Neil Young’s iPod Killer

Summary

Summary of "Neil Young’s iPod Killer" - 99% Invisible

Release Date: July 15, 2025
Hosted by: Roman Mars
Episode Title: Neil Young’s iPod Killer

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Introduction: Neil Young’s Legacy in Music and Technology

In this episode of 99% Invisible, host Roman Mars delves into the ambitious project undertaken by legendary musician Neil Young: the creation of the Pono, a high-fidelity digital music player designed to challenge the dominance of the iPod and elevate the quality of digital music consumption.

Neil Young: Artist and Innovator

Neil Young is celebrated not only for his prolific musical career but also for his ventures into various creative fields. As Roman Mars introduces, Young is "a rare artist...insanely prolific," with favorites like Harvest Moon resonating deeply with fans (01:01). Producer Chris Berube expands on Young's multifaceted career, highlighting his experimental endeavors, including electronic music albums, model train set designs, and his 1980s sci-fi film, Human Highway (01:32).

The Birth of Pono: Challenging Digital Music

Four decades into his career, Neil Young grew dissatisfied with the decreasing audio quality of digital music. He perceived a loss of the "warmth" that analog formats like vinyl provided. This dissatisfaction led to the conception of Pono, a digital music player aimed at audiophiles seeking superior sound quality. As Mars explains, the Pono was intended to be "a competitor to the iPod," featuring a distinctive triangular "Toblerone-like" shape (02:40).

Development and Design Challenges

Developing the Pono was no small feat. Neil Young assembled a team of experts, including Phil Baker, a seasoned product manager from Apple and Polaroid. Together, they faced significant design constraints, such as balancing high-quality audio playback with a portable form factor. The resulting triangular design was not only a visual departure from mainstream players but also necessitated a larger battery to support the enhanced hardware (12:57).

Notable Quote:
Phil Baker reflects on the design process, stating, "We were like a tiny little animal in comparison to their jet engine," referencing the challenge of competing against tech giants like Apple (12:30).

Funding the Vision: The Kickstarter Campaign

Realizing the financial demands of bringing Pono to market, the team launched a Kickstarter campaign. Neil Young leveraged his star power, enlisting endorsements from other musicians such as Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. The campaign garnered significant attention, initially appearing as the third most successful Kickstarter effort at the time. They ultimately sold about 15,000 units to backers, exceeding their initial expectations (16:06).

Market Reception and Criticism

Upon its release in early 2015, the Pono faced mixed reviews. Critics pointed to its awkward shape, high price point of $399, and limited storage capacity compared to mainstream players. Slate magazine dismissively labeled it a "vanity project." Additionally, reviewers like David Pogue conducted blind tests, revealing that average listeners couldn’t discern a significant difference in sound quality between Pono and standard iPods, often favoring the latter due to familiarity (19:11).

Notable Quote:
David Pogue noted, "Testers could not spot the difference whether they were listening on tinny earbuds or over plush, expensive headphones," highlighting the challenges Pono faced in proving its superiority (19:34).

The Decline: Technological and Market Shifts

The timing of Pono’s market entry proved detrimental. By 2014, iPod sales were declining, supplanted by the multifunctional iPhone, which rendered single-purpose MP3 players obsolete. Moreover, the rise of streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music shifted consumer preferences towards convenience and vast libraries over high-fidelity audio. In 2016, Apple’s acquisition of the Pono store effectively ended its operation, leading to the project's eventual wind-down in 2017. Despite the financial losses, Neil Young remained unfazed, maintaining his commitment to quality over commercial success (21:43).

Legacy and Reflections: The Enduring Quest for Quality

Nearly a decade later, the Pono serves as a case study in the balance between technological ambition and market readiness. Nate Rogers, a music critic and Young supporter, suggests that while Pono struggled commercially, it ignited important conversations about audio quality and the value of music in the digital age. Modern streaming services have begun to acknowledge these concerns, offering higher-resolution audio options, though often at a premium.

