Did you ask Neil Young?
www.ponomusic.com

Yeah,Ive heard of it,but haven't heard it.
Supposedly Neil Young wasn't happy with the digital quality and set out to make change. Good for him.

I got the impression that it is a solution looking for a problem.

The buying public will usually buy what the marketeers steer them towards, but the yoof seem to be quite happy with their mp3 at the moment, being into the music and not the kit. High res alternatives are already, and have always, been available, but the yoof follow the price.

For myself I have run tests on studio masters at different resolutions and although I thought I could initially tell the difference between 96k and 192k I now believe it was psychacoustics at work. I don't think I can tell the difference, but then my ears are old and possibly not in the best state to make these observations.

More resolution is obviously the future as the tech improves and storage gets cheaper and bigger, but I get the distinct feeling that the PR around pono is just hype.

There is always the FiiO X5, which is the same bit of kit, but on the market already.

we shall see.

I can't see it succeeding but you never know.

The market has got to be shrinking and when this generation of hi-fi nutters finally runs out, people will probably wonder what all the fuss was about. As MOST people fail to reliably pick up decent rate MP3 from lossless, I can't see there will be enough takers to keep this going. Starting from scratch to take on the likes of iTunes is a big ask.

Having said that, he got his crowd source investment very quickly so who knows. The player is pig ugly though, looks like a big Toblerone bar.

Neil Young has given up with Pono but he is launching a streaming service that has adaptable resolution that delivers the best quality that your connection can deliver at any given moment.
The price is fixed, regardless of the quality you actually receive.


"For more than eight months, I've been working with our small team to look for alternatives. Finding a way to deliver the quality music without the expense and to bring it to a larger audience has been our goal," Young said.

"Xstream plays at the highest quality your network condition allows at that moment and adapts as the network conditions change. It's a single high-resolution bit-perfect file that essentially compresses as needed to never stop playing."

Young added that "every recording I have ever released will soon be available in Xstream high-resolution quality at my complete online archive."

What Young realized from his Pono experience is that "good sounding music is not a premium," he said.

"All songs should cost the same, regardless of digital resolution. Let the people decide what they want to listen to without charging them more for true quality. That way quality is not an elitist thing. If high-resolution costs more, listeners will just choose the cheaper option and never hear the quality."

While this adaptive streaming service has proven "a difficult sell" for investors so far, Young said he's still committed to this particular labour of love.

www.cbc.ca/beta/news/entertainment/pono-neil-young-streaming-1.4079358

That sounds like a competitor to MQA. If he's not careful, he'll have another failure on his hands.

Why is he so set on yet another system rather than agreeing a deal with, say, Spotify?

I personally think Spotify is pretty good quality, yes it is not quite as good as when you import the music yourself into FLAC or whatever, but unless you compared the two, I doubt you'd notice.