Neil Young Says Pono Is 'a Revelation' Because You Can 'Hear Everything'
(CBS SF/RADIO.COM) - Neil Young doesn't just hear music, he feels it. He wants you to feel it, too, which is why he developed Pon0Music, a high-end digital audio system that he unveiled last month during a keynote speech at the annual South By Southwest conference in Austin, Texas.
An early critic of digital audio — he delved into digital waters for 1983′s rockabilly ode Everybody's Rockin', but by the end of that decade he'd declared we were living in the dark ages of audio — Young created Pono on the assumption other listeners were as distressed as he was by the format's brittle sound.
Neil may be onto something: within hours of its March 11 debut, Pono's Kickstarter campaign — which concludes on Tuesday, April 15 — was fully funded to the tune of $800,000. And it's continued to grow at rapid pace, reaching over $5.75 million through the support of more than 16,900 backers, which amounts to the third-most-funded Kickstarter project as of this writing.
"We made a low estimate," Young conceded to Radio.com during a phone interview last week. "But we are very gratified by the results and by the interest and the support and pledges behind us on Kickstarter. It's great to have the people recognizing what it is we're doing and why we're doing it. There's a lot of people out there that understand this."
Understanding "this" isn't necessarily so easy, as Pono isn't merely a digital music player. To hear Young tell it, either in person or during his hour-plus presentation at SXSW, Pono is a crusade, an opportunity to restore majesty to music, to place music back at the center of a listener's life. Consequently, whenever Young talks about Pono, he's not simply raising awareness of his Kickstarter campaign. He's on a mission: He first needs to explain to listeners accustomed to hearing music through earbuds that they're missing out on a whole world of aural treasures; then he has to sell Pono as the solution to a problem they didn't realize they had.
Read more at Radio.com
