
Ten years ago Neil Young tried to get people to care about music quality with Pono. Most digital music/streaming isn’t the highest fidelity, Pono aimed to use high resolution audio without compression. The project lasted less than two years, what happened?
Nate Rogers has a nice retrospective on the device on Stereogum:
The question of whether audio quality technically went down in the digital age isn’t really up for debate. In order to fit thousands of songs onto an iPod in the 2000s or create music that could be streamed seamlessly on Spotify in the early 2010s, files had to be compressed. Information in those files would be lost — and that was the basis of Young’s entire argument. While every other type of entertainment technology seems to be getting digitally bolstered — movie files larger and TVs crisper, for example — music is frequently being digitally stripped apart. (By comparison, a CD’s bitrate is 1,411 kilobits per second versus Spotify’s “normal” level of 96 kbps.) The real question, however, is if anyone can tell the difference — or if there’s any way to prove the superiority of one music file versus the next.
See what The Verge thought of Pono when it first released:
Hands-on with Neil Young’s Pono music player
We also posted about it back then with: Bridging the Gap #makerbusiness
Bend all audio files to your will with the Adafruit Music Maker shield for Arduino! This powerful shield features the VS1053, an encoding/decoding (codec) chip that can decode a wide variety of audio formats such as MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, WMA, MIDI, FLAC, WAV (PCM and ADPCM). It can also be used to record audio in both PCM (WAV) and compressed Ogg Vorbis. You can do all sorts of stuff with the audio as well such as adjusting bass, treble, and volume digitally.