We’ve been all over Neil Young’s Pono music initiative because:
A) It’s a bold gambit to reinvent digital music as something that sounds better, and
B) It’s from Neil Young, who is famous enough to talk about it on The Daily Show and Late Night with David Letterman in a way that other technology entrepreneurs are not.
Since the dawn of the digital age, some audiophiles have maintained that new formats from the CD to the MP3 and beyond have degraded sound quality. Ever since we left vinyl, music has sounded like crap, they say. Some of the down-with-digital crew say we need to do away with audio compression and go beyond “CD quality,” increasing the sampling rate of the music we listen to from 44,100 times per second (44.1 kHz) to 192,000 times per second (192 kHz) — while also boosting its bit depth from 16-bit to 24-bit. I myself proposed a similar idea five years ago.
