Neil Young to "restore the soul of music"

kidkage

kidkage

Bored of Canada
Can Neil Young & Pono ‘Restore The Soul Of Music’? » Synthtopia

Thoughts?

I've been dreaming of a .wav player for a while now.

And I think someone we Q&A'd here a few years ago said he'd like to see a cloud based .wav player at some point in the future.

But at $400 I don't see this doing much on a massive scale.
Not to say that it can't - Apple stuff is insanely overpriced, but it's got the same appeal as Pro Tools. That whole "industry standard" thing.
 
Neil calls it 'an artist-driven movement', but it's not the artists that drive mass purchase - it's the consumers. And most consumers are either kids who want it all for free or people who don't really give a shit. So I figure most will go 'Pono? Oh no!'

But it's interesting to me, listening to the 50 endorsements by very famous musicians, that they're hearing significant differences at resolutions higher than CD quality. I used to pay attention to online discussions about whether it was worth recording and mixing at res higher than CD quality, and in the end I figured that cuz I couldn't hear the difference between 44,100 and 48,000 KHz that going higher wasn't going to make a difference. But Neil's opinion is that 192/24-bit makes a hearable difference, IF IT'S PLAYED BACK AT THAT RESOLUTION.

So yeah, I want to hear PONO. If I can hear a difference, then I'll buy a new interface, a faster computer, and start recording and mixing at the resolutions they're talking about. But if I can't hear a difference, then I've saved a lot of money.
 
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I'd be willing to bet that after 50 years of playing live music, Neil Young can't hear anything better than anyone. I don't think this is anything more than Neil trying to tap into the wallets of his nostalgic vinyl generation and young hipsters that have never actually heard a record anyway.
 
I thought that was the purpose behind FLAC. Pretty efficient, open standard if I am not mistaken, Lossless, but it is hardly supported.
 
fat_fleet said:
Doomed. Noone gives a shit about FLAC quality audio except for the types that hang out here.
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Why do you think that is? No one really cares about quality or there is a flaw in FLAC? Just wondering as it seems to be the answer to higher quality music without the full overhead of wave.
 
But someone should make a player that streams at 92kbps and shows random videos of anime, Jackass movies, Assassin's Creed, and soft-core p0rn.
 
DM60 said:
Why do you think that is? No one really cares about quality or there is a flaw in FLAC? Just wondering as it seems to be the answer to higher quality music without the full overhead of wave.
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Kids just aren't really into music anymore.
 
dobro said:
And here's the flipside of the argument:

Why Neil Young's New Pono Music Player Doesn't Make Any Sense
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I agree with the wonderfully named Monty Montgomery in this link that it's a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Where are folks meant to get the music from in the first place to put on the Pono? If it's meant to sound "better than CDs", then you surely can't use your CDs as the source for uploading. Presumably you'd have to buy everyone's back catalogue yet again in another format to get any benefit... ???
 
Dr.SpringReverb said:
Most people don't hear a difference between 320kbps mp3 and flac anyway
Me neither.
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I'll be honest, in the MP3 world, I don't hear a difference in any of the kps differences. But I do hear a difference in wave and FLAC. Just seems there are more dynamics. I think most of us here can tell a difference as we work with the source in wave, then convert and wonder what happen to our music.
 
I hear the differences between various MP3s rates and wavs. To me, the difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and the source wav is negligible enough to not worry about. Anything less than 320 gets pretty fucked though. Online streamers brutally kill a mix. But if I'm trying to cram as much music as I can onto my phone, I'll deal with the loss of quality because I'm not trying to hear every single whisper and detail while just walking around casually listening to music.
 
I guess my ears are shot. Or it is because i'm always recording on cassettes anyway, which is not exactly hifi... :thumbs up:
But i don't really care for perfect quality anyway. Same with movies, i can enjoy it even with bad picture on a tiny screen.
 
Greg_L said:
I hear the differences between various MP3s rates and wavs. To me, the difference between a 320 kbps MP3 and the source wav is negligible enough to not worry about. Anything less than 320 gets pretty fucked though. Online streamers brutally kill a mix. But if I'm trying to cram as much music as I can onto my phone, I'll deal with the loss of quality because I'm not trying to hear every single whisper and detail while just walking around casually listening to music.
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Yea, there is some honesty in that statement for a great deal of people. When just having music as a back drop verses its focus, detail listening is really not required.

I need to revisit the 320 mp3 space. Maybe I missed it.
 
Mostly been said but I don't see a substantial percentage of people re-buying their entire music collection for this reason.
I'm not exactly cutting edge, but is streaming not the future anyway?

I wonder who told him to make it a stupid triangly shape. That's going to work well in your pocket.
 
DM60 said:
Yea, there is some honesty in that statement for a great deal of people. When just having music as a back drop verses its focus, detail listening is really not required.
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Exactly. That's probably how it is for most people. Does "Back in Black" sound compromised at 128 kbps? Yup, absolutely, but it's better than hearing people talking and cars honking.
 
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