Apple should buy Pono, Neil Young & Jon Hamm's music "high-resolution" 24-bit 192kHz audio company and have Neil play some real Rock & Roll at Apple events.
I'm a huge Neil Young fan, but Pono is bound to fail. Throughout the evolution of widely adopted audio formats, the sound quality has always decreased. The average listener doesn't care about fidelity. They can't tell the difference. They care about convenience.
Cassette tapes were better than vinyl records, because they were more portable. CDs were better than tapes, because you could skip tracks. Mp3s were better than CDs, because you could fit thousands of them in your pocket. But at each step of that progression, the sound got worse.
Young's testimonials are from professional musicians, the extremely small subset of the public that actually cares about the quality of the sound. These are not the people he needs to convince. This is obviously aimed at the general public, who have proven time and time again that convenience is king.
The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.
>The vast majority of people can't tell the difference between an 16-bit, 44.1kHz, 192kbps mp3 and a 24-bit, 192kHz, losslessly compressed file.
I don't think the vast majority of people could either tell the difference or care about the difference between much larger compression gaps than that.
I received three free months of Sirius radio when I purchased a certified used car. After a few minutes of flipping through the channels, I couldn't understand why anyone would want to listen to such highly compressed music with tons of artifacts, yet lots of people pay for subscriptions.
If his ears can still tell the difference between "high-resolution" audio and MP3 320, then it is a miracle of geriatric audiological medicine. Seriously, medicine should get on that, there's something unknown to science going on there.
