Neil Young Issues Another Statement About Donald Trump’s Usage of “Rockin’ in the Free World”

[whatchamacallit]

36. Neil is slightly misguided on this

but I don't believe he's purposely trying to deceive. His interest in audio fidelity goes way back, and coming from the analog recording world (tape) he's always been wary of technology that creates new audio by taking discrete samples of continuous, presumably higher resolution, waveforms at low sampling rates and bit depths.

That said, yeah once you get above 48/24 most will not recognize or appreciate a difference. Funny thing is many of the cherished qualities of analog recordings were created by characteristics or flaws in the recording hardware of the time. Whether tube or ss circuit, the hardware in the recording chain (microphones, mic preamps, compressor/limiters, mix board inputs and busses, the properties of tape...) introduced distortions and colorations that became synonymous with "the sound". The testament to this being the vast number of plugins for digital audio workstations that aim to recreate these characteristics to "warm up sterile digital audio".

I don't know much about the Pono, but imagine it's only real advantage over the average audio player would be higher quality DACs. Would that be enough to justify the cost for the typical user? Probably not. A well known guitarist friend called me to rave about it, and we had a long conversation about the efficacy of a portable super-highres player. The question I had was, considering the ambient noise level of your typical listening environment for a portable player (noisy house, car, earbuds in a city or suburban din...), what's the point?