On Tuesday April 15, the Kickstarter Campaign for the PonoPlayer, launched by none other than Rock and Roll Hall Of Famer Neil Young, went in the books as the third most successful Kickstarter Campaign of all time. Before we get into the device and Kickstarter Campaign, I have to point out that I am a huge Neil Young fan. That said, here is some reading music for this article:

The PonoPlayer is an incredibly unique device, much more than an MP3 player or streaming device. The device was built to give listeners the highest possible sound quality:

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. ¹

The Kickstarter campaign, and Pono in general, is about much more than a music player. Pono represents an entirely new ecosystem:

the PonoMusic Store and the PonoPlayer together deliver stunningly clear music, the next best thing to hearing it in the recording studio. The PonoPlayer is a purpose-built device, designed by world-renowned audio engineers, to do one thing, and one thing exceedingly well – to let you hear high quality PonoMusic in its original quality for the original experience.²

Standard MP3 files have a bit rate of 192kbps or 256kbps. The PonoPlayer, on the other hand, was built to support higher resolution files – CD lossless quality, High-resolution recordings, Higher-resolution recordings, and Ultra-high resolution recordings – that have bit rates that are orders of magnitude higher, between 1411 kbps and 9216 kbps.³ The player utilizes the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) audio format.⁴

Neil Young and the entire Pono team have done an incredible job of rallying support to the new ecosystem. So much, in-fact, that every major record label and a huge number of independent labels will list their music on PonoMusic. Further, many artists have voiced their support for the PonoPlayer. From Beck, to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, to James Taylor, to Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, countless artists are coming out in support of Pono.⁵

The PonoPlayer device is set to retail at $399, with whole albums on PonoMusic expected to be priced around $14.99 -$24.99. The device will ship with a total of 128GB of storage, 64GB built in 64GB on a removable microSD card. That ammount of storage is necessary to hold such high quality music files; 128GB equals about 800 Ultra-high resolution recordings. The device itself and the PonoMusic marketplace function very much like the standard mp3 players, think of the iTunes/iPod relationship.

In total, the Pono Kickstarter campaign raised a whopping $6,225,354 from 18,220 backers. That total puts Pono as the third most successful Kickstarter campaign, behind the Pebble Smart Watch – $10,266,845 raised – and the OUYA video game console – $8,596,474 raised.

Upon the completion of the campaign, Neil Young wrote a thank you letter to all the supporters. One of the passages really highlights Pono’s goals and the mission as a whole:

Finally, quality enters the listening space so that we can all hear and feel what the artists created, the way they heard and felt it.

This is done when the artist makes the best available, wanting to share it with you. It happens when the artist lets you hear and feel more than what is on your CD or MP3 of any song. CDs and MP3s are derived from the original masters, and now, with the PonoPlayer, you can finally feel the master in all its glory, in its native resolution, CD quality or higher, the way the artist made it, exactly. That’s the beauty of Pono.⁶

Neil Young recently sat down with Zack O’Malley Greenburg of Forbes to discuss the PonoPlayer and some of the goals behind the project. The interview is wildly enlightening: