Neil Young Developing Studio Quality Audio Format
posted in: Music News
The MP3 format has experienced wild popularity in the digital age, but that may all be changing. As reported by Rolling Stone, legendary rocker Neil Young, who has always been an advocate for higher-fidelity audio, filed documents last June with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that hint at his plans to change the culture of how people listen to digital music. Young filed for six trademarks in total; Ivanhoe, 21st Century Record Player, Earth Storage, Storage Shed, Thanks for Listening, and SQS (Studio Quality Sound).
While there has been no official word from the Young camp on the status of his project, it seems that a press release regarding his upcoming memoir may contain a bit of information pertaining to this project:
“Young is also personally spearheading the development of Pono, a revolutionary new audio music system presenting the highest digital resolution possible, the studio quality sound that artists and producers heard when they created their original recordings. Young wants consumers to be able to take full advantage of Pono’s cloud-based libraries of recordings by their favorite artists and, with Pono, enjoy a convenient music listening experience that is superior in sound quality to anything ever presented.”
Neil Young is no stranger to criticizing the fidelity of digital audio, earlier this year while attending the D: Dive Into Media conference, Young stated: My goal is to try and rescue the art form that I’ve been practicing for the past 50 years¦ We live in the digital age and, unfortunately, it’s degrading our music, not improving it. He went on to say, [I]t’s not that digital is bad or inferior, it’s that the way it’s being used isn’t doing justice to the art… the MP3 only has 5 percent of the data present in the original recording. ¦ The convenience of the digital age has forced people to choose between quality and convenience, but they shouldn’t have to make that choice.”
We’re still not sure if this project will lead to a hardware and cloud-based storage solution, or just a new standard filetype that will challenge the stranglehold MP3’s have had on the market for years.
.neil anyone?