For most, the digital music on our iPhones and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora sounds just fine.
However, to a small-but-vocal group of audiophiles, it sounds like crap. Even as digital music downloads have increased in quality (iTunes used to sell mostly 128kbps downloads; now they're 256kbps), the music is still compressed. Some people say they can hear the difference.
Neil Young is one. He's been trying to get his Pono music player off the ground since at least 2012, and now he's taking another stab via Kickstarter. The PonoMusic player is a triangular iPod-like device designed specifically for high-quality audio.
How high? The Pono can play music in the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) format up to 9,216 kbps or 192kHz/24-bit recordings. For the record, that's technically far above what's generally regarded as the limits of human hearing, which maxes out at about 20kHz. Acoustic physics dictates that the sampling rate should be at least double the maximum frequency you need to produce, which is why CDs — indeed, most consumer audio formats — use 44.1kHz as a sampling rate.
That's not good enough for Young, and he's been clear on that for years. He was a proponent of the doomed DVD-Audio format in the early 2000s, but now he and others are trying to bring the vision of portable high-res audio to live through crowdfunding.
With 34 days to go, the PonoPlayer is more than halfway to its goal of $800,000 to bring the product to market.
That's even more impressive considering audiophiles already have options if they want to listen to portable high-res audio. Astell & Kern offers a high-resolution portable music player through the iriver brand as well as digital-to-audio converters for listening to better-quality music on an iPhone or Android device. Some apps, such as FLAC Player+ and OraStream, provide users options for high-res audio, too. And sites like HD Tracks offer many high-quality tracks users can import into their music libraries.
Still, the PonoPlayer would add another option to the mix, and the plan is to answer a key question about high-res audio: where to get the music. Pono plans to open a music store when they release the player, letting users download tracks and transfer them to the player via USB — functionally identical to iTunes/iPod, but a little anachronistic in 2014.
Most audiophiles would probably think it's worth the trouble, though. The target $399 retail price is a little on the high side, but interested backers of the project can reserve one now for just $200. Considering the speed at which the Pono project is attracting donations, there's a lot of them out there.
Image: KICKSTARTER