Notable Quote:
Nate Rogers reflects, "Maybe we need to spend $20 once in a while. And the devaluation of music isn't just financial. There's also the matter of appreciation," emphasizing the broader implications of Pono’s mission (23:31).

Continuing the Conversation: High-Resolution Audio Today

While Pono itself is no longer available, its spirit lives on through platforms like the Neil Young Archives, which offers high-resolution streaming of Young’s music. Additionally, services such as Tidal, Apple Music, and Qobuz now provide higher fidelity options, partially validating Pono’s original vision. These advancements highlight a growing niche market that values audio quality, suggesting that Neil Young’s efforts were not entirely in vain.

Notable Quote:
Chris Berube shares a personal experience: "I could really hear these little differences. Like you could hear the harmonica trailing off kind of these little things," indicating the tangible benefits of high-resolution audio (31:21).

Conclusion: A Vision Ahead of Its Time

Neil Young’s Pono was a bold attempt to redefine digital music consumption, prioritizing audio quality and artist compensation. Despite its failure to achieve commercial success, Pono's legacy persists in ongoing discussions about the value and appreciation of music in an increasingly digital and commoditized landscape. As Roman Mars aptly notes, "The Pono was trying to stand for something, for high quality and respect for artists," a mission that continues to resonate today.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• Nate Rogers (23:31): "Maybe we need to spend $20 once in a while. And the devaluation of music isn't just financial. There's also the matter of appreciation."

• David Pogue (19:34): "Testers could not spot the difference whether they were listening on tinny earbuds or over plush, expensive headphones."

• Phil Baker (12:30): "We were like a tiny little animal in comparison to their jet engine."

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Reflection

The episode "Neil Young’s iPod Killer" meticulously unpacks the intricate journey of Pono, from its inception rooted in Neil Young’s passion for authentic sound to its eventual decline amidst evolving technological trends. It serves as a poignant reminder of the delicate interplay between innovation, market readiness, and consumer behavior in the realm of technology and art.

Transcript

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[Roman Mars]

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Neil Young is a rare artist. He's had big commercial success while also enjoying credibility as a musician's musician. He's also insanely prolific. Young has released dozens of albums. It's hard to pick a favorite Neil Young song, but I'm a simple man, and I think mine is probably Harvest Moon.

[Chris Berube]

Look, there are a lot of great choices. I think I'm more of a heart of gold guy myself. But Neil Young is not just some legend of classic rock.

[Roman Mars]

That's producer Chris Perube.

[Chris Berube]

There is a whole other side of Neil Young's career. His bizarre experimental side. There's the Neil Young who made a divisive electronic music album. Or the Neil Young who designs model train sets. Neil Young even directed a very confusing sci fi movie in the 80s starring Devo. It's called Human Highway. Good gas. Oh, it's bird gas.

[Michael C. Hall]

It's the best.

[Chris Berube]

You make it yourself?

[Roman Mars]

Nah, it comes from birds.

[Chris Berube]

Human highway, man. It's a weird one. But perhaps the biggest swing came about four decades into his career when Neil Young decided to make his own digital music player, which he called the Pono.

[Roman Mars]

You don't like the itunes and the.

[Chris Berube]

Ipod and that kind of stuff.

[Roman Mars]

You got this thing called Pono, which is your own music player.

[Nate Rogers]

Well, because it's not that I don't like him, it's just I can't play what I do.

[Roman Mars]

The Pono was meant to be a competitor to the ipod. The Pono was a portable digital music player. But unlike the Ipod. It had a long triangular candy bar esque shape.

[Chris Berube]

It's not a. It looks like a Toblerone.

[Roman Mars]

It's not. What is this for your ears?

[Nate Rogers]

It's even better than a Toblerone.

[Roman Mars]

Really?

[Nate Rogers]

Yes, it sounds.

