The Vergecast - Neil Young says the Macbook Pro has “Fisher-Price” audio quality

Episode Date: January 28, 2020

Musician Neil Young and tech executive Phil Baker have been trying to push the tech industry to make it easier for consumers to listen to high-quality audio for almost a decade now. The duo’s hi-res music player Pono aimed to fix problems they said plagued MP3 players like the iPod and music software like iTunes — like compressed, lossy, and low-fidelity audio files that were not similar enough to their original recordings. But five years after the Pono was released, Young believes the tech industry has still not advanced enough for consumers to easily listen to high resolution audio. The two men’s new book, To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission To Save High Quality Audio, details the hurdles they had to overcome to create the Pono, as well as what the tech industry should do in order to get consumers to realize what their missing with streaming and “CD-quality” music. In an interview with The Vergecast, Young tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel that even though Grammy-winning artists are able to make music almost anywhere they go on their laptop or mobile devices, they’re still sacrificing on audio fidelity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hey everyone, it's Neil I from the Vergecast on this week's interview. We've got the one and only Neil Young. That's right, Neil Young, the rock star.

And I'm honest with you, I think I pissed him off a little, but in like a good way, in a good way. Neil just wrote a book with longtime tech executive Phil Baker called To Feel the Music, which was about their quest to build a Pono music player and make high-res audio happen. We talked about his feelings on the tech industry, why music sounds worse now, I pushed him a little bit on some of his ideas about why music sounds worse now that had what I would say, the expected outcome. But mostly he told me that he really just wants people to listen to great sounding music, which how can you fight that?

Honestly, it was a great conversation, a lot of energy, a lot of fun. He's Neil Young. Check it out. Neil Young and Phil Baker, welcome to the Vergecast. Thank you. It's great to be here. Thanks. Neil, let's start with you.

You have been working on, obviously, music. for a long time, but in particular, increasing the quality of music for a long time. And you've just written a book with Phil called To Feel the Music about that process, about making the pono. What inspired you to get into the sort of the tech side of this world? Well, I live in it. It's what I do. I've always been in it. So you might say I'm inspired to try to save the sound of music from technology. I appreciate that. So a challenge I have as a reviewer is somebody who writes about music who, Virchcast listeners know, I care a lot about audio quality and music gear.

You know, with TVs, I can just count the pixels. With phone screens, I can say, look, it's sharper. With cameras, I can say, look, the photo is clearer. Audio seems more subjective even though it isn't. It's much harder to convince people that there's tiers of quality I have found. Is there a way that you think about it or you talk about it or that you think people should be listening to understand the differences here? Because that to me is the foundational problem of the whole thing. Okay.

There is a way, but you have to associate visuals with audio so that you can make the comparison. For instance, if you're watching a show on, say, you know, like Hulu or Netflix or, you know, you know, whatever, one of these shows, it's on, you know, streamed. And you're watching it and where you, the place you're at, watching it, you notice every once in a while it gets really fuzzy looking. It's like, you know, it's not clear and then it comes back. You know what streaming looks like when it on a screen? Yep. How it gets, you know, like very soft and kind of like fuzzy looking and not really there.

And then eventually the signal improves and it comes back. Okay? Yeah. All right, well, when the signal improves and comes back to perfect, that's where we were up until the digital age began. Okay, basically that's where everything was at. Analog was all there. Everything was clear like that.

Now, if you take the softest looking thing, that's where we're at now. That's where Spotify is. That's where Apple Music is. That's where the streaming companies are streaming the lowest common denominator of quality to avoid having dropouts. So I agree with you. I think the question I have is, what should people be listening for?

With a screen, I can tell them what to look at. I can point at it. You can't tell them what to listen for or go, you can't do that. It's a personal thing. You have to feel it. That's why it's hard to explain because it's a feeling.

