According to Neil Young, he and Steve Jobs were working on a iPod that would handle master-quality audio files!
Young has always been the first to argue that MP3s suck — and that they only offer about 5% the fidelity of vinyl and other ways to playback.
He’s a huge proponent of lossless filetypes, saying:
“If you take a 2192 file – the highest res recorded music today – and you compare that to a vinyl record or analogue tape master, they’re both pretty similar [in sound quality]. The copy is very good. If that’s 100%, now we have 5% with mp3… The problem is that there’s no alternative living in that space. You can’t associate poor quality with convenience.”
He also talked about how with technology today, he thinks we should be able to have a “modern-day iPod” that can handle lossless — which would mean that “full lossless audio files would take 30 minutes per album to download onto a device ├óΓé¼ΓÇ£ and that he believed a portable device that carried 30 albums was possible.”
So why doesn’t he just make one already?
Turns out, he’d been in the thick of doing just that — with Steve Jobs!
“I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it.”
Sadly, not much has happened with it since Steve Jobs’ death.
So cool, though… would you want to pay for something expensive that only plays 30 albums? Have we gotten to the point now that we have more storage for hundreds of albums than we’d ever need so there’s no looking back to something so small? Especially for just audio quality?
Because let’s be honest here — who is so unhappy with the quality of the average iTunes download that they’d need this at this point? Is there even a big enough market past audiophiles?
It’s hard to tell, let us know how U’d feel about something like this in the comments!
[Image via WENN.]