[Chris Berube]

Have you ever jammed a Toblerone in your ear? My friend Neil Young unleashed the Pono in 2015 with a lot of media coverage and endorsements from famous musicians like Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty. But the Toblerone esque music player was confusing to a lot of potential consumers. Most people just didn't understand why it was necessary to replace their ipods with another device that retailed for about $400. Even Neil Young's fans did not totally get it.

[Nate Rogers]

My initial reaction to it was really just sort of like, meh, let's see, I was 25 when it came out. I didn't have a lot of expendable income at that point. I wasn't in the market for something to replace my ipod.

[Chris Berube]

That's Nate Rogers, a writer and a music critic who wrote about Pono for the website Stereogum earlier this year. Nate also happens to be a Neil Young super fan.

[Nate Rogers]

I have a Neil Young. A picture of Neil Young on the wall in here that I've been looking. I'm sitting directly across from 1979 Russ never sleeps tour. He's really rocking out with Crazy Horse. Looks happy.

[Roman Mars]

If you've never heard of Pono before, that's because it came and went in a few short years. And at the time, many critics dismissed Pono as a celebrity vanity project.

[Chris Berube]

But reading Nate Rogers piece made me wonder if we were wrong about Pono because Nate's article is actually headlined what if we were wrong about Pono? Like maybe this awkward yellow triangular music player was actually a noble project, one we just weren't ready for.

[Roman Mars]

In the early 2000 and tens, Neil Young was enjoying something of a career resurgence. He was playing shows across North America with his band Crazy Horse, and he was getting some of the best reviews of his career.

[Chris Berube]

But in interviews, Neil seemed upset, almost angry. He told journalists he was unhappy with the rise of digital downloads and that he didn't want to listen to songs on a computer. In fact, in one interview, Neil Young claimed he hadn't listened to music for over 15 years.

[Nate Rogers]

I don't know how it's possible to not listen to music for 15 years, even if you're not a musician. So I don't really know what Neil was talking about there. I feel like he meant to say, like I haven't listened to digital music in 15 years. But he did say that, so whatever, maybe he did. Neil is an interesting person. Love him.

[Chris Berube]

You're probably thinking, this all sounds like typical old guy. Back in my day, stuff was better kind of crankiness. And to be fair, yes, okay, maybe it's a little bit of that.

[Roman Mars]

But Neil Young actually had a good reason for boycotting digital music. According to Young, digitized music just sounded wrong.

[Nate Rogers]

The origin of the pono is that Neil Young thinks that digital music destroyed music quality in general.

[Chris Berube]

When Neil got his start in the 60s, everybody was listening to music on vinyl. Today, of course, lots of folks love vinyl, but vinyl records were delicate and not super mobile. So in the 80s and 90s, vinyl was pushed out by new formats like cassette tapes and CDs.

[Roman Mars]

Cassettes were portable and handy. You could pop one of those bad boys into your Walkman or the console of your Dodge Neon and hit the road. But in the 90s, cassettes lost the format wars to CDs, which were slim and futuristic. They were just as portable as cassettes, but sounded much better. They didn't wear out or scratch as easily as vinyl, and they were free of the noise that plagued analog formats. But to people like Neil Young, there was something lost with the rise of CDs, a warmth.

[Chris Berube]

And MP3s, well, that's where things started to get a whole lot worse, because of something called compression. Basically, to fit a lot of songs onto a hard drive or an ipod, the files had to be pretty small, which means they had to be compressed or squeezed down in a way that reduces the quality of the music you're listening to.

[Nate Rogers]

I guess the term is probably appropriately decimated. Maybe a tenth of that CD makes it onto an MP3 file.

[Chris Berube]

A way of measuring sound quality on a digital music file is in kilobits per second. A music file on a CD has about 1400 kilobits of information per second. In a streaming MP3, that number goes down to about 96.

[Nate Rogers]

It's shocking. Honestly, it's very significant.

[Roman Mars]

It's hard to explain what gets lost when you do that much compression on an audio file. An MP3 of a song and a vinyl record might sound pretty similar to untrained ears, but to trained ears, there's a real difference.

