Posts Tagged ‘pono’

Analog Geeks on Psychedelic Pill

a great analog geeky article about the analog discussion of the Neil Young & Crazy Horse album “Psychedelic Pill” on www.analogplanet.com about the .MP3 generation vs. “the real sound”

“You used to get it all/blocking out my anger/blocking out my thoughts.”

— On this sprawling three record, five side triple-gatefold AAA album, recorded through a vintage Universal Audio tube console and Neve BCM10 junior console to a Studer 2″ eight track analog tape recorder, mixed to Ampex 1/4″ tape, mastered by Chris Bellman from the analog master at Bernie Grundman’s and pressed at Pallas in Diepolz, Germany, Young lays down the sonic challenge, saying in the sound and production, “Here it is, here’s what we once had, here it is again, listen and tell me that any digital format can even remotely approach this, not just sonically, but emotionally”.

Also mentions some details on the PONO audio format recording of the album.

…read more on www.analogplanet.com/neilyoung .

thanks to bgunn.

They rate the music (on a scale of 1-10) as a 9, 
and the sound as an 11.

Tags: analog, pono, Psychedelic Pill
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Neil Young Moving Forward With Pono

Pono gains momentum:

“On Thursday Neil Young Moving Forward With Pono was a top story. Here is the recap: (Gibson) Neil Young’s quest for a new online music service and digital player is gathering pace. Pono, his forthcoming service, will feature high-resolution master downloads of songs. Young’s company has now made federal trademark applications for a pair of slogans – “Pono Promise” and “21st Century Digital.”

Young Tweeted earlier this month that Pono will roll out the service’s cloud-based music-library component and portable digital-to-analog players by summer 2013.   During an interview with David Letterman in September, Young said he was “negotiating with Sony” and working on transferring albums including The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited for Pono.

And Young is very serious about this: Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that he and Pono raised $500,000 investment in November.   In the past, Young has been critical of the MP3 / AAC formats and before that, even CDs. But Pono will be hi-res. Some reports suggest that, on average, a five-minute song on Pono would require 300MB of storage space.

–   Source:  http://www.antimusic.com/news/12/December/ts20Neil_Young_Moving_Forward_With_Pono.shtml

Read more:  http://www2.gibson.com/News-Lifestyle/News/en-us/neil-young-pono-format-1219-2012.aspx

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Neil Young moving forward with plans for “high-res” music service

Neil Young moving forward with plans for “high-res” music service
December 21, 2012 – 16:04 AMT

PanARMENIAN.Net – Neil Young is moving forward with his plans for a “high-resolution” music  service, filing two new trademarks for marketing slogans. In addition to his previous trademark applications, Young has now asked for the rights to two more phrases, 21st Century Digital and Pono Promise, both linked to the singer’s forthcoming Pono audio system, The Guardian reported.

According to the United States patent and trademark office (via Rolling Stone), Young has taken out eight different trademarks for Pono: Pono Promise, 21st Century Listening, Earth Storage, Thanks for Listening, Storage Shed, 21st Century Record Player, Ivanhoe and SQS. SQS stands for Studio Quality Sound, while Ivanhoe is the name of the singer’s holding company.

The two latest filings are already displayed as slogans on Young’s Pono website. The site explains that “pono” is “the Hawaiian word for righteous” and that the technology “lets you ‘feel the soul of the music'”. Young’s trademark applications specify that the terms can be used on audio paraphernalia, for everything from microphones to CDs to MP3 players.

Despite bold talk about Pono’s audio fidelity, details of Young’s project remain closely guarded. Though Young had been in discussions with Steve Jobs before the Apple CEO’s death, the singer has said he now plans to “force iTunes to be better”.
Whatever it turns out to be, Young hopes to launch Pono next summer, according to a recent tweet.

http://www.panarmenian.net/eng/news/138741/

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Rolling Stone Article: Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analog Music Service

Neil Young Expands Pono Digital-to-Analog Music Service
Audio system could become rival to Apple
by: Patrick Flanary

Neil Young
Paul A. Hebert/FilmMagic

Aretha Franklin had never sounded so shocking, Flea decided last year, as “Respect” roared from the speakers of Neil Young’s Cadillac Eldorado. Stunned by the song’s clarity, theRed Hot Chili Peppers’ bassist listened alongside bandmate Anthony Kiedis and producer Rick Rubin while Young showcased the power of Pono, his high-resolution music service designed to confront the compressed audio inferiority that MP3s offer.

Beginning next year, Pono will release a line of portable players, a music-download service and digital-to-analog conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions. In his book out this week, Waging Heavy Peace, Young writes that Pono will help unite record companies with cloud storage “to save the sound of music.” As Flea raves to Rolling Stone, “It’s not like some vague thing that you need dogs’ ears to hear. It’s a drastic difference.”

