On Wednesday, March 12th, Neil Young’s Pono music player had raised an unbelievable $2 million. This impressive amount has now been doubled.
As of Tuesday, March 18th, 12:30 PM PST, Pono has raised $4,152,376 on Kickstarter.
An insane amount of money, indeed, though the PonoPlayer continues to polarize music fans everywhere. On the one hand, listening to audio that doesn’t sound like crap would be great. On the other hand, do you want to an audio player that looks like a $400 Toblerone bar?
This is a good benchmark to understand. It appears there are a lot of people who have extra cash they can piss away.
Considering the future was supposed to be paperless, let’s welcome the world’s first digital paperweight.
Srsly? That’s your ENTIRE article?
A 2nd affordable, hi-res portable hits the market, but it doesn’t look like an ipod???
It’s actually just a quick update. We’ve been covering this from the start, through several articles (on funding, idea, commentary, etc.)
Hi Paul,
how do you access older articles that are not on the front page anymore?
Cheers
Depends how far back you need. We’re actually in the middle of a massive archiving project right now, so a lot of the stories earlier than 2012 are offline at the moment as we re-format and transfer them to a different platform.
Which are you looking for?
That things looks really painful to carry in your pocket.
HMMMM
Despite Pono’s promise, experts pan HD audio – http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57620489-93/sound-bite-despite-ponos-promise-experts-pan-hd-audio/
Those experts are full of sh…. when they say “there is no advantage going over CD quality” which is 16 bits.
there is a big advantage going to 24bits, even at 44.1.
Why? because it sounds better, and because noone produces at 16 bits anymore, except beginners or hobbyist (and even there, that’s a minority of them who use old gear that simply don’t support 24 bits).
they focuss on nyquist, but that’s about sampling..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nyquist%E2%80%93Shannon_sampling_theorem
http://web.archive.org/web/20060614125302/http://www.lavryengineering.com/documents/Sampling_Theory.pdf
ignoring bits makes those experts really shallow.
Crazy how people are reacting to this thing. It’s just the iPod II – Professional that Apple never bothered to make, and I already bought one. Amazing!
Pono is WAY overdue. People claiming that no one can hear or care about what digital tech has been doing to our music for the past 30 years are deaf themselves. MP3’s are “good enough” for streaming or putting a million songs on your phone, but they still sound like ass. Always have, always will. CD’s are better but still a major compromise and we’ve been suffering under that ‘standard’ for 37 years now.
BTW – Monty the ‘expert’ and anyone associated with compression algorithms are definitely NOT EXPERTS at audio. They are programmers and they are fighting their ears all day and all night.
Audio is analog. Digital is always a lesser reconstruction, no matter how high the definition. I personally have been working at 24/48 for a couple of years, and I buy great albums at 24/192 or LP these days. No more mp3’s (unless streaming) for me anymore.
I know C-Net is about computers, but if you want experts talk to musicians and record engineers. Every one of them moved past 16/44 over a decade ago. It’s just the consumer (led be false scientists) being told that 16/44 is all they will ever need.