Championed and promoted by Neil Young, Pono is here (at least for those willing to cough up the dough on the Kickstarter campaign).
Content for the PonoPlayer will be sold by the PonoMusic online store. The CEO of PonoMusic, John Hamm, promises “studio master-quality digital music … the way the artist recorded it.” Fundamentally, this means it will be capable of playing audio in the lossless FLAC format at 192 kHz and 24 bits, versus the 44.1 khz and 16 bit audio of CDs, and versus the MP3 and other compressed digital formats which strip data from those CD quality recordings to make the files more quickly downloadable and portable. However, the Pono player will still play those lower-resolution formats as well. Continue reading “Neil Young’s Pono is Launched, and Fidelity in Digital Music Gets Debated”