If you’re skeptical about Neil Young’s pricey new music download service, you’ve got company — inside Young’s company, even.

Product engineers for the shaggy rock icon’s newly released Pono digital music player have privately admitted they aren’t convinced that the high-resolution audio files it plays have any significant technical advantage over CD-quality files, sources told The Post.

Instead, Young’s Kickstarter-funded PonoMusic has decided to hawk so-called “hi-res” files as a marketing strategy, betting that numbers-obsessed audiophiles will pay up for the higher advertised digital sampling rates, tech insiders said.

“It has been clear throughout that Neil Young himself is all about the hi-res,” one source close to the situation said. “There’s no doubt in his mind that it sounds better.”

But for some of Pono’s other tech-savvy execs, selling files with more musical data than what’s available on a CD is mainly “a business decision,” the source said.

“Their take is that the serious audiophile has convinced himself he has to have it,” the source added. “They’re saying, ‘We don’t necessarily believe it, but nobody’s going to buy it if we don’t do it.’”

Neither Young nor Pono responded to requests for comment.

Young is a rare, high-profile crusader for audiophiles, who increasingly have felt jilted by an industry that’s focused on what’s cheap and convenient, packing low-quality mp3s onto smartphones and squeezing speakers into sleek, tiny shapes that look better than they sound.

But Young’s insistence on hi-res — and high-priced — digital music files has divided audio experts. While most agree that mp3s sound worse than CD-quality files, there’s fierce debate over whether still-bigger files tagged with specs like “24-bit/192kHz” (a CD is rated at 16 bits/44.1kHz) are actually better.

“Of course hi-res files are better,” says David Chesky, a New York-based composer and digital recording pioneer who is also CEO of HDTracks, an online distributor of hi-res music. “You run into problems when you downsample (a hi-res file to CD-quality) … it gets grungier and closed in. It sounds like your 14-foot ceiling came down to 8 feet.”

Others argue, however, that the superior sound of hi-res files from services like Pono and HDTracks comes almost entirely from fresh remastering at high-tech recording studios like Chesky’s — and not from the increased size of the data files they’re peddling.

Indeed, some critics liken hi-res audio files to the new generation of “4K” high-definition TVs, whose staggering pixel counts are becoming less relevant to their actual picture quality.

“I think Neil is barking up the wrong tree,” says Lukasz Fikus, a digital audio designer whose high-priced Lampizator components have earned a following among hard-core enthusiasts.

The benefits of hi-res files may be detectable on high-dollar stereo systems, but “the difference is so miniscule that it’s not even worth talking about,” according to Fikus.

The sound quality on Led Zeppelin’s second album is notoriously poor, Fikus notes. A hi-res version of it won’t change that, he says, although a recent remastering by Jimmy Page helped.

“There are many, many factors that contribute to the final pleasure (of digital music),” Fikus adds. “The density of the media file is only one of those factors — and probably not the first priority, but almost the last.”

Hi-res files can occupy as much as six times the space on a hard drive as a CD-quality file, and can easily be twice as expensive. Last week, a top seller on the PonoMusic site was a hi-res version of Young’s 1972 album “Harvest,” listed at $21.79.

The Pono version may sound better on Pono players than previous versions that die-hard fans have downloaded, but it won’t be because it’s rated at 24bits/192kHz, says Monty Montgomery, executive director of Xiph.org, a nonprofit group for freelance audio and video engineers.

“Neil is advocating for good sound, and I think that is a noble and good thing that will benefit people,” Montgomery says. “I just object to where science is being misrepresented.”

Last week, Sony relaunched its Walkman as a hi-res player priced at an eye-popping $1,100. In marketing materials, Sony has pushed the idea that music files with lower sampling rates result in incomplete, “stair-step”-shaped waves with accordingly jagged sound, whereas hi-res files have enough sampled data to smooth out the curves.

Nonsense, says Montgomery, who explains that the samples actually serve as plot points that are used by music software to draw continuous, analog-form waves. CD-quality files are more than enough to generate smooth waves for all frequencies detectable by human ears, he adds.

Indeed, Montgomery says he took the matter up in fall 2011 with Pono execs, who asked about a possible demonstration to prove his point as they mapped out the design of the new player.

“I said, ‘Yes, I would be happy to demonstrate this to Neil himself,’” Montgomery said. “They said, ‘That sounds great and we’ll get back to you,’ and they never did.”