Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music

Pono's mission is to provide the best possible listening experience of your favorite digital music.

What is PonoMusic?

"Pono" is Hawaiian for righteous. What righteous means to our founder Neil Young is honoring the artist’s intention, and the soul of music. That’s why he’s been on a quest, for a few years now, to revive the magic that has been squeezed out of digital music. In the process of making music more convenient – easier to download, and more portable – we have sacrificed the emotional impact that only higher quality music can deliver. However, the world has changed in the last 10 years – technology has solved some of the underlying problems that forced that tradeoff. You no longer have to choose between quality and convenience when listening to music – you can have both. This is the fundamental idea behind PonoMusic.

Pono Music - Where Your Soul Rediscovers Music

First Edition PonoPlayers: Black & Yellow

Pono's mission is to provide the best possible listening experience of your favorite music. We want to be very clear that PonoMusic is not a new audio file format or standard. PonoMusic is an end-to-end ecosystem for music lovers to get access to and enjoy their favorite music exactly as the artist created it, at the recording resolution they chose in the studio. We offer PonoMusic customers the highest resolution digital music available. PonoMusic is more than just a high-resolution music store and player; it is a grassroots movement to keep the heart of music beating. PonoMusic aims to preserve the feeling, spirit, and emotion that the artists put in their original studio recordings.

We are pursuing this vision by building a system for the entire music listening experience – from the original master recordings to the PonoMusic.com Store to the portable PonoPlayer. So now you’ll hear the nuances, the soft touches, and the ends on the echo – the texture and the emotion of the music the artist worked so hard to create. 

Please see FAQ at the bottom of this page for answers to the most commonly asked questions. 

Why should you support our Kickstarter?

PonoMusic is about a lot of things, but first and foremost it’s about the connection between the artists and their fans – the music, and the people who can’t live without it. We see Kickstarter as a way to strengthen those bonds by letting musicians and music fans get behind the thing that matters most to all of us – the music itself.   

Our Kickstarter is about bringing creators and consumers together.  It is about the formation of a community that values the experience of listening to music the way the artists made it, at the highest quality they can obtain.

We also wanted to allow music fans to connect with their favorite artists in a special way through the campaign - we are offering limited edition Signature Series PonoPlayers from artists such as:

Pearl Jam, Neil Young, Tom Petty, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Foo Fighters, Willie Nelson, Patti Smith, Arcade Fire, Beck, Dave Mathews Band, Herbie Hancock, Norah Jones, Lenny Kravitz, Pearl Jam, My Morning Jacket, and James Taylor and more coming!

These special edition PonoPlayers have laser-engraved signature of the artist, and ship to you pre-loaded with the artist's choice of their two favorite albums.  We will be adding additional limited edition Signature Series PonoPlayers throughout the campaign as more artists step forward - so keep watching our pledge levels on the right to see new artists as they become available.

Artist Signature Series: Neil Young

More about the PonoPlayer...

The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built device, designed by world-renowned audio engineers, to do one thing and one thing exceedingly well - let you hear high quality PonoMusic as close to its original recorded resolution as possible, and therefore, the original musical experience. 

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Your PonoPlayer works in much the same way as most other portable music devices. The PonoMusic App (for Mac or Windows PC) provides you access to the PonoMusic.comStore, where you can browse, search, purchase and download high-resolution music to your computer.  You then simply connect your PonoPlayer micro USB cable to your computer's USB port in order to sync your favorite music and playlists. Then you can enjoy your music on your PonoPlayer at the same quality level as the original recording.  The touchscreen LCD allows for easy “swipe” navigation between songs, albums, artists, genres, and playlists. It also allows you to change the settings in the player to suit your personal taste.

The PonoPlayer has two output jacks. The first is a normal mini-stereo output specially designed for headphones and is meant for personal listening. The second is a stereo mini-plug analog output specifically designed for listening on your home audio system, in your car, or with your Sonos Connect – so you can share the PonoMusic experience with your friends and family.

[First Edition Yellow PonoPlayer]

First Edition Yellow PonoPlayer

What do we consider to be high quality digital music?

Generally speaking, mp3 files have a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps.   These are highly compressed files and are much smaller in size than higher resolution music files.  The good news is that you can keep a lot of mp3 files in a small amount of storage on a portable player or mobile device.  The bad news is that they’ve lost a lot of the musical information that often reveals the most pleasant and satisfying aspects of the music. It is mostly that sense of realism, dynamic range, and detail that higher resolution recordings typically capture in a way that restores the emotion in the song.

On the “low end” of higher resolution music (CD lossless, 44.1kHz/16 bit), PonoMusic files have about 6 times more musical information than a typical mp3.  With ultra-high resolution recordings (192kHz/24 bit), the difference between a PonoMusic digital file and an mp3 is about 30 times more data from which your player reconstructs the “song”.   

The PonoMusic.com Store uses FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format as its standard, for compatibility, although the PonoPlayer can play most popular high-res music formats from other sources. PonoMusic has a quality spectrum, ranging from really good to really great, depending on the quality of the available master recordings:       

CD lossless quality recordings: 1411 kbps (44.1 kHz/16 bit) FLAC files

High-resolution recordings: 2304 kbps (48 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files 

Higher-resolution recordings: 4608 kbps (96 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files

Ultra-high resolution recordings: 9216 kbps (192 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files    

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The Evolution of the PonoPlayer Design...

Over the three years of PonoPlayer development, we considered many different designs and concepts. One of the early ideas was to make an accessory for a smartphone that contained storage for the music tracks along with advanced audio electronics. The phone’s display would be used to navigate and play the songs, but with the songs would be stored in the accessory’s memory. A Bluetooth connection would communicate between the phone and the accessory to select and play the desired song. This design was dismissed, for now, because it was very complicated to use and required two devices to play music.   

We talked a lot about making the player thin, to snap onto the back of a phone so it could be carried as one unit. But that meant you’d need a different player design for each phone model, and we found that it was not possible to put some of the large audio components – required for the best performance – into a thin package.  This led us to design the accessory in the shape of a triangular “Toblerone” shaped chocolate bar.  It allowed us to use larger audio components and to separate them far enough apart to prevent electrical interference between the various subsystems. It also allowed us to use a large cylindrical battery that’s much more efficient than a flat battery.

Early PonoPlayer Prototypes

 It then became obvious that if we added a touch display, we could make the player completely self-contained.  It wouldn’t need to be tied to your phone and there would be no interruptions from an incoming call while you were enjoying your music. It would be the best playback device ever for listening to high quality digital music. We realized that music this good deserved a truly purpose built, dedicated device to enjoy it. There was no “Swiss Army knife” good enough for the music we wanted you to hear.   

This triangular shape also has additional benefits: it can be held upright for one-hand operation or it can sit flat on your desktop or home stereo system. The display automatically rotates depending on the orientation of the device. But the best thing about this shape is that we were able to include the best sounding audio components with absolutely no compromises. The PonoPlayer will certainly be recognizable on your desk as the unique product it is – the world’s best sounding portable digital music player.