Neil Young as you’ve never heard him

Critics of Neil Young’s Pono player are missing the point. The old rocker is taking us back to a time before CD when music actually sounded good.

This column has never before dealt with any gadgets made by Neil Young. I speak with a reasonable degree of confidence here: the hirsute Sixties rocker has never dabbled in technology in his half-century-plus career, never mind creating a portable audio player that has quietly built up as much hype as anything since the iPod.

There are two obvious stumbling blocks for Young’s Pono player, which he financed by raising $6million on crowdfunding site KickStarter. First, it’s impossible to say the word Pono without people thinking you’re talking about racy films. Second, it looks like a Toblerone.

But Young hopes the player, which promises better sound quality than most current digital portables, will herald a new era where people actually sit down and listen to music (his music, preferably), rather than snacking on the go.

Pono plays ‘hi-res audio’, or HD audio, digital files recorded at the same or higher resolution than CD. It pairs with an online store where you can buy the stuff, although it’ll play most HD files without complaint. Testing it with (of course) Neil Young’s Old

Man, you definitely can sense the magic dust of HD audio. It’s got a certain sparkle, and a sense of space. The triangular player is built to sit on a surface, and the sound, likewise, rewards listeners who bother to sit down and enjoy it rather than half-listen on the bus. Crucially, it’s priced at a competitive €405: most players that can play HD files cost over €1,000.

Young himself would be the first to admit this is a niche product. It doesn’t even try to compete with smartphones. There are no modern fripperies such as apps, email or Angry Birds. It just plays music. And forget earbuds, you’ll need big headphones, or a proper hi-fi to get the idea. It might be futuristic, but this is a player for old stick-in-the-muds, created by an old stick-in-the-mud. And for that alone, it deserves our applause.

Many tech sites have gleefully stuck the boot into Pono. But they are missing the point. HD audio really is the future. In a century where CDs are increasingly irrelevant, it’s insane to have a ‘cap’ on music quality. Pono’s aimed at an audience born at a time where music came on vinyl, and sounded excellent, who have listened to it descend into the digital mire over the past two decades.

Pono’s not perfect, but it’s the sound of hi-fi starting to dig its way out.