[John Atkinson]

You know, a sense of ease to the sound. And that's going to be subjective and individual, but nevertheless, you know, if you listen to mp3s seriously, your attention wanders.

[Chris Berube]

John Atkinson is the former editor of Stereophile magazine. He says that with MP3s, listeners actually lose Something pretty fundamental.

[John Atkinson]

Any transience in the music. You know, Cymbal, crashes, beats drums so what was a clean hit on a drum now becomes more of a blur on a drum. So if you listen to low res MP3s, you start to aware that the sense of rhythm has been degraded.

[Phil Baker]

You're missing a lot of the harmonics. When you strum a guitar or hit a piano key, you hear one note, but you also hear a whole series of harmonics and notes that trail off.

[Roman Mars]

That's Phil Baker. He worked as the product manager for Pono starting in 2012.

[Phil Baker]

You know, when you strum a guitar string, it's not just boom, it's so all those other things are lost, or a good number of them are lost because it's just truncates. It doesn't have the, the ability to play back that fine detail. There are a lot of subtleties. For many people, that's fine. They hear music, they're used to listening to radio, whether it's AM or FM or Sirius xm, which by the way, you know, transmits in a very, very low resolution.

[Roman Mars]

Oh, okay. Thanks Phil.

[Chris Berube]

When MP3s became the dominant way of listening to music, a lot of casual listeners just didn't mind the trade off. But Neil Young believed he could do.

[Nate Rogers]

Better because he had unbelievable resources and because he's a very, very stubborn man, he was like, I'll just do it myself. And that's where Pono came from.

[Roman Mars]

In 2012, Neil Young announced his plans for the Pono player. To give listeners a truly great experience. He devised a plan for, for an online store that would only sell high quality music files.

[Chris Berube]

Neil said Pono files wouldn't be comparable to what you would get on a record, but they would be a lot better than an MP3. While this whole thing is pretty technical, Neil made a handy video using a nautical metaphor to explain it.

[Nate Rogers]

When you're on the bottom of the ocean and you have a huge tank on your back and a big glass ball over your head, that's kind of, you know, you're walking around in the murk and there's big fish down there. That's kind of like listening to an MP3. And when you, when you're listening to a CD, you've risen to, you know, maybe a couple of hundred feet below the surface, something like that, and you're still underwater. You're not quite in air.

[Chris Berube]

And according to Neil, to get to air, figuratively speaking, you need some Pono.

[Nate Rogers]

And the feeling is different, actually is a visceral relief.

[Chris Berube]

You feel good with the store. Listeners could buy higher quality files without going through a big tech middleman. Each album would cost about 20 bucks, which was higher than itunes. But musicians would be paid more than the pennies they were getting from Apple. Neil Young presented the whole project as a matter of principle.

[Nate Rogers]

Pono is the Hawaiian word for righteous, which is where Neil got that from and insisted on it, despite the fact that it sounds very close to porno and in every headline. If you look at it too quickly, you might think that you're seeing a weird tech review of porn.

[Roman Mars]

To produce a device capable of playing these higher quality files, Neil Young had to recruit a crack team of experts like Phil Baker, who had a distinguished career developing products at Apple and Polaroid.

[Phil Baker]

You know, the pressure was sort of on me. Everything I thought of, everything I would do, I would say, well, how does this affect Neil and his reputation? What I learned pretty quickly is that he didn't care. You know, don't worry about it. You know, we're going to try. Do your best.

[Chris Berube]

Phil says he met with Neil Young and a small team of engineers every few weeks to discuss the project. And while Neil had total confidence in Phil and his team, it was a huge task developing a music player from scratch.

[Phil Baker]

Apple is a machine, and we were like a tiny little animal in comparison to their jet engine.

[Chris Berube]

Phil says by the time he got there, the Pono team had already settled on the triangular shape for the device. While you could fit the Pono player into your hand, it was a little too big for some pockets. But there was a very good reason for the bulkier form. Here's Nate Rogers.