When you put on a phonograph and you listen to an old record that was made all from analog and it's coming over a vinyl record player or something equivalent to that like it's super high res in digital, which isn't even equivalent, but the best we have,

when you listen to music and you hear it, all of it, that's what it is. It makes your body feel different. It makes your senses, it wakes you up, and it makes you feel what's going on. That's what's missing. If you take all of that away, that's where we are. So I read the book,

And the argument here that you're making, just to make it a little bit more accessible for audience, is... I don't want to argue about what's accessible for the audience. If the audience wants to hear music, they haven't had a chance if all they're doing is listening to Spotify. So there's no way they could ever know. They could not know. I have the ability to talk to you from a long time ago and now, because I'm like three-quarters of a century old. Okay, so I can still remember when everything sounded great. But now it's been a long time since everything has sounded great.

So none of the people that you're trying to convince have anything to relate to. How can they relate to it? They don't even know what we're talking about. The thing is that people who were there know that it was really a lot better. And now what we have is music is basically a content deliverable. It is wallpaper. It's the background. It's the sound of a ringtone. It has nothing to do with the quality of a top-notch recording developed by artists in the studio so that a musician or singer or someone can emote and you can actually feel it. That's what's gone. So there's no comparison. You can't ask somebody one of your audience who may not have heard quality. They may have only heard what they think is great, and music is great. There's no doubt music is great.

But the music that's out there today on Spotify and Apple is terrible. It's shitty. That's basically what it is. There's nothing there. It's like that part of when you're watching a streaming news show or something, and it gets really fuzzy, and then it comes back. Where the fuzziest thing that you see is what you hear all the time on Spotify. It's less than 5% of the digital masters of a hundred,

high-res master, and a high-res digital master is truthfully just not as deep as an analog master. So we've come a long way into a dark hole. You know, you can't explain it. You can't, you can't say to people, well, what do I, what should I look for? Because that's the quandary. There's the people that you're trying to convince have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Where are they going to go to hear the difference? Well, so I mean, this was kind of one of a question that. I've been dying to ask you. So there is a vinyl resurgence going on right now. I have a huge library of vinyl records.

I have a vintage 70s war amplifier, you know, the whole thing. And you see that resurgence. You see vinyl sales are steady to up. You see people are still interested in record players. Do you think that that is a valid comparison? You think people should be A, B testing that stuff to the digital stuff and they should hear it? because then, because that stuff is so prevalent now, you might be able to say, well, you can feel it differently.

Pay attention to this. And that's really what I was getting at. Okay, so if you have a record that's a classic record that you know is great, that you have and you got the old record that was made then from the analog master, and then you go to Spotify or Apple and listen to the same exact song through the speakers that you're listening to your phonograph through, and the amp that you're everything, you know, put it the same, just change the source that you're listening to. Then you'll hear the difference. The thing is going to new vinyl, you're, you know, you're at the mercy of marketing gurus at record companies, which is, oh, man, vinyl is happening.

We've got to make it in vinyl. So they make it in vinyl from the master that actually made the CD. So you're listening to a digital master that may be, you know, like 20% of what it could be. and it's on vinyl. You're not going to hear it, so that you've got to be very careful that you know what you're listening to. So if you want to do these comparisons, you have to listen to an old vinyl record or one that has an actual provenance listed on it

that shows you where that vinyl music come from, because it's vinyl is just a reflection of something. It's instead of being a reconstitution like digital, ones and zero is going together to fool you into thinking you're hearing music. Whereas vinyl is a reflection of something that actually happened, like Mount Shasta in Lake Shasta. You look at it on a perfectly calm day with no waves,

you see a beautiful reflection of Mount Shasta in Lake Shasta. That's what analog is. That's the way records work. It's a reflection of the sound. So when you're listening to a vinyl record that was made from a digital master that was used to make, you know, like Spotify or Apple or CDs or something like that, you'll never get the difference.

So you gotta be careful that you're not marketed into a hole by people going, oh, vinyl's great. Vinyl is great if what's put into it is great. So you have to be careful. You know, on my records, I list where they came from and everything. And they're all analog masters. Many, probably 80% are all from analog masters on my stuff.

