Neil Young is one of the most decorated and popular musicians of the 20th century. But he’s much more than a legend of classic rock. In fact, he’s taken some pretty big swings throughout his storied career. He’s filled an entire California ranch house with model trains. He’s made an experimental electronic music album that baffled his fans. He even directed a baffling sci-fi film starring the band Devo.
But perhaps his most radical experiment was his attempt to build a music player that would rival the iPod. Young’s device, called Pono after the Hawaiian word for “righteous”, rolled out in 2015. It took the form of a yellow equilateral triangle, and was marketed as a way to listen to higher quality audio files, and experience a richer sound quality than what was available from tech giants like Apple.
Young recruited celebrity pals like Tom Petty and Elton John to hype up his new music player, and promised that listeners would fall in love with higher resolution audio. But ultimately, it never found an audience. Critics were very mixed on the Pono, with some arguing the listening experience was no better than the cheaper audio players already on the market.
After a few short years, Young stopped producing Ponos, and the curio was largely forgotten, or remembered only as a punchline. But for the device’s tenth anniversary, writer Nate Rogers has made a reappraisal, provocatively titled “What if we were Wrong About Pono?” In it, he argues Neil Young and his cohorts were ahead of their time, and that the yellow triangular bauble looks a whole lot better after a decade of devaluing music and the people who make it. Perhaps the Pono is a noble project, one we just weren’t ready for.
Phil Baker and Neil Young wrote a book about their experience with the Pono in 2019, called To Feel the Music.
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Toblerone is equilateral — Pono was a right isosceles triangle.
This was an excellent episode. I’ve been listening to 99% Invisible for forever, but this is the episode that made rush to leave a comment. Thank you for brightening my day!
Good. Maybe if PONO becomes a success I’ll get a return on my investment, but I’m not holding my breath.
Sorry to be the pedant but the shape in question is not an equilateral triangle. It is a triangular prism with an isosceles triangle cross-section. 🤓
Great episode!
But a bit disappointed that you didn’t mention the terms “hi-res audio” and “lossless audio” as ways to distinguish the kind of quality Young was pursuing.
Also, the Pono lives on … several companies like Astell&Kern and Fiio make hi-res players that let you enjoy these audio files whether you save them to the device or stream them via wifi.
Young was clearly onto something. Just ahead of his time.
I totally agree. Compression can be lossy and lossless. You don’t expect ZIP files on your machine to lose some data when you uncompressed them. It could have been easy to draw a parallel to photography where professional photographers prefer keeping raw/uncompressed images, while normal users are perfectly fine with jpeg files that use lossy compression.
Doing a little bit of digging I found this.
https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/neil-young-pono-player-review.49897/
It kind of makes me lean towards the whole snake oil side of things for this product…
Not to be that person, but from what I can tell from the picture, that is totally looks like a right triangle rather than an equilateral triangle :P
(If you as me, a right triangle seems more fitting for a device named “righteous”!)
You should release this episode in PONO grade high-res/lossless format.
That is clearly an isosceles triangle, not equilateral.
Just here to pedantically point out that Pono is absolutely not an equilateral triangle. The cross section appears to be based on a right triangle, and the object itself is of course three dimensional and therefore could be better described as a triangular prism.
Fun episode. Turns out I have a Pono that’s essentially new. It’s the silver Artist Signature Series: James Taylor. The sound quality was definitely noticeable over MP3 standard 128kps but as you get up to about 192kps it gets harder to distinguish. There will always be a difference between lossless and lossy audio files, regardless of the bit rate (Pono’s selling point was lossless high bit rate compression), but it was too expensive to buy albums, too cumbersome to load them up to the Pono and carry it around, not enough battery power to really listen for too long, and the music store was quite limited. The concept, however (and why I joined the kickstarter), was very important to me: like Neil, I hoped this statement would get the public and the industry to Care about music quality as the technology made it feasible to stream much higher quality music. At the time Pono was being developed, it wasn’t feasible to stream music on your phone via mobile service (WiFi could). Not a problem now. Unfortunately the public still isn’t as concerned about the quality of the sound as they are the portability and vast library that streaming services have.
I got to hear the Pono player at Dreamforce in San Francisco in probably 2015, and I remember thinking how much better it sounded. But of, just a few short years later, I too switched to streaming.
Only once or twice did you approach the point that “MP3” is a format and doesn’t convey the wide range of compression available. Yes, the default from iTunes was pretty horrible. But one can do a better job of compressing into the MP3 format (with variable bit rate) and still get moderately good storage and quite good sound. Is it as good as lossless? No. Am I listening in an ideal soundstage? Also no.
I have a Pono: “Foo Fighter’s Limited Edition” #124 of 487
Haven’t turned it on in years – it was always very tricky to get the software to connect to the player to actually move music around. And the triangle form factor doesn’t fit in your pocket very comfortably.
I guess I keep it just for historic sake at this point.
Clearly not an equilateral triangle.