WE’RE HIGH DEAF
Do consumers really care about digital quality?
If you’re skeptical about Neil Young’s pricey new music downloading service, you’ve got company — inside Young’s company, even.
Some product engineers for the shaggy rock icon’s newly released Pono player have privately admitted they aren’t convinced that the highresolution audio files it plays have any significant technical advantage over CD quality files, sources told The Post.
Instead, Pono Music execs have decided to hawk socalled “hires” files as a marketing strategy, betting that specification obsessed audiophiles would pay up for the higher advertised digital sampling rates, tech insiders said.
Indeed, some experts have likened hires audio files to the new generation of “4K” highdefinition TVs, whose staggering pixel counts go beyond what most viewers can even discern.
Though companies keep pushing better quality video and sound for televisions and gadgets, critics say we’ve reach the point of diminishing returns — and that consumers can’t really tell the difference.
With Pono, “It has been clear throughout that Neil Young himself is all about the ‘hires,’ ” one source close to the situation said. “There’s no doubt in his mind that it sounds better.”
But some of Pono’s more techsavvy designers say advertising files with more musical data than what’s available on a CD is mostly “a business decision,” the source said.
“Their take is that the serious audiophile has convinced himself he has to have it,” the source added. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t necessarily believe it, but nobody’s going to buy it ifwe don’t do it.’ ”
Like the $300 bottle of wine with dinner, to some it’s more about price than taste.
Neither Young nor Pono responded to requests for comment.
Young is a rare crusader for audiophiles, who have felt jilted by an industry that’s increasingly focused on what’s cheap and convenient, packing lowquality mp3s onto smartphones.
But Young’s insistence on hires digital music files has divided audio experts. While most agree that lowquality mp3s sound worse than CD quality files, there’s fierce debate about the advantages of files beyond CD quality.
Hires files, which can occupy as much as six times the space on a hard drive as a CD quality file, are expensive. Lastweek, a top seller on the Pono Music site was a hires version of Young’s 1972 album “Harvest,” listed at $21.79.
“I think what Neil is trying to do is a noble and good thing that will benefit people,” says Monty Montgomery, director of Xiph.org, a nonprofit group for freelance audio and video engineers. “I just object to where science is being misrepresented.”
Montgomery admits that some hires files do sound better than CD quality files, but cites the superior mastering used to produce them rather than the added data. He says he took it up in fall 2011 with Pono execs, who asked about a possible demonstration to prove his point.
“I said, ‘Yes, I would be happy to demonstrate this to Neil himself,’ ” Montgomery said. “They said, ‘That sounds great and we’ll get back to you,’ and they never did.”