Stereogum recently published a fascinating retrospective on Neil Young's doomed hi-def portable music device, the PONO. Released in 2015 after several years of painstaking development, Young aspired to create a portable digital audio player to rival the popularity of the iPod—and without compromising the sound quality by compressing the audio like an mp3.
In the article, author Nate Rogers examines the initial public response and reviews to the device, and tries to dig up some dirt from the former executives of the company. Overall, it offers a pretty interesting look back at both the mid-10s tech startup days, as well as the complex psychology of audio fidelity. (Some listeners preferred the sound of an mp3 through an iPod, though there's also the outlying question of whether they just said that because it sounded more familiar to them.)
But the part that stood out to me the most was Elon Musk's involvement in the proliferation of the PONO. Rogers opens the piece with an anecdote recounted in Young's 2019 book, To Feel The Music: A Songwriter's Mission To Save High-Quality Audio about the musician's personal experience with Musk:
This encounter took place around the time Pono, Young's hi-fi digital music player and online store, was released 10 years ago this month, as Young was aggressively proselytizing about the importance of sound quality to anyone who would listen.
Young had been going to various carmakers in an effort to demonstrate Pono's capabilities and had gotten in touch with Musk about the idea of hooking up a PonoPlayer to one of Musk's Tesla vehicles. Young wanted Musk to compare the results to Tesla's stock sound system, but immediately they hit a snag: The set-up would require a wire to connect to the Pono. "Oh, we can't have a wire," Young remembers Musk saying. Despite this being a conversation only about the necessities of a demo, the notion of the visible wire in a Tesla marked the end of Musk's interest in Pono.
"Elon just didn't get it," Young says in the book, which was co-written by his primary Pono compatriot Phil Baker. "Music. Not everyone hears it. But given a chance, they would feel it."
It's a curious historical footnote—a moment in time before Musk was so widely reviled, that somehow still reveals a lot about the man we know today. Musk put about as much thought into demo'ing a high-definition audio player as he does with, well, entire government budgets.
(BONUS: pair this piece with Michael Owen's recent Atlantic article on how Bluetooth speakers ruined music, and you may start to think about what we've really lost by prioritizing cheap, large libraries of disposable audio over communal musical moments shared in physical space.)
What If We Were Wrong About Pono? [Nate Rogers / Stereogum]
