There’s widespread industry speculation that Neil Young’s dream of a higher quality consumer music service is slowly getting closer, although a launch date is still nowhere in sight. Pono, in which Young is heavily invested, is a high-resolution audio ecosystem consisting of a download service supplying digital audio files transferred from the original audio masters at 192kHz/24 bit, and a dedicated player with the ability to play back those files at that resolution. Along with Apple AAPL +0.68%’s best kept secret in their Mastered for iTunes program, Pono is an attempt to raise the bar in audio quality, a bar that has been continually lowered since just before the turn of the century thanks to the public’s acceptance of the quality impaired MP3 format.
Through the years, Young has always been a notorious stickler for audio quality, being one of the first artists to build his own personal recording studio based around hand-picked vintage audio gear, then later investing in Pacific Microsonics, which developed the HDCD audio technology that was acquired by Microsoft MSFT -0.03% in 2000. He’s also been a big proponent of high-res audio formats like DVD-Audio and most recently Blu-Ray.
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.
Another big problem that doesn’t get pointed out is that the vast majority of popular music recording done today is done in the digital domain at a resolution of 96kHz/24 bit at the highest. In fact, many hits in the early days of digital were cut at a sample rate half that. This limits the potential Pono high-res catalog to hits of the past that were done on tape and then transferred to digital at the desired high-resolution, although the Pono playback device is said to be able to play back songs from other music services as well. That said, Pono is reported to have garnered the blessing of all three major labels with promises to supply elements of their catalogs to the service.
Being an audio and tech guy myself, I applaud Neil Young and the Pono team for their efforts. It’s indeed a noble cause to keep high-quality audio alive. There’s no doubt that when people are exposed to it, they can be quickly converted to the joys of high-res audio with the right demonstration. The only problem is that we live in a quick-cut MTV world were convenience trumps quality the majority of the time, which means that unless the expectations of Pono are very modest, the company could be in for a rough ride.
