Pono
Pono ( Hawaiian for "goodness, righteousness, morality, equity, just, in perfect order" among other things) is an online music service with its own player, currently announced by Neil Young and his company PonoMusic. The first pre-ordered devices were shipped from October 2014. They are now available in stores. Pono aims to "counter the inferior quality of MP3-compressed audio" and instead offer music that sounds like "while recording in the recording studio" (original: "to confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer" ... " as they first sound during studio recording sessions. ”) Pono is said to use the free audio format FLAC , a codec for lossless audio data compression .
Various reports indicate that Pono has distribution agreements with several major record labels . Commentators point out that Pono competes against providers such as iTunes Store .
history
In his biography, "Waging Heavy Peace: A Hippie Dream," Young expressed concern about digital audio quality, particularly in Apple's iTunes Store. "My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I've been practicing for the past 50 years," he writes.
In 2012, Young founded Pono Music, together with the Silicon Valley entrepreneur John Hamm as CEO . In September 2012 Young presented a prototype of the player on David Letterman's Late Show and reported on the support from several large record labels Warner , Sony and Universal .
In March 2014, PonoMusic started a pre-order campaign for the player via the crowdfunding platform Kickstarter , combined with the announcement that the device would play "the finest quality, highest-resolution digital music from both major labels and prominent independent labels". The FLAC file format should be used for this. This was followed by a promotional video in which Bruce Springsteen , Eddie Vedder , Rick Rubin , Jack White , Elton John and Arcade Fire advertised the device. With this campaign, Young was able to raise more than $ 800,000 in one day , and in the end it was more than $ 6,000,000 in seed capital.
By the end of November 2014, 9103 Chrome LE players with artist signature, 2824 yellow players and 380 transparent players had been delivered. The dates mentioned in the pre-order campaign were thus met.
Ecosystem
The pono "ecosystem" comprises the following components:
- A portable player, the PonoPlayer, costs 399 USD and is operated with the internal memory of 64 GB size, as well as with an included microSD card with a storage capacity of 64 GB. The player can thus store up to 500 high-resolution versions of music albums. With its two outputs, the PonoPlayer can also be operated in balanced mode for use with professional high-end sound systems and headphones.
- The PonoMusic Online MusicStore, which offers earphones, headphones and other accessories in addition to the pieces of music.
- The "PonoMusic App", the associated media management system for downloading and synchronizing the music.
criticism
Pono's decision to distribute music with a quality of 96 kHz / 24 bit or 192 kHz / 24 bit PCM has provoked criticism from sound engineers , among others , who have not scientifically proven that there is a noticeable difference between recordings with 16 bit / 44.1 kHz and 24 bit / 192 kHz.
Individual evidence
- ^ Pono in Hawaiian Dictionaries
- ↑ Pono Player Yellow Details / Specs. PonoMusic, San Francisco. ( Memento of the original from April 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Sebastian Stöwer: Neil Young's PonoPlayer gets off to a dream start . Visions . March 12, 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2014.
- ↑ Achievement for NeilNeil Young: Six million dollars for Pono-Kickstarter from April 16, 2014 in Rolling Stone
- ↑ 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
