According to musician Neil Young, the concept of an mp3 player is not dead, especially if it offers amazing sound quality. Even in the face of music streaming services like Spotify, Rdio, and Pandora Radio, Young believes there is still a market for a portable music player that is not your mobile device. Even though the mp3 quality that iTunes sells has increased to 256kpbs downloads in the past few years, the audio quality is still of a compressed and sub-par nature where music connoisseurs cannot enjoy the music to the fullest extent.
Young first announced his plan for a musical PonoPlayer in 2012, and at present, he is re-starting his campaign on Kickstarter with the end goal set at $800,000. He hopes that crowdfunding will execute his dream of manufacturing a triangular music player that streams high-quality audio. This streaming player uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) that can play up to 9.216 kbps or 192 kHz/24-bit recordings. These numbers far surpass the known limits of what the human ear can possibly hear, approximately 20 kHz. But with the sampling rate that humans can acquire, according to physics, we need to double the maximum frequency. This is why the average CD contains 44.1 kHz for most consumer audio formats.
The PonoPlayer has a downloadable app where users can access the PonoMusic.com store to purchase high-quality music with a strong resemblance to the iTunes store. Users then sync their music via the provided USB cable. The onboard LCD touchscreen enables users to scan through their music collections and create playlists. There is a mini-stereo output made for headphones, and a mini-plug analog output to share the music via speakers, home audio systems, and through Sonos speakers. There will also be a Bluetooth connection to communicate with users’ phone to play songs as well.
It’s all well and good that there is a device in the making that will provide us with top notch audio, but isn’t the concept of a portable music device a little bit passé? With 29 days left in the Kickstarter campaign, PonoMusic has absolutely exceeded its goal, raising $3,944,019 so far. With this hefty funding, perhaps ordinary music listeners will be converted into audiophile-ism, and will actually prefer this technology more than listening to music on their phones.
Backers on Kickstarter will receive a PonoPlayer when they donate $200. Once manufactured and on the shelves of stores, the PonoPlayer will be set to retail at $400 by this October.
Story via Kickstarter
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