Giving the MP3 a bit more quality

Getting your hands on music is easy these days, very easy in fact. iTunes, Spotify, TuneIn and a host of other online services will feed your addiction instantly. Although convenient and cheap to get your hands on the quality of the reproduction isn´t the greatest. Instead have you ever wished you could hear digital music the way the artist recorded it in the studio, without the degradation of MP3 compression? So has Neil Young (yes that Neil Young).
 
For the last several years, Neil and a team have been working on trying to enhance the quality of MP3s, which inherently lose sound quality during the compression stage. Young announced on PONO's Facebook page a few days ago that the technology will be available early in 2014. The company will live as an online music store with software that coverts digital audio files into analog-quality recordings. The enhanced songs can then be played using a triangle-shaped device. Meridian Audio known for producing high-performance speakers and home entertainment systems, , will manufacture the PONO music player.

So will people who are accustomed to listening to music on their iPods and smartphones care enough about sound quality to make the switch? Young argues, and I would agree, that the experience is worth it.


"Hearing PONO for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theater on a sun-filled day. It takes you a second to adjust," he said. "Then you enter a bright reality, of wonderfully rendered detail. This music moves you. So you can feel. That's why so many musicians are behind PonoMusic - this is important work that honors their art. This is the way they wanted you to hear their music."

PONO does this by getting permission from artists to use their studio masters then, with the help of Meridian Audio, "unlock[s] the richness of the artist's music to you."

The bigger plan is to make PONO-quality music as readily available as any other digital music by having an online library where people can purchased the enhanced songs.

I for one welcome the improvement in quality of the humble MP3