But that's not the way everybody is. They'll put out a vinyl version of a CD because they know that people like vinyl. Those people are getting ripped off. I hate to tell you that. But buying new vinyl, you have to be really careful what you're getting because it's just a rip-off. Yeah, there's nothing actually one of my biggest pet peeves is badly mastered modern vinyl. You can hear it right away. The format is not well-suited for the dynamic range of a CD.

So that kind of leads me to the next question, which is so many artists today write their songs on tour, in a hotel room on a MacBook, they're not starting with the big analog studio. They're not starting with tape. They're starting digitally. Does that carry through? Is that, is even worth it to talk about the output format when, you know, it's teenagers and bedrooms writing hits right now? What's the problem with teenagers and bedrooms writing hits? Well, they're starting on their MacBooks, recording straight to MP3. Yeah, I know, but if that's what they want to put out as a record, that's a problem. Right, but I'm saying, look, I'm looking at the new 16-inch Mac Pro, like Apple gave me a review in it. They said, look at all the artists who use this thing

with Garage Man to start, right? But you're saying that shouldn't be where recording starts. It's a piece of crap. Are you kidding? That's Fisher Price Quality. It's like Captain Kangaroo, your new engineer. The MacBook Pro, what are you talking about? You can't get anything out of that thing. The only way you can get it out of it is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you can't get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has. Because they're not aimed at quality. They're aimed at consumerism.

That's what Steve Jobs told me, told me that exact thing. We're making products for consumers, not quality. So they don't want audio quality. They don't want to spend a lot of time on that. Audio quality for your reference and for anybody else that's listening is deeper than visual quality. You can look at it, you can look at things and think you're seeing everything with a high-res, whatever you're looking at in a picture. But true audio dimension is so deep.

There's so many, there's so much data there if you want to capture it all. In the echo, in the softness and the loudness and the difference, as things are decaying and getting smaller and smaller as they go away, that's part of the beauty of sound and the beauty of music based on that. is that you can hear all of the detail. Now, when you talk about doing that on a MacBook Pro, it makes me barf. This is where we are. But I see so many artists.

We talk to artists. We interview them, and they say, look, we did a video with a guy. Lots of Grammys, works for lots of people. And he's like, I assemble Sambles in the back of my car using my MacBook Pro. I love it. This is how music is made. I never won a Grammy for music, so I wouldn't know about that quality. Sure.

I'm just saying, like, we talk to the people who are making the moment. and they're like, I assemble samples in my MacBook Pro. It's not about money, it's not about hits. It's about quality. It's about sound. It's about museum quality. It's about the real thing, the facts, the real sound. What happened when you opened your mouth and sang?

What went into the air? That's what we're not getting with the new technology. The older technology used to give you a reflection of it so that you could still feel it. Today, it's reconstituted, it's poorly sampled, It's garbage that has less bits to save people memory, which is not even relevant anymore. We have so much memory, it's got to come out our ears,

yet we're still saving memory, saving quality to, so we can store more crap. It's just we've gone down this bad street, and we're way down it. So if you talk to somebody about quality, and they're using anything from that, they're not going to hear it. They're going to hear today's quality,

and they may be great as far as today's. case quality goes. But to me, it's just like it doesn't matter. So there are sounds that you maybe couldn't have gotten with analog, that you maybe couldn't have gotten with Final. I'm thinking a lot of the EDM today is sort of outside the dynamic range of pre-digital stuff. Something like the big 808 sound in hip-hop, a little bit farther afield of, you know, it's gotten louder and louder and louder. That stuff is a little bit farther afield of what analog could do. That stuff has really exploded with digital. Do you see that relationship between the kinds of music people are making and the tools, even if they are inferior, that enable them to do it.

