Published by Leonardo Calcagno
Last year, Neil Young launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a new digital music player called Pono, the idea being that it would serve as a high-quality alternative to the MP3s that he felt had degraded sound quality and fucked up the way everyone heard music. Young raised more than six million dollars on the campaign, exceeding his goal many times over. And now you can buy a Pono player for a cool $400, and you can pay somewhere in the neighborhood of $20 for a whole lot of classic-rock albums at the Pono store. But does Pono actually offer an audible upgrade over what the way-less-expensive iTunes store offers? A lot of tech people seem very, very skeptical. Continues at stereogum.com