August 2, 2019
For singer-songwriter Young (Waging Heavy Peace), music is meant to be felt deeply and experienced, and for decades he has lamented that the quality of recorded music presentation has progressively decreased since the advent of the compact disc, with each digital advance diminishing the listening experience. With coauthor and business partner Baker, Young chronicles his attempt to combat the problem through a grassroots campaign to create the Pono music player and music store. The affordable and high-quality player tried to re-create the sound the artists originally intended. The story involves technological development, fundraising (eventually with a successful Kickstarter campaign), business negotiation, and product creation and experimentation, but, ultimately, while reviews were mostly positive, the Pono faced daunting economic and business challenges and its online store closed. VERDICT Young remains a crusader for high-quality audio, and he tells a fascinating tale, albeit with much technical and business narrative detail, which will appeal mostly to tech, business, and music buffs interested in the future of how we consume, preserve, and listen to recorded music.--James Collins, Morristown-Morris Twp. P.L., NJ
Copyright 2019 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
July 29, 2019
Musician Young (Waging Heavy Peace) and consumer electronics developer Baker passionately tell of their quest for premium sound in this narrowly focused memoir. Their quest involved creating the PonoPlayer in 2012, a portable device that could play uncompressed audio files, as an alternative to what Young felt were MP3’s poor sound quality. Young, an audio evangelist, argues that digital music is too compressed and muddy, whereas “if the highest-quality music audio were available at a reasonable price... everybody would hear and feel better music.” He and Baker write about their attempt to build Pono, which ranged from haggling with music industry types (“most companies... had to put up millions of dollars for those rights. I was able to get the three major record companies to do it without paying those huge fees”) to launching a multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaign in 2014. However, Pono was discontinued only three years later, when Omnifone, the music service company that hosted Pono’s store, stopped operating. There’s a great story in here about Pono and the debate over sound quality standards in the music industry, but the authors are too close to the subject to bring it out. The narrative gets too far into the weeds for the casual reader, but tech junkies will find lots to enjoy.