Apple, Sony, and Pono, a music player project spearheaded by Neil Young, are planning to release new products that play music in high-end formats that will likely command premium prices. Pono was finally released on Monday.
The prism-shaped device can play music in higher resolutions than iPhones or Android phones. It might seem weird that some people want a portable standalone music player when they can just listen to music on their smartphones but Pono managed to raise over $6 million on crowdfunding site Kickstarter.
Pono claims to make music sound better through the use of high-resolution audio. The Pono music store sells digital audio that has a higher bitrate than music sold through iTunes, meaning that the music technically sounds clearer, without compression or limits on the high-ends. The bitrate is the number of bits per second, or the density of the encoded information in the music file. The more dense the file, the richer the sound.
So is this an actual player too, like an iPod? Since my iPod classic is broken I may need to invest in something like this if they have a version with as much storage as it had.
A blind study revealed that listeners couldn't identify when they were hearing a normal track and when they were hearing a larger high-resolution file.
The only people I can see interested in this are people like my uncle who invested $500k into building a room just for perfect sound and music listening.
