Neil Young reveals plan to take a bite out of Apple with $399 PonoMusic player and download store

PonoPlayer to offer superior sound quality to Apple's downlaodable files

Aims to recreate the sound quality of vinyl in a digital download

Will require users to buy their music again in new format



Legendary musician Neil Young has revealed plans for a high end digital music player and download service to take on Apple.

Called Pono Music, it will use a $399 player, and will raise money via Kickstarter.

It will offer 'lossless' downloads at a quality far higher than those offered by Apple or most other music services.

The $399 Pono Player will play high quality audio files, and each player can hold between 100 and 500 songs

'It's about the music, real music,' said said Neil Young, founder and chairman of PonoMusic.



'We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does exactly that.



'We couldn't be more excited about bringing PonoMusic to the market.'

The gadget, announced at the SXSW festival in Austin, is described as a 'revolutionary movement'.

Young has previously hit out at the quality of music downloads.

Because files are compressed to make them smaller, information is removed - leading to a lower quality.

'The simplest way to describe what we’ve accomplished is that we’ve liberated the music of the artist from the digital file and restored it to its original artistic quality – as it was in the studio,' he said in a previous post on his Facebook page.

'Hearing Pono for the first time is like that first blast of daylight when you leave a movie theatre on a sun-filled day.'

Neil Yioung said 'We want to move digital music into the 21st century and PonoMusic does exactly that'

'Our mission is to bring the highest-quality digital music to discerning, passionate consumers, who wish to experience music the way the artists intended, with emotion, detail and power intact,' the firm says.



'Our goal was to offer the highest quality digital music available from all the major labels with the world's greatest sounding, user-friendly portable music player.

'We've achieved our goal and we are excited to launch our Kickstarter campaign next week to invite music lovers everywhere to join the PonoMusic community and reserve a PonoPlayer for their own enjoyment,' said John Hamm, CEO of PonoMusic.

The PonoPlayer has an LCD touch screen interface, and 128GB of memory allowing it to store 100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums.



The PonoPlayer has an LCD touch screen interface, and 128GB of memory allowing it to store 100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums.

Memory cards can be used to store and play different playlists and additional collections of music.



The PonoPlayer will be sold at PonoMusic.com for $399 MSRP and is available for pre-order at a discounted price on Kickstarter.com as of March 15th.



PonoMusic recommended earbud and headphone products will also be available for purchase on PonoMusic.com.

PonoMusic worked with Colorado firm Ayre to create the service.