[Nate Rogers]

It was shaped like a Toblerone because it needed more space to fit the hardware and the battery in particular, because in the mid 2010s, the battery had to be larger than your average ipod battery to power hardware that was more powerful than your ipod hardware. So you just couldn't fit all of that in that space. And you needed a rechargeable battery that was substantial. And so I think the combination of those two things is where the weird shape came from.

[Roman Mars]

By the way, if you tell Phil Baker that it's Toblerone shaped, he will correct you.

[Phil Baker]

People compared it to a Toblerone, Bob, but in reality, it was an equilateral.

[Chris Berube]

Triangle shape wasn't the only thing that set Pono apart from its mainstream competitor. You also couldn't go on the Internet or do other things on your Pono. Another factor was the size of the screen, which was smaller than the ipod. That Choice came down to cost.

[Phil Baker]

You know, LCDs were really tough to get that time, so we couldn't make a big, flat device. You could get a big screen, but they were custom, very, very expensive. And our goal was to do something that was under $300. So the display was a display that came off the back of a compact camera.

[Chris Berube]

After nine months of tinkering in R and D, Phil and his team finished a prototype. A yellow Toblerone or an equilateral triangle of music. And did it look funny? Yes, it did. But it also had enough space to hold a bunch of high quality music files, and it was small enough to carry around, and it wasn't catastrophically expensive. Honestly, a pretty big win, all things considered.

[Roman Mars]

But there was a final hurdle to getting the Pono on the market. They needed cash, because it turns out making an ipod killer takes a lot of money. Even with a rich celebrity footing the bill.

[Phil Baker]

If you look at the cost to build, let's say, 5,000 units, if it cost you, even if they were $100 apiece, you know, $100 times 5,000 is half a million dollars. So just start building units.

[Nate Rogers]

And they started a Kickstarter campaign to try to generate enough money to set this thing off, which is a very, very difficult thing to set off any sort of digital device.

[Roman Mars]

To hype up the Kickstarter, Neil Young filmed a series of videos where he showed off the prototype to his celebrity friends, who raved about how much better the Pono sounded compared to the ipod.

[Nate Rogers]

He had, like, a car that he would bring, like, backstage at shows or something like that, or drive up to Tom Petty's house. You know, all these random places in this video of Neil just, like, flexing on everybody by being like, I can show up to Elton John's house and just get him to listen to this, because I'm Neil Young. And honestly, you know, Respect, it blew me away.

[Roman Mars]

It was like being in a recording studio. It was like we were listening to Bob Dylan. You could hear him playing harmonica right next to you. You could hear the drums and the backing vocals on Respect by Aretha. I haven't heard a sound like that since vinyl.

[Chris Berube]

While the video was pretty crude, Young's star power got a lot of people's attention. And the Kickstarter was a hit.

[Nate Rogers]

It was like the third most successful Kickstarter campaign ever at the time that they did it. So they were kind of off and running.

[Phil Baker]

Well, when we started the Kickstarter campaign, we basically sold about 15,000 units to Kickstarter. Members. I don't think we ever expected that number.

[Roman Mars]

While the Kickstarter hit its goal really fast, it still took about two and a half years to get the Pono to market because the development team wanted to make sure the Pono player would meet the high quality standards of true music fans.

[Phil Baker]

We had a handful of products that had to be repaired, and I mean, a handful, you know, maybe a dozen or so out of the 15,000 products that we ship. So we were very, very lucky.

[Chris Berube]

After years of hype, in early 2015, the Pono was finally made available to the public. The device itself retailed for $399, about 100 bucks more than the ipod.

[Roman Mars]

Thanks to the Kickstarter success, the Pono seemed to be on everybody's radar. But all of the hype might have put a target on its back because a lot of music journalists reviewing the Pono did not like it.

[Chris Berube]

Critics slammed Pono's awkward shape and the elevated price, and some writers seemed upset the Pono existed at all. Slate magazine called the whole thing a vanity project.

[Roman Mars]

Many reviews called out Pono for carrying fewer songs than other music players.

