No Multichannel Downloads from Neil Young?

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bmoura

bmoura

2K Club - QQ Super Nova
Since 2002/2003
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Hmm, sounds like we won't be getting any more Multichannel music from Neil Young and his Pono store.

"On Blu-ray, a format on which he released the giant Neil Young Archives compilation: "Super-clunky, but it sounds good."

On early attempts to couple the marketing of high-res audio with 5.1-channel audio on SACD and DVD-Audio: "Surround in the home — what a disaster." (Young feels going higher-res in stereo would have been a better move than going multichannel.)"
Click to expand...
http://www.soundandvision.com/content/neil-young-delivers-pono-news-and-witticisms
 
Well since the Pono player can't do 5.1 then I doubt we'll ever see 5.1 on his site. In general, 5.1 downloads will be few and far between except for probably a good amount of content from the Classical genre.
 
mdmost said:
Well since the Pono player can't do 5.1 then I doubt we'll ever see 5.1 on his site. In general, 5.1 downloads will be few and far between except for probably a good amount of content from the Classical genre.
Click to expand...

Maybe not from Neil Young. But we already have almost 700 Multichannel DSD Downloads and over 800 Multichannel FLAC Downloads. A fine start.
 
It is, but it's depressing that a guy as vocal about sound quality as NY can't find a way to get more MC titles of his work out there. The audience is built-in, natch....

ED :)
 
Ed Bishop said:
It is, but it's depressing that a guy as vocal about sound quality as NY can't find a way to get more MC titles of his work out there. The audience is built-in, natch....

ED :)
Click to expand...

He's always marched to a different beat.
 
No one is a bigger fan than I am of NY, but at this point, I'm not with him on this stuff anymore.

First he was all-in on DVD-A, saying it was the only way he'd release his music going forward. Released those 4 stereo titles he withheld from CD as DVD-A, along with "Road Rock", "Harvest" and "Greendale" in 5.1. Then he suddenly jumped off the DVD-A bandwagon and decided to release albums in "Super Saturated Stereo" on DVD-V discs bundled with CDs.

Then he flipped over to BluRay for his $300 Archives collection, stating that this was the future of music and how all of his future Archives would be released.

Now he is calling BluRay "clunky" and is all in on a proprietary player that will primarily be playing up-sampled CD masters along with a moderate amount of real higher-than-CD resolution sourced material.

IMHO, the Pono will join the Microsoft Zune as a relic of music history. As a historic early adopter of all things audio, this is probably the first thing of this sort that did not jump on. (Actually I never did DCC or El-Cassette either, now that I think about it)

Time will tell if I'm wrong, but to those people who think they will be filling these players with HiRez music only to find it's just CD masters upsampled on a PC, I think I will feel bad for you.

Your results, of course, may vary.
 
JonUrban said:
Now he is calling BluRay "clunky" and is all in on a proprietary player that will primarily be playing up-sampled CD masters along with a moderate amount of real higher-than-CD resolution sourced material.
Click to expand...

What is proprietary about his player?

The Pono Music store sells flac files with no DRM.
The Pono player plays everything from MP3 to FLAC to Apple Lossless, with DSD on the way.

Nothing proprietary in that ecosystem.

His problem with 5.1 was that women make the furniture decisions and no women want 6 boxes around the room. Maybe he could never do it, but a few of us have convinced our spouses that that can work!
 
Cheezmo said:
What is proprietary about his player?

The Pono Music store sells flac files with no DRM.
The Pono player plays everything from MP3 to FLAC to Apple Lossless, with DSD on the way.

Nothing proprietary in that ecosystem.

His problem with 5.1 was that women make the furniture decisions and no women want 6 boxes around the room. Maybe he could never do it, but a few of us have convinced our spouses that that can work!
Click to expand...

I guess my problem is not so much with the player but the fact that most of the Pono store is music at 44.1/16, plus he abandoned DVD-A for DVD-V, then jumped on BluRay and then abandoned that. Hey, Neil marches to his own tune, and that's fine. I stayed with him through "Old Ways", "Trans", "Everybody's Rockin'", and most everything before and after that. His last album was pretty weak, and this whole PONO thing is something that may get blown out of the water if Apple or Sony ever move into HiRez with iPods/iPhones and other HiRez players.

One thing about artists and their projects. As Neil has shown by his past HiRez endeavors, he is quick to drop things and start over when he gets on a different track. One never knows when Neil will get to that switch in the track and take his train in a different direction.
 
JonUrban said:
I guess my problem is not so much with the player but the fact that most of the Pono store is music at 44.1/16, plus he abandoned DVD-A for DVD-V, then jumped on BluRay and then abandoned that. Hey, Neil marches to his own tune, and that's fine. I stayed with him through "Old Ways", "Trans", "Everybody's Rockin'", and most everything before and after that. His last album was pretty weak, and this whole PONO thing is something that may get blown out of the water if Apple or Sony ever move into HiRez with iPods/iPhones and other HiRez players.