Pono’s preservation of the fuller, analog sound already has the ear of the Big Three record labels: Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group and Sony Music. 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. It was a process completed prior to the company’s partnership with Young’s Pono project last year, said Craig Kallman, chairman and chief executive of Atlantic Records.

In mid-2011, Kallman invested with Young and helped assemble a Pono team that included representatives from audio giants Meridian and Dolby, according to insiders. Once WMG signed on, Kallman said that he and Young approached UMG CEO Lucian Grainge and Sony Music CEO Doug Morris about remastering their catalogs for Pono distribution. Neither UMG nor Sony officially acknowledged those conversations.

“This has to be an industry-wide solution. This is not about competing – this is about us being proactive,” Kallman tells Rolling Stone. “This is all about purely the opportunity to bring the technology to the table.”

The title of Waging Heavy Peace refers to the response that Young gave a friend who questioned whether the singer-songwriter was declaring war on Apple with his new service.

“I have consistently reached out to try to assist Apple with true audio quality, and I have even shared my high-resolution masters with them,” Young writes, adding that he traded emails and phone calls with Steve Jobs about Pono before the tech king’s death last October. Apple declined to comment on whether a collaborative or competitive relationship with Pono exists.

Apple’s Mastered for iTunes program, which launched last year with the release of Red Hot Chili Peppers’ I’m With You, requires mastering engineers to provide audio quality based on a listener’s environment – such as a car, a flight or a club. Those dissatisfied with Apple’s AAC format argue that it still represents a fraction of the high-resolution options that Pono promises to deliver. Engineers have debated the value of sound quality for years.

In early June 2011, after filing a handful of trademarks for his cloud-based service idea, Young traveled to the Bonnaroo Festival to perform with Buffalo Springfield. While he was there, he invited fellow musicians into his Cadillac for a Pono demo, including members of Mumford & Sons and My Morning Jacket, and videotaped their reactions for a potential marketing campaign.

“Neil’s premise is cool, and I think it’s exciting as a traveling musician,” My Morning Jacket frontman Jim James tells Rolling Stone. However, he adds a caveat: “I think that’s somewhere that he has to be careful: I’ve already bought Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ a lot of times. Do I have to buy it again?”

While Young acknowledges in his book that existing digital purchases will play on Pono devices, he points out that his service “will force iTunes to be better and to improve quality at a faster pace.”

“His reasons are so not based in commerce, and based in just the desire for people to really feel the uplifting spirit of music,” Flea said in defense of Young. “MP3s suck. It’s just a shadow of the music.”

Rollingstone.com/music/news/neil-young-expands-pono-digital-to-analog-music-service-20120927

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A Techno on Pono — Neil Young’s new audio lossless digital format

Longish article, witsh goes into the line of the discussion we started some days ago:

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Who Cares About Neil Young’s Ultra-High Quality Music Standard?
By Matt Peckham| @mattpeckham| October 3, 2012

Neil Young claims he’s going to change the way we listen to digital music by pairing a new iPod-competitive Pono music player (I see “Ponyo” — how about you?) with an audiophile-caliber music download service. The claims are predictably long on sound bites and short on particulars.

What we know so far is this: It’ll offer 192 kHz, 24-bit recordings with “digital-to-analogue conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions.”

192 kHz and 24-bit? That’s way better than 44.1 kHz and 16-bit (basic CD quality), no? Will it be uncompressed as well? Will lossless audiophiles finally have a mainstream, rich-library alternative to sites with limited catalogs like Rhinoand Bleepand HD Tracks?

Back in July 2011, I lamented Amazon’s decision to limit its “unlimited” cloud music storage service to compressed audio file formats. FLAC files? Apple lossless audio? No-can-play. Thus “unlimited” only for members of the lossy audio club, i.e. those listening to lower quality versions of songs either ripped from personal music libraries or purchased online. Those of us who’ve fastidiously replicated our compact disc or vinyl music collections in digital form were out of luck.

I disliked but understood Amazon’s decision. Lossy audio occupies dramatically less space than lossless, and portable audio players hold only so many songs. The size of the average iTunes music library is around 3,000 tracks (according to TuneUp Media back in June 2011, anyway). If we say the average five minute MP3 is 5 MB, that’s roughly 15 GB of storage per person, which adds up fast. Amazon’s cloud-based pockets aren’t bottomless, and space on portable players can be dear — who wants to fuss over what to carry or leave behind?

What’s more, most people listening on the go — through earbuds, smartphone speakers, in automobiles, on planes or trains, out for a run on a windy day or in areas with traffic — are hearing music in environments decidedly non-conducive to, shall we say, the connoisseur’s ideal aesthetic. Who cares about audio nuance if what you’re using to listen or the listening environment itself aren’t up to snuff in the first place?

