Article and photos by Marcus Siu

After a very successful grass roots Kickstarter campaign back in April, musical spokesman and entrepreneur, Neil Young, who on the side, is actually a pretty good musician in his own right, was able to raise the needed $800,000.00 for the survival of his upstart company, Pono.  (Pono means “righteous” “the one”, “pureness” in Hawaiian)  In addition, he also raised a little more than he anticipated, raising over $6 million from enthusiastic supporters, who helped sell out their first batch of PonoPlayers before the holidays, making it unavailable to the public until the first quarter of next year.

“It’s an indicator of the soul of people that is really a grassroots movement to bring back music that you can feel and get inside of”, Young remarked, while giving his keynote address speech at the Ponos launch at this year’s Dreamforce 2014 conference in San Francisco’s Moscone Center.

After the introduction from Salesforce Chairman and CEO, Mark Benioff, Young took the cloudlike stage dressed casually, mainly in black with a grey unbuttoned long sleeve shirt exposing his black “Ponos” T-shirt with its orange logo, not unlike the team colors of the local baseball team.  His introductory lines to the crowd was explaining why “Ponos” was created.

 “We’re trying to bring the feeling back in music.  We are trying to bring the goose bumps back.  We want you to feel the love in the music and feel all of the emotion that the music was made from.   It’s not about bits.  It’s not about putting down one format over another.   It’s about recreating exactly the artist’s vision and the artist’s dream and what they actually accomplished.  So, that was the goal when we started”.

For those not familiar with PonoPlayer, think of it as a dedicated high resolution portable music player that plays high quality FLAC music files (free lossless audio codec files) unlike the ones sold by the “i” product manufacturer. Like their competitor, Ponos also has a downloadable service shop online (PonoMusic) where you can purchase your music, but focuses on high resolution 24-bit 192kHz audio, instead of the popular mp3 format that the “other guys” sell.

“It’s only goal is to explain to your soul what it’s missed, so you can feel the magic in the music”, Young explains.

It took three years of negotiations, but PonoMusic signed with all the major recording companies (Universal, Sony, Warner Bros) and all of the independent distributors. All the files are ingested in their system, and when you listen to them, it will be like you are listening to them direct from the studio, as how the artist and producers envisioned their works in the quality they were made in.  (At the time Young was onstage, they had nearly 617,000 songs ingested.  They have a few million more to go…)

Young compared Pono’s music files vs mp3…

“You get 95% more data in the file than what you’re used to listening to, and the data is representing quiet and the most dynamic parts of the file, where mp3 is smooth and is all at one level so you can hear it, it takes less data to do that, where you just have a desert with no mountains and no valleys…with Pono, the mountains are all the way up to the top, past Everest, into the sky and the valleys are down in the deepest canyons in the ocean.”

Can we hear the difference?  You betcha…

The Pono demonstration booths offered a chance to hear the PonoPlayer through headphones and in a sound booth with speakers. I was able to visit both and was quite impressed with what I heard. I felt that I was listening to the master recording from the recording studio, especially when wearing over the ear headphones.  Hearing the Stones in 24 bit glory in the listening booth made me want to rebuy their entire catalogue.

Suddenly, I felt excited about the concept of buying pre-recorded music again.  I felt that it would be a brand new listening experience for everything that I have ever heard.  I haven’t felt that way since the 20^th century when I used to shop for vinyl every Friday as a ritual for $3.99 at Tower Records when I was still in college.

According to Young, all of the musical artists who heard his PonoPlayer are completely supporting him.

“100% of the artists are behind us…because they are crying in their hearts, because everything they’ve done their entire lives…over decades, from Joni Mitchell to Carole King to countless others are sad that no one can hear what they created. If Frank Sinatra was here today he’d feel the same way with his recordings with the Nelson Riddle Orchestra.” 

“It’s the history of recorded sound which is in jeopardy, not just this week’s new records. It’s about restoring the quality and preserving it for years and years to come…we’ll still be here and our descendants will still be here…they’ll want to know what the big band era was like in the 20’s and 30’s. People in school will want to study the evolution of music.”

“Why should they be listening of Xeroxes of Picassos?  They should be listening and feeling what the music was that moved a generation…it should move several generations in the future.  That is what the mission of Pono is.”

“Technology is supposed to provide a better life…that is why we have technology. Pono is an example of how we can make things better with technology because it brings a feeling, it brings input into your body that has been missing – we haven’t had this input…”

The PonoPlayer is shaped like a triangular Toblerone bar, so it’s easy to place on a flat surface.  It has two headphone jacks which would be perfect for airplane flights with a companion.  It contains 64 gigs of internal memory and ships with a 64 gig micro SD card.  The battery life is about 8 hours. The touchscreen is about 2.5 inches.  It plays mp3’s, as well as the high resolution files.  It retails for $399 and is available in the first quarter next year.

Just like Steve Jobs was a successful pioneer revolutionizing the music industry through technology, taking iPod’s and making music downloadable in an mp3 format, letting consumers carry music libraries in their pockets, legendary rock icon Neil Young, entrepreneur of Pono, will hopefully be able to do build on that and to deliver all of the goods with nothing missing, including what we used to know of as “album art”, that would include pictures, lyrics, credits, and personal notes from the artists.  What a concept…

Nothing would be finer to re-hear a rock classic, such as Neil Young’s classic, “A Heart of Gold” with the artist’s soul attached to the actual listening experience.

After 40 years in the making, Neil Young’s vision is finally becoming a reality…and the future looks bright.