Neil Young’s Kickstarter for a new music service and player, called Pono, has passed its initial funding goal 29 days ahead of its deadline.
Young had targeted $800,000 for the player’s funding goal but at the time for writing the portable music player is sitting at $3.9 million.
Unveiled at last week’s SXSW, Young outlined his vision for a new portable music player, and download service, that plays music at a much higher quality than an iPod.
“It’s about the music, real music. We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does that. We couldn’t be more excited – not for ourselves, but for those that are moved by what music means in their lives,” said Neil Young, founder and chairman of PonoMusic.
The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built, portable, high-resolution digital-music player designed for music fans to experience studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible.
The Pono player features a LCD touchscreen interface whilst the audio technology in the PonoPlayer was developed in conjunction with the engineering team at Ayre, in Boulder Colorado, a leader in digital audio technology.
The PonoPlayer has 128GB of memory and can store from about 100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums, depending on the resolution and length of the original recording. The player’s storage is split between onboard memory and micro-SD cards.
The PonoPlayer will be sold at PonoMusic.com for $399 MSRP and is available for pre-order at a discount on Kickstarter.com as of March 12th.
PonoMusic files are expected to have about 6 times more musical information than a typical mp3. With ultra-high quality resolution recordings (24 bit/192kHz), the difference between a PonoMusic digital file and an mp3 is about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the “song”.
While they have yet to announce a launch-date for their online store, Pono Players are expected to begin production in late summer 2014.
PONO Kickstarter from pono on Vimeo.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1003614822/ponomusic-where-your-soul-rediscovers-music