[Nate Rogers]

Essentially, to use the Pono, a lot of people would have to pick and choose which albums you wanted on there at any given time. Like maybe you'd be able to fit 10 or 20, and you would choose which ones on any given day, you know, you'd want to go take with you.

[Chris Berube]

There was a sense the knives were out for Pono, which in hindsight isn't a big surprise. I mean, come on. Neil Young named the product after the Hawaiian word for righteous. And as stereophiles John Atkinson points out, there's a particular disdain reserved for music nerds, especially those who try to make you buy expensive high tech gear X.

[John Atkinson]

Therefore, writer Michael Framer wrote about this some years ago. But he said, you know, you read for Sunday Times, and they're advertising, you know, $400, you know, crockery sets, $4,000 lamps, $40,000 watches, and they're all regarded as legitimate. But when you have a $400 Pono plane, oh, my goodness, that's. That's snake oil. It's ripping people off. High fidelity has always been like that.

[Chris Berube]

But still, it was surprising to read the many critics who targeted Pono for its sound quality. Some critics argued the music experience on the Pono player was somehow worse than on an iPhone, even though Pono files.

[Roman Mars]

Were objectively larger and higher fidelity. Some reviews said that you couldn't tell the difference between the Pono and the ipod, especially when they played it for other people. One critic named David pogue went so far as to set up ab testing.

[Nate Rogers]

With average people comparing pono and pono grade files and an ipod and ipod grade files. And he also used over ear headphones, and he used earbuds. And his group of people that he chose pretty clearly chose the ipod over the pono no matter which combination of things he did.

[Chris Berube]

According to David Pogue, testers could not spot the difference whether they were listening on tinny earbuds or over plush, expensive headphones. It might sound surprising that a higher quality audiophile actually sounds worse to most listeners, but most people just picked what they were most familiar with. It's kind of like how most people, people like me can't really tell the difference between a $20 bottle of wine and an $80 bottle of wine. In the end, it all just tastes like wine.

[Nate Rogers]

It's really hard to use a part of your brain that's not activated when you listen to music and look for that stuff because it's so in the, like, deep weeds of what the music is.

[Roman Mars]

The bad reviews didn't help, but they weren't fatal in the end. Pono was a victim of timing. Pono kind of hit the market at the absolute worst time when it was conceived in 2012, as Apple sold 35 million iPods.

[Chris Berube]

But by 2014, sales were way down, and Apple actually discontinued the ipod classic. The ipod was made obsolete by the iPhone, which could play music, but also make phone calls and surf the Internet and do all the other stupid things we do on our phones.

[Roman Mars]

The idea of a single use MP3 player was totally outdated. Not only that, downloading MP3s became totally outdated too, because of the rise of streaming music.

[Nate Rogers]

Streaming was the new thing, and it was the future. And there was no world in which you could convince people to buy a really bulky, pretty expensive MP3 player.

[Chris Berube]

In 2015, services like Spotify exploded in popularity, and rivals like Apple music offered an entire world of sound for $10 a month. That's about half of what it cost to get a popular new record in the pono store.

[Roman Mars]

Just to really add insult to injury, one of the big tech giants made it really hard to get new music for the Pono. In 2016, Apple bought the company that ran the pono store and put them out of business.

[Phil Baker]

You know, at the time, we looked at transferring all the work we did. There weren't very few companies developing music stores. But we talked to others and it was just too expensive and too complex. We didn't have the resources to really start over again and create another store.

[Chris Berube]

The Pono team tried hanging on for a little while, but in 2017, Young announced they were winding down the project. While numbers were never made public, it's believed Neil Young lost a lot of money on the Pono. And while some people might be embarrassed by all this, Phil Baker says Neil took it in stride.

[Phil Baker]

We weren't having the great success. I figured, well, Neil is going to be upset. He probably doesn't want to talk to me anymore. What I found was so surprising. He just was, you know, very matter of fact about it. Like, you know, this record didn't end up at number one, maybe my next record will, or something like that. He was very normal, I guess I would say.

