Veteran Canadian singer-songwriter Neil Young has announced the Kickstarter launch of his high definition digital music device the PonoPlayer. The PonoPlayer is a triangular, 128GB portable device that plays back lossless audio, and comes with a coloured LCD touchscreen. The company, which is headed by veteran Canadian singer/songwriter Neil Young, claims that the PonoPlayer can store and playback “100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums,” and extra memory cards can be used for extra storage.
“It’s about the music, real music. We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does that. We couldn’t be more excited – not for ourselves, but for those that are moved by what music means in their lives,” Young says.
What do we think? Well, unless PonoMusic has some incredibly advanced technology that allows lossless audio to be encoded in very small sizes, you’d be hard pressed to put 500 albums in a 128 gigabyte device. And personally, memory cards remind me of primitive MP3 players in the 90s, and I feel like it has no place in today’s SSD/post-memory card world of technology that Apple has wrought over the, oh, last decade or so, but that’s just me 😉 Either way, everyone seems to be curious as to how this will turn out. We’ll keep you posted!
Do you think lossless digital audio is the wave of the future for portable music listening? Does anyone still need a separate music playback device when it’s possible to listen to music on pretty much any phone? Let us know what you think in the comments below!
Joey Santos
