Neil Young’s long promised high def music device, Pono, is out and I am jammed. Not that I’m ever going to be able to buy one, mind you. But if I were entrenched middle class, the type of person who can shell out 500 bucks for a new Coach purse, I’d have one of these babies in a Texas heartbeat, which should be quicker than a regular heartbeat given the Lone Star State’s rate of high blook pressure and all. The latest news is that they’ll be available in your not-so-friendly neighborhood electronics store on Monday for $399. The Pono Music Store already went online a few days back.
To be sure, the naysayers are everywhere, saying this pony can’t fly. They may be right.
There’s been a lot of concern over the price of the player itself, which I don’t think is valid. Although it’s way out of my price range, four hundred bucks isn’t all that much, especially if you compare it to the twelve hundred dollar price tag on the latest Walkman unveiled by Sony at this year’s CES. If it delivers as promised, it’s worth every penny.
Evidently, it does deliver, according to Gizmodo which has tested one.
“Herbie Hancock just tickled my ears. Not kidding. Adele did too. But Herbie tickled them better. No, this isn’t some weird dream/nightmare. This is Pono. Go listen to Hancock’s “Watermelon Man” now (link here). We’ll wait. Back? What you just heard was a compressed version of Hancock’s classic. What I just heard was not, and the difference is quite dramatic (even over reasonably priced headphones).”
There have also been concerns about storage capacity, with one writer estimating that the device will “only” be able to store 1,872 tracks, or about 150 albums, which seems sufficient to me, especially since the device easily connects to a computer to swap tracks back and forth. Although the soon to be released Pono Music Center app will only be available for Windows and Mac, Linux users will be able to “sideload” the player as a USB storage device and swap tracks using a file manager.
Another complaint, and a valid one, is with the extremely limited number of albums available, which numbers 40 as I write this — a number I figure is sure to go up dramatically in the upcoming weeks and months. As you might expect, titles by Young and Crosby, Stills & Nash dominate the current offerings.
There are more serious problems to be dealt with, however, if brother Neil wants to get this project off the ground. To begin with, the cost of music is incredibly expensive, with a copy of the Foo Fighters’ “Sonic Highway” going for $17.99, or $21.79 for Mr. Young’s “After the Gold Rush.” However, it’s my guess that if the project is successful, we’ll rapidly see these prices come down, along with the price for the Pono player as well.
A more problematic issue has to do the the openness, or lack thereof, of the music codec being used. Although Pono utilizes the Free Lossless Audio Codec or FLAC, which is licensed under the GPL and BSD licenses, evolver.fm reported last August that the files won’t play with full fidelity on anything but a Pono device.
“Yes, if you want a Pono file to play properly, you’ll need to play it on the Pono device — no computers, iPhones, Androids, or high-end D/A converters for you….
“However, according to a source with knowledge of the situation, Pono files will play on any digital audio device, just at a lower sound quality (i.e. something like what most of us listen to today). In other words, you should be able to load the songs up on your iPhone — they will just lack the amped up sound that made you go with Pono in the first place.
“In that sense, Neil Young and his Pono team have figured out how to do something Spotify did for subscription music, but to sound quality: To make it “freemium.” You might be able to “borrow” a Pono file from a “friend” and play it on whatever you want — but in order to get the top-notch sound quality, you’ll need to play it on a Pono, from what we hear, and you’ll need to be the person who purchased it.”
Although I suspect this has been accomplished by way of an easy to get around sleight of hand, by merely suppressing both the very low frequencies and everything above, say, 15 khz and restoring them on playback, this might be a deal breaker for many free tech supporters.
This has already been a deal breaker for me. I would’ve been willing to open up my PayPal account and shell out $23.99 to download the first Crosby, Still and Nash album, just to give you the down low on how it sounds in its remastered high def brilliance, but not if it’s just going to sound like a standard MP3 file when played on my computer.
There’s already Spotify for that.
The post Pono Is Here, High Def Open Source Codec (Sort of) & All appeared first on FOSS Force.
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