Posts Tagged ‘pono’

PONO to Launch Early 2014

finally there is a fickle date for the PONO release.  It is still subject to reality. And also what one understands what PONO would really give to the ears for, e.g. the “girls with the white earphones.”

Technical discussion here on BNB:

https://www.bad-news-beat.org/2013more-on-pono-technical-dissection

No one still answers the question why these high sampling rates, that the end-user cannot hear, is good for the end-user. For mastering ok.  For the girls and boys in white earphones it is still difficult why they should change their habit for songs which take 6 more times to download and to store and have no other quality than they have been remastered. Which is independent of the end sampling rate.

Why isn’t it explained to people that Neil Young is beyond physical limits when it goes about marketing, although he should know better as a musician.

It’s about mastering, not just high sampling rates. Yep, you get the studio sound, the re-mastered one. And that is new. And good. No need for Pono-stuff, though  🙂

Baron

Published: 2013/09/05

Neil Young’s PONO Digital Music Service to Launch Early Next Year

Neil Young’s highly anticipated digital music service PONO will finally be available in early 2014. According to Young, PONO will improve the quality and compression of MP3s. The legendary singer-songwriter posted a statement on the service’s Facebook page on Tuesday that reads:

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 Twitterand NSA 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

jambands.com/news/2013/09/05/neil-young-s-pono-digital-music-service-to-launch-early-next-year

_________________________________
Thanks to Randy G. and BNB team and ny.info

Tags: 192 kHz, digital audio, pono
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more on PONO: technical dissection

for the audiophiles, Xiph.Org writes about the flaws of PONO:

“24/192 Music Downloads …and why they make no sense

***

Articles last month [i.e. March 2012] revealed that musician Neil Young and Apple’s Steve Jobs discussed offering digital music downloads of ‘uncompromised studio quality’. Much of the press and user commentary was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of uncompressed 24 bit 192kHz downloads. 24/192 featured prominently in my own conversations with Mr. Young’s group several months ago.

Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space.

There are a few real problems with the audio quality and ‘experience’ of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we’re not going to see any actual improvement.

First, the bad news… “

>>> read the whole article::
http://xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html

(—Monty (monty@xiph.org) March 1, 2012; last revised March 25, 2012 to add improvements suggested by readers.)

see also: Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem (on Wikipedia)

What it actually says it that the human ear can’t hear frequencies up to the maximum frequency that PONO allows, i.e. 96 kHz, with a sampling frequency of 192 kHz (double the f_max_audible), but the higher frequencies might get transformed down in the audible range by non-linear effects, giving rise to deteriorating audio sound experience (or maybe another audio experience like the warm non-linear sound of tube amplifiers versus the metallic treble-loaded sound of transistor amps) . It can’t physically do any good to augment audio experience, but we suspect it might have psycho-acoustic effects.

And, the dynamic range of 24-bit of sampling also is not audible compared to a classic 16-bit dynamic sampling range. Here we have the problem of changing audio experience with the “loudness war” due to excessive dynamic compression in nowadays audio carriers, be it CD or Vinyl, like in audio ads on radio or TV who blare so loud.

In essence there must be more mystery about why Neil Young can hear it but not yet anyone else.

Tags: digital audio, pono
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PONO Illustrates Hi-Def Audio’s Problems

A Forbes Article:

Media & Entertainment  8/26/2013 @ 8:00AM

Neil Young’s Pono Music Service Illustrates Hi-Def Audio’s Problems

There’s widespread industry speculation that Neil Young’s dream of a higher quality consumer music service is slowly getting closer, although a launch date is still nowhere in sight. Pono, in which Young is heavily invested, is a high-resolution audio ecosystem consisting of a download service supplying digital audio files transferred from the original audio masters at 192kHz/24 bit, and a dedicated player with the ability to play back those files at that resolution. Along with Apple’s best kept secret in their Mastered for iTunes program, Pono is an attempt to raise the bar in audio quality, a bar that has been continually lowered since just before the turn of the century thanks to the public’s acceptance of the quality impaired MP3 format.

Read more at:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/bobbyowsinski/2013/08/26/neil-youngs-pono-music-service-illustrates-hi-def-audios-problems/

Tags: digital audio, pono
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Neil Young visits Meridian – Pono hi-res music link-up imminent?

Neil Young spent some time yesterday at Meridian Audio in Cambridgeshire, England, to talk about Pono developments.

Young, who had performed  the previous night at the Birmingham LG Arena, arrived at Meridian’s Cambridgeshire HQ with his entourage in two tour buses, and as well as the meeting with Meridian founder Bob Stuart, had a variety of demonstrations of Meridian systems, including a session in the Meridian Digital Theatre, a visit to the company’s new Experience Centre, and a ride in a Meridian-equipped Range Rover Vogue, according to the article that appeared in What  Hi Fi?, a tech review site., written by Andrew Everard.

Neil seems to be having fun in Europe…

Read more here:

http://www.whathifi.com/news/exclusive-neil-young-visits-meridian-%E2%80%93-pono-hi-res-music-link-up-imminent

Tags: England, European Tour 2013, Meridian, pono
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Interview: Elliot Mazer – e.g. Harvest Producer

Thrasher has a nice article and discussion on thrasherswheat.org/2013/02/interview-with-elliot-mazer-neil-youngs.html about Elliot Mazer. Audio perception discussion.

” Elliot Mazer’s resume reads like a small army of overachievers. Grammy-award-winning Record Producer, Studio Owner, Recording Engineer, Inventor, Professor, and more, Elliot has worked with some of our best-known recording artists including Janis Joplin, Santana, Sinatra, The Who, and most famously Neil Young.

Original Interview is here: audiostream.com/content/qa-elliot-mazer — has nice photos of soundboards, e.g. “The Green Board [Neil Young’s famous Universal Audio 610 console used to record among other’s the Elliot Mazer-produced Harvest]” audiostream.com/images/11513mazer7.jpg

Also PONO discussion and again about sampling theorems, why it does matter to sample at high rates.

Tags: pono, soundboard
Posted in Interviews, News / Article | 1 Comment »