One thing about artists and their projects. As Neil has shown by his past HiRez endeavors, he is quick to drop things and start over when he gets on a different track. One never knows when Neil will get to that switch in the track and take his train in a different direction.
Click to expand...

And as Jon says, he's about to do it again. See below article that Pono won't be in the hardware business for long! Wow....
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/08/neil-young-pono-wont-be-a-hardware-company-for-long-video-interview/
 
bmoura said:
And as Jon says, he's about to do it again. See below article that Pono won't be in the hardware business for long! Wow....
https://gigaom.com/2015/01/08/neil-young-pono-wont-be-a-hardware-company-for-long-video-interview/
Click to expand...

WOW. I had no idea. That was quick.

I would guess he cannot get the cash to make the next wave of players he promised would start being built in February. Or maybe that will be a limited run to fill orders and that's that. Damn.

It could be that he is rationalizing that the whole PONO effort was done just to draw attention to HiRez, and now that there's a whole new HiRez movement, he's done his job.
 
Witticisms? Half-witticisms perhaps. Have always liked Neil but the pattern here is disturbing.

Here is the list of what I know I'll never see:
1. Any more surround mixes from him (no surprise except for the cutting remarks here about what we know and love)
2. Any surround material from Pono platform or store (always suspected)
3. Since Blu Ray is clunky, Archives volume 2 box will never appear.
4. Time Fades Away on CD (accepted that along time ago)

It pains me to read this. He really does move on without any concerns for the unfinished business left behind. The hardware story: "We're still here". Yeah but what about next week? #hippiedream
 
Last edited:
JonUrban said:
WOW. I had no idea. That was quick.

I would guess he cannot get the cash to make the next wave of players he promised would start being built in February. Or maybe that will be a limited run to fill orders and that's that. Damn.

It could be that he is rationalizing that the whole PONO effort was done just to draw attention to HiRez, and now that there's a whole new HiRez movement, he's done his job.
Click to expand...

I'd hope Pono turns on the DSD support before the hardware effort comes to a close. Since Neil Young is the company CEO now, you never know....
 
JonUrban said:
I guess my problem is not so much with the player, it's with the upsampled music files...
Click to expand...

What upsampled music files are being sold on the Pono store? They have absolutely stated they will not do that and have software to try to detect it. If anyone points it out to them I'm sure they will take it down.
 
Cheezmo said:
What upsampled music files are being sold on the Pono store? They have absolutely stated they will not do that and have software to try to detect it. If anyone points it out to them I'm sure they will take it down.
Click to expand...

Seems like you are right about that. I misread Mark Waldrep's post about the store, which follows:

There is no doubt that Neil Young will give an upbeat assessment of his company, their Pono high-resolution players, and the still in beta PonoMusic website. What you will not hear is how 99% of the Pono catalog of "so-called" "master quality" albums or "high-resolution albums" will be nothing more than rips of standard resolution compact discs. I doubt that Neil will talk about his belief that using different sampling rates creatively during the recording process or the fact that his own catalog will never be available in high-resolution audio (because it wasn't recorded in high-resolution!).

I have great apprehension about Neil Young becoming the poster boy for high-resolution audio. I acknowledge that he's done more than anyone else to bring awareness to the perils of highly compressed MP3 digital files. But what he offered as a solution to the problem...a better portable player and 20 million standard resolution CD rips...is the wrong approach.

I've never heard him speak about the provenance of the tracks that are available through PonoMusic. He promises to his supporters to upgrade all of their standard resolution purchases to the "highest resolution available" when they are made available but fails to inform his followers that this doesn't mean they will ever get real high-resolution audio files. They won't get what the "artist intended" either. Consumers will be upgraded to a new transfer of an older analog master when they are made available by the labels at 192 kHz/24-bits. And the number of those newly transferred albums is less than 15,000 as of today. They are what the mastering engineer "intended" and are not (according to my sources at the mastering facilities) approved by the artists or labels.
Click to expand...
 
I'm not sure why this is such a sore spot for most of you. He went with the technology at the time of its infancy and wasn't completely thrilled with the results. I can live without multichannel on my Pono. They are supposed to be supporting DSD files soon which is a nice step in making this my one stop source for 2 channel audio. The DAC is rated to be able to handle DSD files, it just needs to be opened up to do that. As someone who's not interested in investing multiple thousands into getting things to make multichannel downloads a reality, it's fine for me to just hold on to my existing DVD-Audios, SACDs and HFPA discs. I'm enjoying the heck out of my Pono player.
 
If you listen to his CES speech closely, it sounds like one of his big problems with 5.1 was that on DVD-Audio, the inclusion of a 5.1 mix often required overall lower resolution (24/96 or 24/48 instead of 24/192). Since his goal was 24/192, he saw that of a derailment of that mission.
 
Can anyone actually tell the difference between 24/96 and 24/192? Heck, can anyone even tell the difference between 24/48 and 24/96? Nyquist would suggest not.
 
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