[Chris Berube]

It's been about a decade now since Pono's rise and fall, and as a casual Neil Young fan, I had always just thought of it as some footnote in his incredible career. But when I read Nate Rogers article, I took a step back and considered maybe there's more to the Pono than its goofy reputation. Because the Pono, it kind of looks prophetic when you consider just how much things have changed about our relationship to music.

[Roman Mars]

In the past 10 years, we have devalued music in lots of ways. In the 90s, artists could make a pretty good living off CD sales. Then with itunes, they made a less Good Living selling MP3s. Today on Spotify, musicians generally receive one third of a cent every time their song is played.

[Chris Berube]

The Pono was trying to stand for something, for high quality and respect for artists. But instead, as music fans, we've chosen a different path, one of convenience and low prices. Sure, the Pono store selling a high quality album for $20 seems really expensive by today's standards. But now lots of musicians can't make ends meet. Maybe we need to spend $20 once in a while. And the devaluation of music isn't just financial. There's also the matter of appreciation.

[Nate Rogers]

So much of what shaped my music listening experience was buying records that I decided I was going to get my money's worth. And being like, I value this because I bought it and I'm going to spend time with it and get to know it. And Pono's whole approach was music fidelity. But it's also just. It's a broader element of like, active participation. When people just have thousands and thousands of songs at their fingertip, it diminishes your relationship to the music.

[Chris Berube]

If you want to experience Neil Young's dream for the Pono Maybe you don't need that yellow triangular music player. It might be enough to spend a little more time with art. Just linger in front of a painting at a museum or read a book at a coffee shop with your phone in your pocket. Or just listen to a record while doing nothing else and let the music in.

[Roman Mars]

There is a way to hear higher quality music in this dreaming age and we will tell you about it after.

[Michael C. Hall]

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[Roman Mars]

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[Roman Mars]

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[Chris Berube]

Hey Ruben.

[Roman Mars]

So we've been talking about the listening experience of the Pono and I was wondering, did you get a chance to actually listen to one?

[Chris Berube]

Roman I tried. I tried so hard. I asked lots of people how to get a hold of one. I ordered one on eBay and the seller sent me a message saying, this item doesn't exist. Sorry about this, I've never seen that before. Like I've never tried to buy an item on ebay and they're like, we actually don't. This isn't a real thing. I'm not sure what happened with that. And actually most of the ones on ebay, there are a few for sale on ebay. Most of them are just there for spare parts so you could buy it to fix problems with your existing Pono. But there are not a lot of new Ponos that you could buy through that.

[Roman Mars]

Well, that is too bad and actually kind of weird that there hasn't been one that's like filtered into the secondary market at all.

[Chris Berube]

I know, it's just they're impossible to find. And actually Nate Rogers, who wrote the piece for Stereogum, that was the basis for all of this, he tried to get one for his story. No luck on that. But I do have some good news, which is that there is a substitute that tries to recreate the experience of hearing music on the Pono.

[Roman Mars]

Okay, how does that work?

[Chris Berube]

So there is a website called the Neil Young Archives, and actually, Phil Baker works on this project. So after Pono, Phil kept collaborating with Neil Young, and he helped to put together this website. It's kind of actually laid out like an archive. Like, it's a really fun bit of design, the website. Like, you go on there, it looks like you're entering a filing cabinet, and then you go through, and there's just all of this arcana for Neil Young.

[Phil Baker]

The Neil Young Archives is really a depository of everything you would find in a real archive. Handwritten notes, photographs of objects, lyrics, timelines. You know, it's just a wealth of information.

[Chris Berube]

So you get basically all of these DVD extras of Neil Young's career and life. And on top of all that, it has all of Neil's music streaming in high resolution. So they're trying to do something that is similar to what you would hear on the Pono. And Phil actually sent me a subscription to check it out. So I got to listen to that for a while.

[Roman Mars]

So did you notice a difference between what you could sort of get in the Neil Young Archive versus what you could hear on Spotify or something like that?

