Want better sounding music? Encode using Apple's Lossless encoder.

This thing though, touts benefits/capabilities that lie outside the human range of hearing

I am generally pretty cynical, but this post seems overly cynical.

hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahaha

It's a super cute idea, but 90% of the population can't tell the difference between a midrange AAC file and a high-end AAC file anyway, much less the difference between high-end and lossless. Throwing even more quality on top of is SERIOUS overkill.

Plus, $400 for something that I can't use as a phone? HILARIOUS. If you want the heart back in music, stop having your drummers use metronomes.

Whether they are correct or not, millions of people believe that mp3's have robbed them of the musical enjoyment they pay GOOD MONEY FOR!!

I'm reminded of Prof. Atmos P.H. Ear in Robert McCloskey's Centerburg Tales, who breezes into town selling shakers containing a lifetime supply of Ever-So-Much-More-So, "an odorless, colorless, tasteless chemical... that when sprinkled on things, supposedly enhances everything; a soft bed would become softer, a fast car becomes faster, and so on."

This is pretty dumb.

The iPod can hold music in whatever bitrate you want. The limiting factor here is the headphones you're listening through.

Me, I like to emulate the sound of the stock radio in a 1974 Mercury Capri, so quality isn't really top of my list.

@1: Hey, don't you know that Monster HDMI cables give you the best audio experience? They're gold plated and everything!

@7, a fat pipe will cure all ills.

Audiophilia is as full of pseudoscience and flimflammery as the supplements aisle at Whole Foods, but that said...

There are indeed higher-definition digital audio formats than Apple Lossless. Likewise, cell phones and portable music players generally have terrible analog stages (that is, the circuitry the sounds pass through after they've been decoded to analog electrical signals from their digital format.)

As it happens, the latter actually matters quite a bit.

You know what was actually an exceptionally low-noise music player? The original iPod Shuffle, the one that was a USB stick. With a well-encoded 256kbps+ MP3 or AAC file it sounded great, even in a quiet room with great headphones. It never supported lossless formats, but that never mattered beyond a certain point.

Making a portable digital music player that is genuinely better sounding than anything else on the market? Something that sounds as good as an old iPod Shuffle but has the storage space to support lossless playback, and has a screen for navigation? That's worth a modest premium in a niche market if it's usable with, say, FLAC and Apple Lossless codecs.

I agree that this will not go far, however. And the whole "ecosystem" stuff is nonsense.

I'd pay a lot for a portable music player with a massive amount of storage that didn't do anything else (batteries!). But it wouldn't be $400. I don't need high end lossless, but I do want to hold tens of thousands of songs, non-streaming, at once.

@6 I had you pegged as a Kraco man. Learn something new everyday....

@6. Actually the iPod as well as most encoders are limited to 320kbps. Not that there's much sense to go over that with the MP3 codec.

It would be nice to be able to buy lossless music from Amazon or iTunes. Not so much because the quality is noticeably better than a high rate MP3 but because you will be able to convert it to any format you may want in the future.

The world doesn't need extra shrill Harvest Moon piped into your ears from a toddler's building block.

Some enterprising snakes have taken advantage of Mr. Young's declining faculties, it would appear.

@6: Not true, as @12 points out.

This is aimed at a niche market. If you're like @10 and just want to carry around tens of thousands of songs in a crappy compressed format this isn't for you.

Sigh. I love Neil Young, but he's so far off in the weeds on this that it isn't even funny, and I have a serious suspicion that his "business partners" in this little venture are quietly pocketing 80% of the money. Their BOM for that thing can't possibly be more than $40 inclusive of labor, and I would not be at all surprised to find that the internals were remaindered mainboards from some other player.

If you believe that it is possible to substantially improve on 44khz/16bit sampling, you are wrong in basically every way it is possible to be wrong about audio processing and storage. True fact.

Argh, wrong link in my last comment. True Fact.

RIP Rio Karma

I drove Neil and his son Ben around Seattle for a day, doing some sight-seeing, then met Amber Jean in Ballard where she was shopping for a new tattoo. Nice people.

@12 / @14, MP3 files are limited to 320kbps, but the iPod will happily play Apple Lossless files.

Having a nice DAC and headphone amplifier matters sooner than that anyway.

His last memoir - Waging Heavy Peace - hit on this topic over and over, almost an infomercial. The book read as if he actually wrote it - all over the place. Tough slogging, but good tidbits. Anyway - this is his passion project.

It's not a triangle. It's a polyhedron called a triangular prism.