Well, if you look at loudness, loudness is a function of less dynamics. Okay? The louder something is, the less dynamics it has. If you take everything and make it all loud, nothing's soft. So when you do this compression thing and you make everything loud like these records are made, and bless their pointed little heads, they're making great records, they're fantastic, it's the sound of the time, I got no problem with that, but I'm not from this time. I'm from a time when if you want to listen to a symphony orchestra, if you want to listen to a great acoustic guitar,

you want to listen to somebody sing or a band play in a room together, you mean like it really happened, not something that somebody built in their garage using a MacBook Pro, not something like that, but a real piece of sound that was actually captured. That's the difference. And we're so far away from that now that to try to, for you to try to compare that and tell somebody what to listen to, it's like asking somebody to go back like five generations or something. So it's like not really realistic to think that you could explain this to someone who's only listened to Spotify and Apple.

They'll never hear it. So it does seem, and I was reading the book and you talk about your interactions with Steve Jobs and the iPod and trying to get them to support the five. formats. But it seems like with the iPod in particular, the acceleration towards convenience over quality just went faster than ever. And it's still going. But there are these attempts. Like Apple made the HomePod, which shows all this like computer process beam forming. That's a bunch of bullshit. It's all math. The whole digital thing is math. All you have to do is look at the numbers and you can see there's no way it's ever going to have the detail. It's limited by what it is. So Apple in particular will tell me that they will never do

uncompressed audio because they fully believe no one can hear it. Yeah, well, that's right. They can't hear it. So why should they believe anybody? They fully believe no one can hear it? Yeah, I mean, I've asked them a bunch of times. You know, their title exists. That's what Steve Jobs did when Steve Jobs went home from working at Apple with all the dickheads.

You know what he did? You listened to vinyl. Yeah. The reason nobody can hear it is because nobody makes it. It's just not there. Have you ever, have you ever worn AirPods in your life? Yeah, I've had those. The AirPods? What do you think?

You mean Apple's wireless headphones? The wireless. What the fuck? What are you talking about? What are the numbers? I think AirPods sound horrible. But this is actually leads to a real question. Just look at the numbers. They're starting with a low-res master and downgrading it to get it into those things. I'm only asking because I'm trying to lead to it. When you were putting out the Pono, you said one of your first ideas was we'll build a case for the iPod, right? we'll build a case for the iPhone, and we'll do this thing, and then Apple limited you because of the connector, which is a real thing the whole industry faces. Now you've got an app, you can stream

high-res from your website, but nobody can plug headphones into their phones anymore. It's all Bluetooth, and Bluetooth is sort of necessarily compressed, particularly on Apple devices. There's no other way to get a Bluetooth codec in the mix. It's just whatever they want you to use, which is AAC. How do you win in that scenario? That's a losing scenario. That's a losing scenario. Technology has crushed music quality, period. Everywhere you turn, you're fighting your way through. LG phones really, they try, okay? They have a 192 DAC.

They can play things back. They do the best they can. They're actually trying to do it in the digital realm. That's as good as you can get. If you get a good file from like one of the files that I have on my site or other people that have sites like mine or Kobuz or something, or something like that, or even the new, under great circumstances, the new Amazon will give you everything. Thank God for them actually taking a step in the right direction, rather than sitting

in their big office in Silicon Valley and going, no one can hear it if it's not compressed. Who are those people? They ought to stay in their offices in Silicon Valley and never come out. They have had such a negative impact on the arts that it's, you know, you can't have the arts. if you don't have quality. You can't hear it. And most of the time you can't see it. Like if you went to a movie and you looked at an old 35 millimeter print and you actually saw a movie and you saw something

and then you saw the high-res DVD or Blu-ray or whatever or high-res streaming of that same thing, you realize it doesn't even look the same. It's like all jacked up. That's, you know, they take the edges and make them clearer. They do all this stuff. It's like we're living in an age where if you can screw with some, something and make it different and tell people that it's better, then you got something you can

sell. And that's what people do. But what they need to do is leave everything alone and let people hear what happened. But we're past that now. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce. They offer a host of helpful tools you can take advantage of, from payment processing to analytics to website design.

