Neil Young may be an old man, but take a look at his life and you’ll see he’s a devoted audiophile. He’s supported several high-end audio formats over the years, including DVD Audio and Blu Ray Audio. His latest venture is the Pono music player, a dedicated audio player for an extremely high quality audio format.
First shown on Letterman last year, the Pono player is based on high-end technology developed by Meridian. It’s got a strange Toblerone form factor but otherwise not much is known about it yet.
Neil Young announced the launch of the Pono and the high quality digital music store with a post on the PONO Facebook page. Thanks’s Neil, and long may you run.
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
[Via: PONO Facebook]