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Topic: Neil Young’s new audio format (Read 130316 times) previous topic - next topic
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Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #51
I read lots of news stories yesterday, but is there anything new by now than some journalist found his trademark applications?


Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #53
Rolling Stone article


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WMG – home to artists including Muse, the Black Keys, Common and Jill Scott – has converted its library of 8,000 album titles to high-resolution, 192kHz/24-bit sound.

I wonder what does the word "converted" mean.


Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #55
It's a great design.



Probably many have made that joke already, but it immediately came to my mind.

BTW, I saw that Letterman show, Jimmy Fallon was on before Young. Fallon doing Neil Young singing the Fresh Prince of Bel Air theme song made more sense than Real Neil Young.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #56
Summer 2013 becomes early 2014:
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To everyone who loves music –

I’m very happy to bring you some good news. All of us at Team PONO have been focused on getting everything right for our early 2014 launch of Pono.

The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality - as it was in the studio. So it has primal power.

Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.

This music moves you. So you can feel. That’s why so many musicians are behind PonoMusic – this is important work that honors their art. This is the way they wanted you to hear their music.

PONO starts at the source: artist-approved studio masters we’ve been given special access to. Then we work with our brilliant partners at Meridian to unlock the richness of the artist’s music to you. There is nothing like hearing this music - and we are working hard to make that experience available to all music lovers, soon.

Our mission is also to make PONO just as accessible as any music you buy and listen to today. So we’ll be launching both the PONO portable player – an updated version of the one I showed on David Letterman’s program – and an online library, with all your favorite music available in PonoMusic quality. Everything you need to feel music anew.

Stay tuned for more updates. And be sure to follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest information. We hope you’ll try PONO when it comes your way, and that it brings you the soul of music.

Yours, for PonoMusic –
Neil Young

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #57
Quote
The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality - as it was in the studio. So it has primal power.
If it's not a digital file, what kind of device is this?    Jokes aside, I don't think the computer audiophiles will ever agree on what high resolution means, at what bit depth, sample rate, pcm or dsd, etc. Maybe Mr. Young will be the Moses to lead them out of Egypt.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #58
Quote
we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality

...and offered to resell it to you as a digital file specially processed with exclusive Meridian Voodoo Technology.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #59
...at a premium.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #60
By "PONO" do they mean "PORNO"?

Otherwise I don't care.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #61
What a load of emotionally exploitative, self-congratulatory tripe!

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So it has primal power.

Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust. Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail.

This music moves you. So you can feel.
Ah, yes. Clearly all this overwhelming apathy has really always been due to the fact that I listen almost exclusively to lossy audio. Well, turns out this is a lot simpler to solve than I thought it would be! Thanks, Neil. I’ll record you a video of the glorious moment when I finally rediscover genuine emotion.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #62
By "PONO" do they mean "PORNO"?

Was about to comment something along those lines...

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Otherwise I don't care.

Oh, I do care. They're, as we say down here, "selling colored mirrors" (literal translation), meaning selling snake oil, and people will happily buy it. But, what can we do...

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #63
Summer 2013 becomes early 2014:
Quote
To everyone who loves music –...


Maybe something like Spotify for HDTrack users and Meridians magic Apodizing.

Edit: i guess Meridian will build the DAC Hardware, they did build some small units like the Explorer DAC lately
Is troll-adiposity coming from feederism?
With 24bit music you can listen to silence much louder!

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #64
I think the thing that bothers me most about this marketing-speak driven product of dubious value is that they used a Hawaiian word for it.  That is not pono at all, Neil.


Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #66
Actually you didn't really mention the problem... it's that 1-bit cannot be sufficiently dithered, as shown in the classic Lipshitz / Vanderkooy paper. It may be "good enough" for a distribution format or a single conversion, but strictly speaking it's not transparent like properly-dithered multibit PCM.


Good point. The thing that bothers me is all these people who seem to believe that DSD has some kind of inherent sonic advantage over PCM, and that converting DSD to PCM (given that the DSD format and the PCM format have similar bandwidth and information capacities) somehow ruins the DSD in a readily audible way.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #67
marketing-speak driven product of dubious value
I think at least some of the people involved believe what they are saying. While there's some hyperbole, they're not intentionally out to fool anyone. Unless you count the fact that they've probably fooled themselves.

I don't know whether that makes it better or worse.

Cheers,
David.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #68
marketing-speak driven product of dubious value
I think at least some of the people involved believe what they are saying. While there's some hyperbole, they're not intentionally out to fool anyone. Unless you count the fact that they've probably fooled themselves.


Where I live we call that "The John Atkinson question". ;-)

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I don't know whether that makes it better or worse.


One could call this an educational problem, but if you approach them with education many start chanting nonsense words so that they can't hear what you say.

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #69
i'm a fan of neil's music, but he is a self-centered idiot when it comes to everything else.  this PONO stuff is just unbelievable.  the fact that he has 'experts' telling him that he's going to make 'better' digital copies is so sad.  not to mention the obvious return to DRM and the absolute lack of any critical thinking of whey music sounds bad these days.  it's the mastering!!  if he was supporting an idea to create an industry wide dynamic range maximum, i'd be on board.  now he's just trying to sell hi-rez shitty masters. 

alas, this will never see the light of day.  if it does, his droves of mouth breathers will buy willingly.  he sold blue ray to them along with the promise of bd-live downloads.  that's now dead.


Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #71
he sold blue ray to them along with the promise of bd-live downloads.  that's now dead.


In what way is Blu-Ray dead?


Blue-Ray is not dead, it's the live monthly downloads Neil promised with the purchase of Archives I on Blue-Ray.  (Incidentally, at that point in 2009, Blue-Ray players were still new and expensive and lots of Neil fans went out to buy them in order to buy the Archives.)  That being said, Blue-Ray is definitely not the norm and is basically redundant and unnecessary.  Blue-Rays make all movies look like cartoons! 

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #72
Blue-Ray is not dead, it's the live monthly downloads Neil promised with the purchase of Archives I on Blue-Ray.  (Incidentally, at that point in 2009, Blue-Ray players were still new and expensive and lots of Neil fans went out to buy them in order to buy the Archives.)  That being said, Blue-Ray is definitely not the norm and is basically redundant and unnecessary.  Blue-Rays make all movies look like cartoons! 


Erm, OK then.

Anyways I'll not reply again as it's too off-topic

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #73
> Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day.

PONO will make me wince, give me temporary blindness and a pounding headache?

Neil Young’s new audio format

Reply #74
The sanitized version of my thoughts is that it sounds like snake oil and manure.  And is probably insanely overpriced, especially for what it's likely to be.  And it wouldn't surprise me if it was technically inferior to CD.