Digital music has changed how and where we can listen to music, but there are trade-offs for the portability. Digital files often sacrifice some of the resolution for size so you can fit more music on your portable player, which means you loose some of the details and nuances the artist intended you to hear. In the early days of portable digital players and music, these sacrifices were necessary, but changing technology has solved some of the problems that required the lower-quality files. Neil Young (yes, the musician) wants to make sure that we honor the artists’ intentions by creating and listening to music that “preserves the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio recordings.” He founded PonoMusic, a complete ecosystem that “offers PonoMusic customers the highest resolution digital music available. We are pursuing this vision by building a system for the entire music listening experience – from the original master recordings to the PonoMusic.com Store to the portable PonoPlayer. So now you’ll hear the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo – the texture and the emotion of the music the artist worked so hard to create.”
The Pono Music Team launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund PonoMusic, and they have blown their funding goal out of the water with 29 days left in the funding period. Although they already have about $4,000,000 (they were seeking $800,000), the funding period continues through Tuesday, April 15, 2014, at 1:30 PM EDT. A pledge of $300 gets you your choice of either a black or yellow PonoMusic player. A pledge of $400 gets you a limited-edition, signed player, signed by your choice of a variety of artists, like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Patti Smith, Willie Nelson, and several others, including Neil Young himself. As you can imagine with the astounding support they’ve already received, many of these limited edition players are already claimed, so you’ll need to hurry if you want a limited edition. Estimated delivery is in October of this year.
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I wonder how many people still carry a separate device to hold their music these days? I finally stopped carrying my 180GB iPod Classic. I leave it at home connected to whichever speaker I may be reviewing.
My 80GB iPod Classic has become a permanent fixture in my car.
@Greg Carter My 16g iPod touch has suffered the same fate… @Julie I agree with most phone holding music these days I cannot see any real reason to carry an additional music player.
@all
I guess the real audiophiles can appreciate such a player. It is also a good idea cramming tons of albums in there (when available). I personally ripped all of my CDs (878 to date) and put them in 256 kbps and up (where I saw fit) on my harddisc.
Personally I don’t use my ears to go in the direction of listening to music as an artform. Music is my life, I love it, I want my playlists and artists, depending on my preferences (since I hate ongoing radio babbeling), but after a certain clarity I wouldn’t really need this player. I could always throw in a CD in my player – that’s HiFi enough.
In summary, I’m with Julie: I like the fact that I can carry one device for many things. Don’t really see the point for the player, especially at that price tag.
After looking at the PonoMusic website all I am interested is buying music from them in FLAC format. I am not interested in buying a separate device when my phone can playback FLAC files anyway.