Goodbye Ipods. Hello Pono: Kickstarter Campaign Completes In Under 24 Hours

13 March 2014

The Kickstarter campaign to launch Neil Young’s Pono music player has completed in less than 24 hours attracting over $1 million from backers worldwide - some pledging up to $5000 each to get their hands on the high quality player plus bundles of extras - including, at the very top end, a listening pary and ‘VIP' dinner with Neil Young himself.

Most of the pledges will result in a purchase of the first edition Pono Player, a prism-shaped device that plays top-quality FLAC music files. The standard 128Gb players cost $300 each via Kickstarter, a saving of $99 from the expected retail price.

For $400 you can also purchase one of the ‘artist signature series’ models, which come with laser-engraved signatures from artists including Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, Patti Smith, Arcade Fire, Beck, Dave Mathews Band, Herbie Hancock and Norah Jones.

The device connects to the Pono Music App and Pono Music store, where you can buy and download music. The tracks will be CD quality at minimum, while certain music will have an “ultra-high resolution” of 9216 kbps.

“Generally speaking, mp3 files have a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps. These are highly compressed files and are much smaller in size than higher resolution music files. The good news is that you can keep a lot of mp3 files in a small amount of storage on a portable player or mobile device. The bad news is that they’ve lost a lot of the musical information that often reveals the most pleasant and satisfying aspects of the music. It is mostly that sense of realism, dynamic range, and detail that higher resolution recordings typically capture in a way that restores the emotion in the song. PonoMusic files have about 6 times more musical information than a typical mp3. With ultra-high resolution recordings (192kHz/24 bit), the difference between a PonoMusic digital file and an mp3 is about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the song.”

There’s no launch date for the online store yet, but Pono Players are expected to begin production for in late summer 2014 - and we for one, will be throwing away our IPods once they're out.

Have a peep at the Kickstarter video below. You'll see where we're coming from...

Pono's Kickstarter campaign is still going for another 33 days. That means you're still in with a chance to get a discounted device on its launch. Head here for more info:

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