Say what you will about Neil Young: he’s blunt, he’s mercurial, he doesn’t “realize that there are other people involved in this world,” as Graham Nash puts it in his recent autobiography.
But there’s one adjective you couldn’t imagine applying to him, at least not until he made his session at SXSW for his portable, high-fidelity music system, Pono: pitchman.
As the Toronto Star’s Ben Rayner observed from Austin , Young is on a quest to “bring vinyl-quality sound to a generation of music consumers accustomed to listening to thin MP3 files through laptop speakers and earbuds ‘that look like lozenges’.”
For music lovers — especially music lovers of a certain age — it’s a tantalizing promise: a chance to hear music like it used to sound, before those kids with their MP3s and iPhones and their insistence that music consumption be, above all else, convenient got their hands on it.
But watching the livestream of Young’s extended infomercial, we began to get a sinking feeling, and here’s why.
1. The product is aimed at out-of-home listening. If we want vinyl-quality sound in our living room, we’ll just play records. A decent turntable is relatively inexpensive, and Toronto is blessed with an abundance of used-record shops where you can still (as we did recently) stumble upon an original copy of Young’s Harvest, complete with lyric sheet and grainy cover, for eight bucks. No portable format can beat that.
And we don’t know about you, but our car isn’t equipped with the kind of speakers that can distinguish between 44.1 kHz/16 bit CD quality and 192/24 ultra-high resolution, especially when we’re sitting amid the roar of rush hour traffic on the Gardiner.
2. The players aren’t cheap. Once they hit stores, provisionally this fall, they’ll sell for $399, and that doesn’t include a pair of headphones decent enough to take advantage of the high-fidelity sound.
3. The music won’t be cheap. Albums will be $14.99 to $24.99, according to the FAQ at ponomusic.com. The price for single songs hasn’t been set. Neither, apparently, has the cut Pono will take on music sales. Apple, for instance, gets 30 per cent off the top. At SXSW, that question was met with a response from CEO John Hamm (no, not that one) that was so evasive, even Young conceded he didn’t provide an answer.
And, as a couple of audience members at SXSW noted, a lot of us already own some music on record, cassette, CD and MP3. We don’t want to buy it again.
4. You can already buy the music in the same format and quality that the Pono music store will be selling in October. As the SXSW presentation made explicit, Pono is not a new format. It plays FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) files. Sites with extensive repertoires, such as hdtracks.com, already sell albums and tracks in the high and ultra-high resolution FLAC format. To be fair, Pono is using a unique digital filter; we’ll have to wait til the fall to hear how much better it might sound.
5. Hippie values aside, part of us wishes that Young’s system was aimed more at communal listening. The pitch video focused on listening to Pono in your car, and Young also mentioned headphones, but both of those scenarios feel like an extension of Shuhei Hosokawa’s famous “The Walkman Effect.” In other words, they encourage “self-enclosure.”
If you really long to go back to the way music used to be consumed, you might empathize with Jacques Attali’s words in Noise: The Political Economy of Music. He calls music “a tool for the creation or consolidation of a community . . .” Pono doesn’t really seem like it’s built for that.
Mind you, as a fan who has bought every piece of music Young has released (and some he hasn’t), we’ve learned that his intentions aren’t always plain on first listen. If Pono proves popular enough — and the fact that its Kickstarter campaign raised $2 million in one day is a promising sign — it could spark Apple into making its players, phones and tablets FLAC-compatible.
That would be a win for everybody. And that we do get.
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