Neil Young is a great musician. Well, I've enjoyed a few of his songs, and plenty of people have enjoyed lots more of them – enough to give him a decades-spanning career in the music business.

I'm not sure, though, that this quite qualifies him to tangle with mathematicians waving Nyquist-Shannon's theorem, who are lining up to tell him his Pono music player – which crashed through its $800,000 Kickstarter finance-raising target within a day of being announced – won't actually give people (14,600 backers pledging nearly $5m so far) the benefits they hope for.

Pono is the latest in a long line of attempts to give people "high-quality" recorded audio. It will be able to play music that has been digitised in 24-bit audio sampled at 192 kilohertz (kHz), rather than the 16-bit 44.1kHz audio that CDs use. If you remember the ill-fated DVD-audio and SACD discs of a decade ago, you'll know this song already. Barely anyone pays for such high-quality digital audio, because they can't hear the difference from the medium-quality variety.

Pono's team says otherwise: "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," wails the Kickstarter page. "You no longer have to choose between quality and convenience when listening to music – you can have both," it says.

It's true that bandwidth has expanded hugely over the past 10 years; we're not working on MP3s encoded at 64 kilobits per second (kbps) so they can be squeezed down a phone line connected to a dialup modem. But during that period the ability of our ears to distinguish sound has not changed; 44.1kHz, 16-bit audio sampling is good enough to reproduce any music. In promoting higher quality recordings, people often say that some early CDs from the 1980s had horrible sound compared to vinyl. That was because sound engineers at the time overcorrected the treble balance, as they were used to engineering for vinyl, which didn't reproduce high frequencies well.

CDs, and digital-to-audio converters, reproduce pretty much everything better than vinyl. To say so is to spit on the holy writ of many audiophiles, but there's science behind it. Nyquist-Shannon's theorem is a neat piece of maths that shows how quickly you have to sample an analogue signal to turn it faithfully into a digital one. Every sound is a combination of multiple frequencies at different volumes. To digitise sound, you have to capture all the frequencies. The theorem shows that, to capture a sound at frequency X, you need to take a digital sample double that frequency. Now mix in that the absolute limit of human hearing is 20kHz (and for most people more like 14kHz or less), and you realise the 44.1kHz sampling rate for CDs is fine. It will capture everything, assuming your sampler is any good.

Then there's the question of 16-bit audio. Really, is 16-bit enough to capture a sufficient range of volumes in what began as a smoothly varying analogue signal? This isn't so easily settled; 16-bit gives you 65,636 possible sound levels, while 24-bit increases that to 16.7m. It's conceivable that using more bits to encode the audio (while sticking with the same sampling rate) will improve the sound – if you have wonderful hearing. But most of us don't. Studios tend to record in 24-bit because they don't want to lose any data. But that is then mixed down to 16-bit. It's possible, if you're a mad-keen audiophile, to get 24-bit audio mixes – but they aren't cheap. And it's highly unlikely that in a blind test you would hear the difference.

So given that Pono is going to play music where the sampling rate and bit depth won't improve reproduction, why do people want it? Simple: those extra numbers are a specification, and if there's one thing certain groups of men (it's always men) love above all other things, it's a specification on a list. So Pono offers you a feature – for a premium – that you can't actually perceive. It's like invisible clothes or odourless perfume. Marketing people must be looking at it with envy.

I do also see a real problem with Pono, though (because listening to things you can't hear won't hurt you). It's prism-shaped. So it won't fit comfortably into anything, bar a handbag. And I just can't see many audiophile Neil Young fans going for that.