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With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. I noticed I was reading the book. You guys worked with an engineer who was trying to build a masterclass. quality format. Didn't work out for y'all. That format's now used by title. How do you think titles doing? Title, you know, they're trying to do something good, but it doesn't sound that good to me. You know, it's 44-1 generally across the board. It's CD quality. Every once in a while, they have

higher quality than that that's gone through some program called MQA. Why do you need a program called MQA? Why do you need anything? Why not just put the whole file out there and let people listen to it. That was meant to try to save memory, which you don't need to save anymore. It's the 21st century. We don't have a memory problem anymore. All of these tiers, you know, like the 320, the 256, all this stuff was all built for ancient times. We're not there. 5G is right around the corner. I have to say this is the most compelling argument for 5G I've heard yet, because I hear a lot of them and they don't send any good to me. But do you think that's actually going to lead to a shift that we're going to get 5G and Qualcomm's going to start streaming higher quality bitrate music to people?

I don't know what they're going to do, but I know that Amazon and Kobuz are streaming high res to people now. Cobus gets pure high res out there. Amazon gets high res out there to whatever the quality of your player is, and then they cut it off at that level. The thing is, at our place, at my site, we stream adaptive bit rate streaming, which is, it gets you all of the bits that can get to you through the air. So, you know, like if it's in the air, you're going to hear it. If the bandwidth is high enough, you get all of it. It's all about bandwidth now anyway. With digital and bandwidth, if you're streaming, it's got to be, you know, a great situation.

If you're in a great situation, just like when you're watching Amas NBC and you're streaming it, it's going to be clear. And, you know, the announcer is going to be clear. You're going to be able to see all of that stuff. But if you're in a rural area and the signal's not as clear, it's going to be real fuzzy. You're going to look at it. It's going to get fuzzy. Then it'll get clear. Then it'll get fuzzy. That's the same thing that's happening with music. It's fuzzy all the time. The digital thing is, it's just inherently got huge problems, even the best. Neil, let me ask you, is that just a rule for you that analog is always superior to digital? Because I'm not sure I buy it. No, I don't. I mean, I've listened to some really bad analog audio in my life. Oh, no shit. Well, I don't want you to get caught in that trap of saying that analog is always better because I don't know that's true.

No, no, no, no. Analog is not always better. I did not say that. I said analog is superior as a carrier to reflecting everything that happened. If you put a full 192, 24, or 32 or whatever file out there with everything digital has to offer today, and you have a really good analog representation of the same thing, I would like the analog better because I like more warmth and I like more depth and I like more air in my music and I like to hear all of it,

not where it cuts off at 192. I want it all, as I can hear it. So, you know, maybe I'm an exception to the rule, but I'm not saying all analog is good. I'm not saying that at all. Yeah, I just, I didn't want to fall in that trap because I, it's like the digitally mastered vinyl, right? Like, it's an analog product, but it doesn't, it doesn't, to me, doesn't sound any good. You know, you can't be saved just because you have analog.

That's not it. You've got to get good analog. You've got to get analog that came from a good place. Maybe not six generations down because Universal's, uh, you know, you know, burnt all their records up, you know, in their warehouse. Who knows what happened to the tapes? They're gone. You know, people are, you know, people are copying and copying and copying and putting those out now like their, like their, you know, analog masters. You know, analog masters disintegrate after a while.

They start to go away. So the thing about recorded sound is to get good analog masters and copy them to the highest resolution digital. And then at least, you have that. Is that happening? Yeah, in some cases, record companies are doing that. I think Warner Brothers does it more than anybody. And people do want to do it. There's a lot of libraries in all of the major companies making records. They want to do this. But the cost of doing it is remastering and doing all this stuff. It costs, you know, two or three thousand dollars a record to do it. They got hundreds of thousands and millions of records. You know, they might go broke. But I say, you know, What are your 100 best-selling records that everybody of all time?

