Neil Young writes about his quest to deliver high quality audio with the story behind the ill-fated Pono player and the development of Xstream high resolution streaming. In To Feel the Music co-written with Phil Baker and due to be published by Benbella Books on 26th September 2019, he tells the story of his efforts to improve the quality of audio that you hear. The book takes you through how the sound was and is compromised by technology and record companies, and instead of improving over time like other technologies has generally become worse.
In the book Neil describes the deterioration of studio quality music as it has been replaced by digital CDs, MP3s and now low-price, low-quality streaming. He goes on to show how he gathered others committed to his goal of delivering music the way artists intend for it to sound to eventually develop the Neil Young Archives, a HiRes streaming site using Xstream that gives users unprecedented access to all of Neil’s music in the best quality their devices can handle.
He also offers his own unique perspective on the Pono player venture which was intended to produce an affordable, portable music player offering the highest audio quality. Although it attracted huge interest it did not achieve the commercial success that was hoped for and ultimately was closed down. Undaunted Neil went on to produce the Neil Young Archives developing Xstream which is based on Orastream technology. Primephonic also uses Orastream technology to deliver its specialist Classical music streaming service.
Neil Young on his blog, The NYA Times-Contrarian writes, “The issue of improving audio quality has been one of the most important things we’ve been doing for decades, and something I focus on every day. We spent a year writing this [book] and I think you’ll find it interesting and informative.”
For further information on the Neil Young Archives go here, and to pre-order the book from the publisher go here.
