To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission to Save High-Quality Audio

Musician Young (Waging Heavy Peace) and consumer electronics developer Baker passionately tell of their quest for premium sound in this narrowly focused memoir. Their quest involved creating the PonoPlayer in 2012, a portable device that could play uncompressed audio files, as an alternative to what Young felt were MP3’s poor sound quality. Young, an audio evangelist, argues that digital music is too compressed and muddy, whereas “if the highest-quality music audio were available at a reasonable price... everybody would hear and feel better music.” He and Baker write about their attempt to build Pono, which ranged from haggling with music industry types (“most companies... had to put up millions of dollars for those rights. I was able to get the three major record companies to do it without paying those huge fees”) to launching a multimillion-dollar Kickstarter campaign in 2014. However, Pono was discontinued only three years later, when Omnifone, the music service company that hosted Pono’s store, stopped operating. There’s a great story in here about Pono and the debate over sound quality standards in the music industry, but the authors are too close to the subject to bring it out. The narrative gets too far into the weeds for the casual reader, but tech junkies will find lots to enjoy. (Sept.)