[Chris Berube]

I gotta be honest from it, I came into this being so skeptical, like, this whole story, even after doing this whole story, I was still kind of like, how big of a difference could it be? And I put it on, and just immediately I was like, oh, that sounds better. That actually sounds quite a bit better. And then I list a couple of Neil Young songs on Spotify, switched over, listened to the same ones on the Archives, and I could really hear these little differences. Like you could hear the harmonica trailing off kind of these little things that we talk about in the story. Now, I should say I was primed to listen for that kind of thing after working on the story for so long. So take it with a grain of salt. I might have been set up to believe this, but no, I really did notice a difference.

[Roman Mars]

That's really interesting. But this is just for Neil Young's music, right? Like, there isn't other music that you can try out.

[Chris Berube]

That's right. So it's not like a total recreation of the Pono experience, because all you can get is Neil Young's Archive on there. But I think a lot of people don't know this actually. You actually can access higher resolution music on a lot of streaming services. Did you know about this, Roman?

[Roman Mars]

I remember that being a selling point of Tidal. I don't know if Tidal still exists, but that's the only one I've really heard of.

[Chris Berube]

Yeah, so Tidal does still exist. You can still listen in higher resolution. And actually Apple Music also has a tier where you can listen at a higher resolution. Spotify, it should be noted they have pretty limited options in terms of fidelity. You can turn it up. The default is actually a pretty low resolution MP3, so you can turn it up to the point that it kind of sounds closer to CD quality. There's actually one service called Qobuz, so Qobuz. I'm not sure how to pronounce it. Their whole deal is just offering things in higher resolution. And I tried all of these actually, and all of them, like, yeah, I could notice a bit of a difference. Like they all sounded quite a bit better. So there are options out there. And in a way, talking to Nate Rogers about this, he was telling me like, this kind of feels like a vindication of the Pono, right? This idea that higher resolution audio is something that is now more normal.

[Nate Rogers]

I almost feel like Neil cared less about his device and more about the conversation and that he wanted people to start thinking about it and start asking for more out of the, you know, tech companies that had taken charge of music in the 21st century.

[Roman Mars]

And if you really want this conversation to continue, I'm sure there are corners of the Internet in which it is happening right now. Like this conversation is happening at length about every format of music and which is better and how to listen in a perfect environment. This just seems like what the Internet was made for.

[Chris Berube]

Oh, truly endless. Especially like Stereophile, the community around Stereophile magazine. Like I went on a couple of the forums about the listening quality for Sirius xm, for example, and there is. There's so much back and forth, Roman, you could waste entire days on that.

[Roman Mars]

Well, this story's been so fun, Kares. I really appreciate you bringing us the Pono.

[Chris Berube]

I'm glad we can keep the legend of the Pono alive. Thank you for this. A lot of fun.

[John Atkinson]

Foreign.

[Roman Mars]

Invisible was produced this week by Chris Berube, Edited by Kelly Prime Fact checking by Laura Bullins Mix by Martin Gonzalez Music by Swan Real Today's episode is based on Nate Rogers reporting about the Pono for Stereo Gum magazine. Nate's piece is great. It gets to a lot more detail than we could. We will include a link to Nate's article at 99pi.org. Special thanks this week to Stereogum, Kate Mishkin, and Myron Caplan. Our Executive producer is Kathy Tu. Our Senior editor is Delaney Hall. Our Digital Director is Kurt Kohlstedt. The rest of the team includes Jason De Leon, Emmett Fitzgerald, Christopher Johnson, Vivian Lesha, Madonn, Jacob Medina Gleason, Joe Rosenberg, and me, Roman Mars. The 99% invisible logo was created by Stuff and Lawrence. We are part of the SiriusXM podcast family now, headquartered six blocks north in the Pandora Building in beautiful uptown Oakland, California. You can find us on Blue sky as well as our own Discord server. You'll find a link to that as well as every past episode of [e-mail].