "The album had no value – only the individual tracks had value," he stated.

He added: "As a guy who'd been making records for many years at that point, I was pissed off – I love every note, on every song, on every record…. They weren't just filler." He then said that the sound of MP3 was 'shit': "We were selling shit, but people were still buying it because they like music [but] they were buying Xeroxes of the Mona Lisa."

Young went on to explain that music adapted to the constraints of MP3. "Instead of being soulful – which it still is – music adapted, it became beat heavy, it became smart, it became tricky. But for me, it was like 'woah, I don't want to do that!'... I started thinking it might be a good idea to do something about it".

He then showed a short film, which saw a host of music world stars commenting on Pono, after listening to the player, including Bruce Springsteen, Tom Petty, Patti Smith, Mumford and Sons, Dave Grohl, Elvis Costello, Mike D of the Beastie Boys and Jack White. Click below to watch the video. "This gives it to you as good as you can get it," says Tom Petty, whilst Springsteen comments that it has "a closeness and intimacy that digital recordings can lose very quickly." Elton John says: "I haven't heard a sound like that since vinyl".

"Pono plays back whatever the artist decided to do," added Young. "My body is getting washed, I'm getting hit with something great. It's not ice cubes, it's water – I'm listening. I'm feeling." Pono's CEO John Hamm also spoke during the session and talked about the triangular shape of the Pono device. "The electronics that fit inside wouldn't fit in a flat package," he explained. "It's a small piece of audio gear, not a mobile device."

In his book Waging Heavy Peace, released in 2012, Young explained how Pono will help to "save the sound of music". Young claims in the book that he had emailed Steve Jobs about Pono before his death: "I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them," he wrote, before stating that his service will "force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace".

The PonoPlayer ships with a total of 128GB. 64GB of memory is built into the player and another 64GB of memory on a removable microSD card. The expansion slot can accept microSD cards of up to 64GB each. Unlike many other portable music players, the microSD cards are designed to be easily swappable. For example, you can build a library of various playlists or genres on different cards and simply swap them in and out, much like you'd swap game cards on a portable gaming console. So in reality you have infinite capacity on the PonoPlayer.

How many songs can it hold? That depends on the quality of your music files:

• CD lossless quality recordings (44.1 kHz/16 bit): About 5000 tracks.
• High-resolution recordings (48 kHz/24 bit): About 3200 tracks.
• Higher-resolution recordings (96 kHz/24 bit): About 1600 tracks.
• Ultra-high resolution recordings (192 kHz/24 bit): About 800 tracks.

This is a LOT of high-resolution music, and we say, “the more the better”. You’ll get hooked on how good this music sounds.

We want to be very clear that PonoMusic is not a new audio file format or standard. It is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music in the highest resolution possible for that song or album. The music in the PonoMusic.com store is sold and downloaded in industry standard audio file formats.

The PonoMusic Store uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format as its standard, for compatibility, although the PonoPlayer can play most popular high-resolution music formats from other sources. PonoMusic has a quality spectrum, ranging from really good to really great, depending on the quality of the available master recordings:

• CD lossless quality recordings: 1411 kbps (44.1 kHz/16 bit) FLAC files
• High-resolution recordings: 2304 kbps (48 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
• Higher-resolution recordings: 4608 kbps (96 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
• Ultra-high resolution recordings: 9216 kbps (192 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files

Streaming music typically requires highly compressed music files and at this time high-resolution digital music is not well suited for streaming - it can’t yet, based on a lot of technical variables in the “network playback” chain, reliably deliver the sound quality that you deserve from your favorite artists’ finest recordings.