Since the advent of recorded music, musicians have had a complicated relationship with technology. For audiophiles and purists, nothing beats experiencing music at live venues, but for most of us, we’ve long settled for listening to highly compressed audio files on our portable digital music devices. It’s gotten to the point where most people no longer have a real sense of what a true high-fidelity recording sounds like, since we’ve become so accustomed to the highly engineered sounds of the mp3.
But there’s a movement by artists and musicians looking to provide a better high-fidelity experience for music lovers, and it’s being led by technology.
On March 11, iconic Canadian singer-songwriter and musician Neil Young started a Kickstarter campaign to raise $800,000 for the PonoMusic project. Within the first 24 hours, the project received over $1,000,000 in funding, doubling to more than $2,000,000 in the first 48 hours, and then doubling again to more than $4,000,000 a few days later.
So what’s all the fuss about? The PonoMusic project is working to provide the best possible listening experience of digital music. How? By using technology to maintain the musical integrity of studio master recordings with resolutions that range from 6 to 30 times better than that of an mp3, and making these high-resolution recordings accessible to a much broader audience. According to the project’s Kickstarter page, “PonoMusic is not a new audio file format or standard. PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio.” The high-resolution music will be available for purchase on the PonoMusic online store. The store will use the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format as its standard, but the player will be able to play other most popular, high-resolution music formats from other sources.
The difference between the low-resolution format such as mp3 and FLAC format is that in order to support a small file size, the mp3 compresses the original music file so much that it loses a lot of the original musical information, affecting the final sound of the recording, whereas the FLAC format retains much of the high-resolution integrity of the original recording, allowing significantly more details of a song to remain. Mp3 format has a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps, while the ultra-high resolution FLAC format utilized for PonoMusic has a bit rate of 9216 kbps, which is “about 30-times more data from which your player reconstructs the song,” according to PonoMusic.
The PonoPlayer has an unusual triangular design, evoking the form factor of the “Toblerone” chocolate bar. Unlike the skinny profile of the latest iPod nano, the triangular body of the PonoPlayer houses the larger audio and battery components needed to deliver the ultimate in sound quality. The device features a touchscreen swipe navigation that auto-rotates depending on the orientation of the device.
Neil Young isn’t alone in his quest to preserve sound integrity—PonoPlayers were tested by an electric roster of music artists, including Pearl Jam, Tom Petty, Foo Fighters, Dave Matthews Band, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Sting, Beck, Norah Jones, Jack White, and James Taylor. The music industry’s love for the new digital music player is evident in the array of endorsements that comprise most of the PonoPlayer promotional video (Warning: some language NSFW).
For music lovers and casual fans, PonoMusic could signal a return to high fidelity music.
The PonoPlayer can be pre-ordered on Kickstarter or on PonoMusic.com. The first batch of PonoPlayers are scheduled to be delivered to Kickstarter backers in October 2014. It will have a 1-year warranty and will retail for $399.
