Neil Young CEO-splains to buyers why his digital music player failed

Hey, remember PonoPlayer? If you paid US$399 for one of Neil Young’s digital music devices, you don’t have to remember it: it’s probably sitting on a shelf in your living room, reminding you of the concept of “more money than sense.” Young wheeled out the PonoPlayer on the Letterman show in 2012, took US$6-million worth of preorders in a Kickstarter. com campaign, and started the Pono Music website in 2015. By July 2016 the website was “temporarily” suspended pending a buyout of the provider. The official end was announced the following spring. What a ride!

We are all pretty familiar by now with Kickstarters that don’t work out well, but ordinarily they involve teenagers raising money for board games about transgender vampire unicorns. Pono Music, to its credit, delivered a portable music device that works — although you can forget about any kind of ongoing technical support, and you risk being snickered at if you are seen using it in public.

Neil has moved on, and tells us so in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times. He is fronting for a high-definition musicstreaming site now, and is making a catalogue of his own archival recordings available. This has to be exciting if you admire Neil Young strictly as a musical creator, rather than a technical visionary.

Young’s new project is predicated on the same irascible/heartbroken spiel that he used to sell the Pono Thingy: digital music, as normally consumed, is a crime against humanity. “The thing is, I want the sound of music to come back — and it’s gone,” sobs the model-train enthusiast. “CDs have less than 20 per cent of the quality that music could be, and MP3s in most cases have only about five per cent of what’s on the master recording.”

The Pono website made classic records available in the mathematically “lossless” FLAC audio format: in that regard, Young was never reinventing any wheels. Other audio formats like MP3 compress the information from a record album into a smaller sequence of bits, and throw some of it out on the premise that it exists at undetectable frequencies.

Audiophiles like Young — maybe I should say “audiophiles and the people who exploit their infamously bottomless gullibility” — would have you believe that MP3s were invented by tineared pseudo-engineers who have never been near a recording studio or even a decent home stereo. The problem is that properly blinded listening tests always confirm that lossy digital formats are fine, if the bitrate is at all realistic. You can’t tell the difference, or at least nobody can show a scientifically verifiable ability to tell. This, naturally, proved true of the Pono when it was blind-tested.

Most of us don’t listen to records, anyway, in a customized lounge with acoustic baffling on the walls: we accept that there might be a price for portability and convenience and not having a NASA-level budget for audio hardware. There is certainly a contrary price to be paid for alleged sonic perfection: the Pono claimed to have enough digital memory for “100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums.” For a serious music collector, that’s not going to cover one letter of the alphabet. (And, believe me: that collector has definitely got those records alphabetized.)

I have always found it a little remarkable that Neil Young, who is renowned for not being quite able to sing in tune, can muster so much passion on the subject of sonic fidelity. If the PonoPlayer were a serious music device, the most natural application would seem to have been classical symphonic music, as opposed to, say, capturing every crystalline nuance of a solo played on a $20 harmonica while also strumming a guitar.

But on looking back over the short history of Pono, I notice that Young seems to have been careful not to mention vinyl. I hate to shock the kiddies, but mass-produced plastic discs scraped with a physical needle are the traditional means by which listeners were initially exposed to the glories of Zuma or Long May You Run.

There is irony here. Young, converted to the cause of digital streaming, now says that “the record labels killed” his pet project “by insisting on charging two to three times as much for the hi-res files as for MP3s ... It’s my feeling that all music should cost the same.”

Never mind that the real argument seems to be “all music should cost the same, but you’ll have to buy it over and over again.” Never mind that any economist would line up behind PonoPlayer buyers to give him a clip on the ear for “All music should cost the same.” Forget, even, that record-label participation was a major explicit selling point of Pono Music (N. Young, CEO).

My question is this: has Young forgotten vinyl records exist at all? High-priced archive-quality vinyl is selling like inedible black hot cakes just now, and those buyers are mostly the same people who, like Young, think MP3s represent the descent of mankind from Eden.

Of course, you can’t listen to vinyl LPs on the bus very easily. But what is the right way to consume Neil Young recordings, after all? Is it just whatever method he happens to be selling this month?

I WANT THE SOUND OF MUSIC TO COME BACK — AND IT’S GONE.