Neil Young’s Pono music player promises to play ultra high quality files and sound much better than lower quality mp3 files and digital streaming, and has received an overwhelming amount of support from the online community. Pono initially raised $500,000 back in 2012 to design prototypes and build infrastructure. Now, the music player has received $6.22 million in a Kickstarter campaign, the third highest figure ever raised on the site after the Pebble smartwatch ($10.3 million) and the Ouya game console ($8.6 million).
Neil Young thanked supporters with a special message. “On behalf of Pono, we thank you for helping us give music a voice. You have helped to set the stage for a revolution in music listening. Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it.”
Pono, which means “righteous” in Hawaiian, is a prism-shaped player that contains fully lossless tracks – large, uncompressed files that replicate the original master of the song. “Go back to your digital masters and see what they sounded like compared to what was released. Now, if you want to, they can all be released in their original glory… This is an opportunity to rescue the art of recorded sound… This music is world cultural history. All of this cultural history should be preserved for enjoyment of the people in its highest possible form forever.”