Rockin’ in the HD world: Explaining Neil Young’s shockingly successful PonoPlayer

If you had told us a year ago that a glorified iPod would be the toast of the tech world in 2014, we'd have to stifle our chuckles of disbelief. As much as we love the fidelity of HD audio, getting the masses to embrace a clunkier form of music in the age of Spotify just wouldn't have seemed realistic.

Yet that's exactly what Neil Young has done with his $399 Pono Music player, which blew past its ambitious $800,000 Kickstarter fundraising goal, acquiring over $2.5 million in pledges in about 60 hours.

In the days that followed, HD audio has gone from a backwater obscurity among audio gurus to front-page news, inviting both praise and criticism, inciting debate, and generating lot of misinformation about HD audio. Is Neil Young an audiophile messiah or just a shrewd marketer? Is HD audio worth the expense? Can you hear the difference? Throw on some vinyl and grab a glass of Scotch, we're here to get you up to speed on the audio trend you never expected.

What's the point of Pono?

Neil Young started with all this Pono stuff almost three years ago, but the topic got a big boost of awareness when he appeared on CBS' David Letterman Show, where he showed off a prototype of the player and explained what he was trying to do. In a nutshell, Neil Young aims to turn digital music around by getting music lovers and listeners closer to the quality of music as it was created by the artist. He points out that even the CD is a dumbed-down version of the original master recordings, devoid of its dynamics and detail, never mind an MP3, which can have as little as 5 percent of the original information.
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