Me, for starters, because even when I’m in one of those compromised situations, I like to know that were I in a great sound space, say at home listening through my high-end monitors (speakers) or a pair of studio-quality headphones, I’d be able to appreciate all the nuance baked in by the musician(s) and whoever engineered the recording. I like the idea of holding in my possession the best version of a song that’s available. If I’m in a pinch, I can compress it any way I like, but if I need to go back to the source, at least there is one, as opposed to something bought through iTunes or Amazon, where you’re stuck with the compressed version, high fidelity playback gear or no.

Sympathy for my position is rare, or at least it has been anecdotally speaking. Most people — family, friends, strangers — claim not to be able to hear the difference, say, between an MP3 encoded at 256kbps and the lossless original. When I push back, I’m accused of being an audio snob. And to be fair, maybe I am (though never in the pretentious sense — I hold nothing against people who don’t care about this as much as I do, nor do I think my audio preferences are “superior” to theirs).

The differences between compressed and uncompressed music can be subtle depending on the compression levels. Working against my desire not to notice: a trained musical ear. I spent years in college-level music programs honing my ear to associate what most people identify as the lyrics to a catchy Rodgers and Hammerstein tune — “do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do” — with actual frequencies in the Western music system. When I hear a piece of music, I can tell just by listening what the chord relationships are, say what the chorus from Peter Gabriel’s “Come Talk to Me” has in common with the first two notes of the main title from Star Wars.
But that’s just pitch recognition — a jumping off point. I’ve also spent a lot of time over the years fiddling with audio formats and reproduction equipment, as well as stuff like ABXTester, a double-blind A/B comparison utility that checks your ability to tell the difference between two music samples. It’s great for testing whether you can discern different compression levels. I’ve found that I can reliably tell the difference at or below 256Kbps (the going compression rate on iTunes and Amazon), and that I only start to mix things up at or above 320Kbps (the rate a subscription service like Spotify laudably offers if you enable “high-quality” streaming). I don’t claim to have a “golden ear,” but I do have a discerning one.
Before I blame ear training and throw in the towel, I want to toss this on the fire: How many of you have built up a library of compressed digital tunes, where they’re your only copy of a song or album? You’ve probably spent a bunch of time and money doing so, right? If someone came along claiming your music collection was inferior and that you could have something of far superior quality, but that it’d cost you to get it, you’d probably balk. Is that influencing your opinion? What you’re telling yourself you hear or don’t hear? I think it’s a worthwhile question.
Then again, you can have too much of a good thing, and who’s to say that’s 192 kHz, 24-bit audio? I mean, you look at video advances and VHS to DVD, sure. But DVD to Blu-ray? Blu-ray to whatever’s next, e.g. “Retina” TVs? When is good enough really good enough? When does it become a truly niche, enthusiast-only thing?

Which bring us back to Neil Young’s music service claims: “digital-to-analogue conversion technology intended to present songs as they first sound during studio recording sessions.” Will anyone care (aside from the core audiophile group)? Does anyone really want to reboot their music libraries for what for most may seem less of a distinction, say, than the leap from VHS to DVD? After all, we’re not talking about a service (or a player) that’s going to solve two of the biggest obstacles to appreciating higher quality audio on the go: portable storage space that’s affordable and audio reproduction gear (to say nothing of ambient acoustics).

Besides, isn’t the real debate these days turning to one-off purchases versus subscription services?

How many of you are flirting with the idea of abandoning digital downloads for a streaming service like Spotify, where you can play back music, from a startlingly complete catalog, at near-CD-quality levels already? Where — artists and publishers and streaming providers willing — you could eventually just stream 192 kHz, 24-bit audio files for a flat rate in lieu of buying them?

Speaking as an audiophile, I wish Neil Young the best in all of this, and I’ll be first in line to try it. But unless he has some crazy sonic trick up his sleeve — some thing we’ve overlooked or failed to anticipate — he’s facing a tough sell, at least on the merits of the service’s superior audio quality.

>>> techland.time.com/2012/10/03/who-cares-about-neil-youngs-ultra-high-quality-music-standard

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a couple of days ago on the German hi-tec list:

www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Pono-Neil-Young-will-iTunes-Co-audiophile-Konkurrenz-machen-1720193.html

“Pono”: Neil Young will iTunes & Co. audiophile Konkurrenz machen Update

Der quietschgelbe Prototyp von Neil Youngs Pono-Player verspricht auch unterwegs ein audiophiles Klangerlebnis.
Seit geraumer Zeit wirbt Neil Young für bessere Klangqualität und will auch Steve Jobs kurz vor dessen Tod schon fast überzeugt gehabt haben, bei iTunes verlustfrei komprimierte Inhalte anzubieten. Doch Apple verkauft nach wie vor verlustbehaftet mit AAC-kodierte Musik bei 256 kBit/s. Einzig das “Mastered for iTunes“-Programm deutet bisher auf eine Initiative für bessere Musikkonserven bei Apple hin.

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discuss this: can we hear the difference?

Tags: digital audio, lossless coding, pono, sampling theorem
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