What are the ones everybody's used to listening to that they loved? But I do want to push on this trade-off a little bit because I see both sides of it. Like I said, I spend a lot of money on records and analog equipment, and I'd probably talk to you about that all day and all night. On the other side, what I see, what The Verge is about is that technology democratizes creativity for people. So it is much easier to be an artist now and record your stuff and get it out in front of people. people than ever before in the history of music. You don't even need a label, right? And you're seeing the artist label relationship change pretty dramatically. You're seeing the nature of what gets produced and how it gets popular changed dramatically. But the price of that is digital technology.

And I'm just trying to get a sense of how you see that. Because I'm with you that everything sounds worse and that AirPods sound bad and that we consistently pick convenience over quality. It completely agree with you. But the benefit that I see is that a generation of artists did not have to go through any gatekeepers to reach their audience. What other choice did they have? I mean, they could release more high quality file. And when I was in a band, we actually released like four different bundles of MP3s. Nobody listened to them because a band wasn't any good, but we did it. How would they do that? I mean, you're saying that Spotify and Apple are the gatekeepers and that's that. No, I'm not. I didn't say that. You're talking about somebody creating art, being able to use all of

the new things and create their records and everything. That's what you were talking about, not Apple and Spotify, but you're saying that they could make this, and it's great for artists where they have the tools, they can create these new records, they can do all kinds of things they couldn't do before. And that's true, they can. But what choice do they have? Well, I'm saying culturally, do you think that tradeoff is worth it? That's the real question, I think, at the heart of it, right? Is it, do you lose some quality? Will we catch up to it over time because technology tends to advance that way? If technology is advancing that way, what's happening to audio?

What happened? Technology is not advanced. Technology has regressed. There's nothing that compares with the way a sound is, the way we're reproducing it, and all of the hoops you have to go through, and all the playback devices are all limited, Bluetooth is limited. All of these things that everybody has are all limited. So you accept that you're living in a limited world, and I don't accept that.

I'm not going to sit there and go, oh, yeah, that's good, well, more people were able to create. That's fantastic. I'm going, okay, fine. I was there when it sounded great, and I'm here now, and it doesn't sound great. So, well, I'm not going to pretend that it sounds great because I'm still here. I'm not going to pretend it's great because many people can make records in their garages or in their house or in their car, wherever they want to do it. To me, that's great. It's fantastic, but it doesn't sound good. So obviously you got together with Phil, you made the pono, you tried, you try to push the market, you try to get everybody involved.

We were backwards. We came out at exactly the wrong time with Pono. We made the classic mistake. So Pono is not a good example other than the quality because Pono's Dax are fantastic. They sound better than anything that's out there now. Now the guys that's stereophile when they compare what's happening now, they still compare it to the Pono player,

which hasn't been out in like four or five years, whenever it was out. So, and that is a digital, you know, digital high point for sound. But it's not like it was backwards. It was a download system when streaming was just coming in. So, yeah, great. We tried to make it great. And now we can do high-res streaming, which we didn't think we could do at the time when we were doing Pono. But we were wrong about that too, as if we'd have been very futuristicly looking at things, we would have located people and do high-res streaming. And the thing to do is to make it as good as it can be so that when the rest of the playback world and capturing and everything and all the devices catches up

and starts actually capturing quality and playing it back, that you still have created something that they'll be able to hear the difference on. If you dummy it down and go for something that's going to sound great on Apple today or anything, by the time you get finished and you get to the other end, You just got a piece of crap that sounds like Apple today. You can't make it any better because it's a piece of shit. And that's where it's at. I mean, there are other high-end players now. There's the Asel and Kern.

Sony makes some ridiculously expensive Walkman. But, Phil, from your perspective, do you still see a market opening for a dedicated piece of hardware that meets Neil's expectations? Well, I think there's other devices out there. Some of them cost as much as $3,000. and I don't think they sound much better. They may have different features and have wireless and other sort of things, but there's good products out there, and you can download music today from a number of sources,

and you can get good results, but I think they're only playing to the audiophile market. Right. It's not an elitist thing. Good sounding audio is not an elitist area. It used to be everybody heard it. the whole world heard quality. Now the whole world, here's shit. Only audio files, apparently, are able to find quality,

which I don't believe even that. I'm just saying, call it what it is. It's just no good. You can debate and at the verge, you can talk about all these different things that people can do and the devices that everybody has. And I'll just sit over here and I'll just say, they all sound like shit to me.

