Joe more and more mp3
This is just another point on the convenience curve.” “The laws of physics that kept us from quality in the early 2000s–bandwidth, capacity, memory, storage–we’ve solved those problems in the last 15 years. “Things ebb and flow between convenience and quality,” says Pono CEO John Hamm, wielding a yellow prototype of the $400 device. What Young and his team hope to do is take high-res audio up a notch and then market it to a crowd beyond the audio codec nerds. For audiophiles, lossless high-quality formats have long scratched the itch MP3s couldn’t. Still, today’s popular formats are clearly sufficient enough for the millions of music fans who purchase songs from iTunes and stream from services like Spotify. While the sound quality status quo has come a long way since the days of Napster, Young and purists like him are far from satisfied. The AAC compression standard, considered an improvement over MP3s, is still just that–a compressed audio file. At 320kbps, the highest quality tracks available through Spotify are still only 22% of the resolution of a compact disc. For an album to be easily transferred over broadband and cellular networks, it needs to be crunched down to a manageable file size, inevitably losing some detail. This is certainly true, technically speaking. In his much-publicized view, the convenience of digital music has come at the expense of sound quality. This is a drum Young has been beating for quite some time. You’ve now purchased the right to recognize the song.
“And it was probably recorded at a much higher resolution that what you got.
“With MP3s, you have less than 5% of the data that could be in that song if it was recorded at a higher resolution,” says Young. For the rock legend turned startup founder, this week’s announcement marks the culmination of years of planning and building–turning an impassioned gripe into an actual company with a business plan and a physical product.