HD Music With The Pono Music Player

In September 2012, Neil Young went on the David Letterman Show to announce the forth coming release of his Pono Music Player. Pono is Hawaiian for righteous. The music of the Pono Player is said to be just that. The Pono Player plays192 kHz/24 bit music files that have been taken directly from artists original masters.

On March 12th, 2014, it was announced that Young's Kickstarter campaign had raised 1.6 million dollars in 24 hours after appearing at the SXSW Music Festival. Clearly, Neil Young may be on to something. By March 17th he had raised 3.6 million dollars, and on March 19th his Kickstarter page listed him at 4.2 million dollars.

The big deal here is that the landscape of digital music delivery may be about to change. And, why not? The Mp3 has been king since the late 1990s. And sure, it's been great to be able to pack thousands of songs into a player that could fit into your back pocket. But, the Mp3 was only able to do that because it compressed the music to make the files smaller.

At first, this was done because the early World Wide Web was accessed by using a slow dial up speed of a 56 kbps modem. Music files were compressed by removing a small portion of the audio content, most notably from the higher frequencies. This made music files small enough to stream with little or no rebuffering.

Flash forward, 15 years later, where broadband has become more readily available and because of that, more popular, and you can see that the way is now clear for a shift in technology. Files like FLAC are slowly gaining acceptance and adoption. In fact, Young's Pono Player is capable of playing that file type as well.

The Pono Player sells for $399 and it plays not only 192 kHz/24 bit files, but it can also play AIFF, ALAC, WAV, and of course FLAC files. At this time there is a question as to whether, or when single tracks will be made available, but albums will sell for $15 to $25 dollars. While the cost as listed may be a little higher than Mp3s right now, you've got to believe that at some point, when other companies begin to bring their product to the market place, prices will ultimately become more user friendly.