LAS VEGAS -- Neil Young's PonoPlayer is in stores now. It's already at some boutique retailers and will start going on sale at Fry's on Monday for $399, the company revealed at CES 2015.
The public arrival of the music player is accompanied by the launch of the PonoMusic store, where owners can buy high-res music tracks. Pono says it offers more than 2 million songs in high-res format, which will be sold à la carte, just like iTunes, and start at $1.99 (though you'll pay a few more bucks for higher-quality tracks).
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You can buy whole albums, too. The cost of those varies even more, but most cost about the same as a CD, or in the neighborhood of $20. That compares with the typical $12 albums at iTunes.
A pet project of Neil Young, the PonoPlayer raised over $6 million when the musician brought it to Kickstarter. Backers of the project started getting the players in October; many buyers chose to customize their casings with colors and engravings. Pono's vice president of business development, Randy Leasure, says it shipped roughly 16,000 players to its Kickstarter supporters.
After spending a little ears-on time with the PonoPlayer, I was impressed. It looked pretty cool, which is no small feat for something painted yellow; the tracks I listened to, including Neil Young's Harvest, sounded good through a pair of high-end headphones, though it was difficult to compare the quality to regular iTunes tracks.
The PonoPlayer pins its entire existence to the idea of high-resolution music, and its creators say it's capable of playing audio up to 192kHz/24-bit format. Many think that's audio overkill and that human ears can't even hear the difference that high-res music conveys, but plenty of audiophiles disagree -- to the tune of $6 million.
The project has generated a surge of interest in high-resolution music, and Sony has debuted its own line of players. The latest is a $1,200 a high-res digital Walkman that is powered by Android and will launch in the spring.
The Walkman doesn't have all of the PonoPlayer's features, though, like its dual stereo minijack outputs that enable multiple use cases. You can share playback with a friend; the second output is better configured for minijack-to-minijack connections (like when playing through a portable speaker or car stereo); and the two outputs can be used in stereo mode for connection to the balanced XLR connectors of a high-end audio system.
With the launch of the PonoPlayer and Sony's Walkman, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of high-res audio. And you thought vinyl was cool.
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