Neil Young raises $1.4m on Kickstarter for music player
Neil Young has taken to Kickstarter to raise money for a new audio “ecosystem” – a portable player and an accompanying store for high-quality recordings – that aims “to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music”. By backing the project to the tune of $300 (£180), patrons can receive one of the early models of the unusual, triangular PonoPlayer. The money will be used to finalise the design and put it into production. The $800,000 fundraising goal was smashed within a day as pledges of $1.4m poured in, with another 34 days yet to run on the campaign.
Each PonoPlayer will download content from the PonoMusic.com Store via a PonoMusic App for Windows or Mac. Although the devices are expected to ship this summer, there is no launch date yet for the online store, but albums are expected to cost between $14.99 and $24.99.
The PonoMusic files – which are based on the FLAC format – can be recorded at data rates of up to 9216kbps, directly from the original studio tapes for each album. This stores up to 30 times more data than a typical MP3 file and is said to give far higher quality playback by artists such as Sting, Tom Petty, Jack White, Arcade Fire and Flea from the Red Hot Hilli Peppers, who all appear in a promotional video on the Kickstarter page.
Each player will have 64GB of built-in memory and a removable 64GB microSD card and come with two outputs: the first is a normal headphone plug and the second is an analogue output designed for connecting to HiFi equipment.
There are just three physical buttons on the device and the bulk of the controls will be accessed via the touchscreen. The battery is expected to provide around eight hours of playback.
“Pono is about the music, it’s about the people who make the music, and the way it sounds to us when we’re in the studio making it,” Young explains in the Pono trailer. “It’s about you hearing what we hear, and that hasn’t happened in a long time.”
People can back the project from as little as $5, for which they will be thanked by name on the project’s website.
Source: The Telegraph
