Last week, Neil Young introduced his ‘PonoMusic” Kickstarter project which promises to deliver uncompressed music downloads up to 24 bit/192kHz.
“Much of the press and user commentary was particularly enthusiastic about the prospect of uncompressed 24 bit 192kHz downloads. 24/192 featured prominently in my own conversations with Mr. Young’s group several months ago,” Chris “Monty” Montgomery, the creator of the Ogg Free Software container format and Vorbis audio codec and others, writes for Xiph.org. “Unfortunately, there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space. There are a few real problems with the audio quality and ‘experience’ of digitally distributed music today. 24/192 solves none of them. While everyone fixates on 24/192 as a magic bullet, we’re not going to see any actual improvement.”
“Why push back against 24/192? Because it’s a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist, a business model based on willful ignorance and scamming people,” Monty writes. “The more that pseudoscience goes unchecked in the world at large, the harder it is for truth to overcome truthiness… even if this is a small and relatively insignificant example.”
Much more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: To date, Neil Young has raised $3,755,213 via Kickstarter for a project that is rather pointless and, contrary to its stated raison d’être, actually delivers slightly inferior sound!
Young should immediately cancel his PonoMusic boondoggle and return the over $3 million already raised to project backers.
Related article:
Neil Young unveils new music media ‘ecosystem,’ PonoMusic – March 12, 2014
The only reason NY’s 192k suck is because your Apple iPODs can NOT do any better than 44.1k/48k, and that’s it.
And when/IF Apple ever changes/upgrades, then your new “article” will be “omg 96k/192k Rocks”
Actually, your beloved iPADs are going to go 192k eventually.
Lol- You mac-fanboys are so predictable, you’re almost foolish.
Mastering is more important than how it is released, but having said that, for the same release, a 24 bit format will have the advantage every day. Summary: I’d rather have a well mastered CD than a badly mastered brick walled 24/192, but we CAN have both. I’m still not sure personally when DSD is better but if the original recording was mastered in the PCM digital domain, it just makes sense to me that it should stay that way and be released at the same format (bit depth/sampling freq) as the master, i.e. *the* master… If an analog recording is being reissued I think the SACDs I’ve heard are superior, when they use the same master but there are few examples where both were issued at the same time (e.g. Tommy was on SACD and DVD audio, but to prove the mastering point, the Japanese SHM SACD is the best)
5G is all Neil Youngs Pono needs