Does Neil Young's startup stand any chance?

http://www.originalfuzz.com/blogs/fuzz/12852557-neil-young-launches-doomed-tech-startup-pono

by leemcalilly • 12 years ago

1 1 12 years ago

anigbrowl• 12 years ago

No. Apart from the ridiculous form factor, encoding rates of 96 & 192 KHz are just pointless for final delivery. It makes sense to use those higher bitrates (at least 96khz...192Khz not so much) when mixing so as to avoid aliasing from eq and effect processing, but most people can't even hear the difference between 44.1 and 48khz. Basis: I am a recording and post-production sound engineer and have been at it for almost 20 years. I have been recording digitally that entire time.

It is nice that it does FLAC so you get lossless playback, and I presume it has good d/a converters. But again, most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between lossless and well-chosen mp3 (320kbps and/or VBR), which is very, very good. Also, storage is so cheap these days that if you don't like compression you can just listen to wav files. I don't need every single piece of music I ever own on one device and available at all times - indeed I still play compact discs from time to time - but if I did, I could just use a really large SD card.

I guess it could get by in the market, since everything in the device is basically commodity hardware that can be assembled by machine and there are enough audiophiles out there to break even or make a reasonable profit. But I don't see it having any more than marginal impact on the market, and I say that as someone who makes music, cares a great deal about sound quality, and is up to speed on codecs, psychoacoustics, DSP, and all other related topics.

Does Neil Young's startup stand any chance?

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