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Home / News / Neil Young shows off Pono audiophile music player

Neil Young shows off Pono audiophile music player

The rocker’s quest to bring lossless music to the mass market gets underway on Letterman

Rock legend Neil Young has always maintained a keen interest in releasing his music at the highest possible quality – his archive boxed set was delivered on Blu-ray in order to offer maximum fidelity to the original recordings – and on last night’s Letterman he showed off a pocket player and service that allows the user to convert, download and listen to what he calls “master quality audio”.

Called Pono (Hawaiian for “righteous”), the device looks vaguely like a mini Toblerone, with a screen and three buttons on one of its three faces. It will play lossless 192kHz/24-bit audio, so you’ll hear every bit of the original recording.

Of course, the main issue is that Young and co have to make it easier for people to get hold of the files at this quality. He told David Letterman that the team behind Pono are currently transferring The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited from the original studio masters, and negotiating with Sony and Warner in order to bring more albums.

We’ll be keeping an eye on Pono to see how it develops.

[Pono via TechCrunch]

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Dan is Editor-in-chief of Stuff, working across the magazine and the Stuff.tv website.  Our Editor-in-Chief is a regular at tech shows such as CES in Las Vegas, IFA in Berlin and Mobile World Congress in Barcelona as well as at other launches and events. He has been a CES Innovation Awards judge. Dan is completely platform agnostic and very at home using and writing about Windows, macOS, Android and iOS/iPadOS plus lots and lots of gadgets including audio and smart home gear, laptops and smartphones. He's also been interviewed and quoted in a wide variety of places including The Sun, BBC World Service, BBC News Online, BBC Radio 5Live, BBC Radio 4, Sky News Radio and BBC Local Radio.

Areas of expertise

Computing, mobile, audio, smart home