They do. And other people say, it sounds great. And I'll ask them, what have you compared it to? And if you look around at the marketplace today, it's very hard to find anything that compares, you know,

that is actually better than what the status quo is. Because you have to get through these dinky little devices to hear what's in it. And all the playback and the Bluetooth and all this. Yeah, you know, I'm just not impressed with it. We're living in the age of technology, and audio sucks. Neil, what do you listen to at home?

Just for a point of comparison, if I want to build Neil Young's setup, what do you listen to at home? What I listen to at home is the least amount of stuff that I can find. You know, I liked Airs equipment. I got some great speakers that Charlie Hansen turned me on to. I used to have a couple of pairs of those. Now I only have one pair, one of them burned, and you're not. in a fire in Malibu that was apparently started by a digital network. No, just kidding.

But you never hear anything about the fire originating from an analog record. It never happened. That's very technical. Those are speakers. What's your turn table? What's my turntable? We got a couple of turntables. Basically, I use the kind of portable ones that you can just buy that are old ones,

Trying to think about what my wife's, what the name of hers is. I don't have a high buck big turntable thing. I don't, I use an analog amp and I use a, you know, as the smallest amount of things that I can use between what I'm playing and what I'm hearing. The least amount of device is possible. No conversions, none of that stuff. I don't like it.

What year is your amp from? I don't know what year it's from. The bus, you have an N-A-D. Yeah, I had an NAD on the bus. Right. That's pretty good. I'm just, I'm just asking because, you know, there's a part of me that wants to go home and buy exactly your setup so that I know, right? Like, I know what good sounds like to Neil Young.

And there's a part of me that wants to tell people like, look, you can go out and buy a – there's lots of good turntables out there, and there's lots of good analog speakers, and you can just pair them together and start. But, you know, that time, I read a lot of old, like, 70s and 80s audio reviews because they put – me in the right frame of mind for how to communicate now. And that stuff was just as subjective as anything. I mean, this is the era of gold-plated speaker wires or whatever. And I don't know that that was really valuable to people. I think people convinced themselves they were getting more than they were just because they're paying money. That's where I started and that's where I want to end is you can feel it. Sure, I buy it. I felt it. But I still don't know how to instruct people on what they should be, what they're getting. Right. Like here's what it actually feels like.

Here's what you should be paying attention to. Close your eyes and pay attention. Look for this. Listen for this. And I'm wondering after this conversation if you have a little bit more of a direct instruction. If you can feel it and you think you're getting it, the only comparison you can make is an old record of a song that you really like.

You get a good copy of it. Play it back on a record player through an amp. Take whatever player you have. Play the current digital copy of that thing through it. Put it through the same amp after you go through whatever things you're going to have to go through digitally to get there, which are all crap. You know, I'm like from another world. Okay? It's like I talk a different language.

So I'm not into, you know, gold speaker wires, all of that. I'm not into any of that stuff. I'm into just, it's just basic things. want all these extra bells and whistles. Nothing is worse for music than attaching an elitist label to someone who listens to quality. We all used to hear quality all the time. Now it's gone. That's what happened. There's no explanation for it. The human race, we're supposed to make things better. Technology is supposed to improve your life. That's all bullshit. It didn't happen. With audio, it didn't happen.

Even with pictures, it didn't happen. It's all about money, and it's all about selling you features. The more features you have, the less quality you have. If you get very simple and just play it back through something very simple, that's the best chance you have hearing the kind of quality that I heard when I started making records and when I started listening to music. Everybody heard the same thing. The same thing.

When I heard Bob Dylan doing Highway 61 or Subterranean Homestick Blues or something like that back in the 60s whenever it was, I heard it either off a radio, came off a vinyl into something that broadcast it into my analog radio in my car, and it sounded great. Now when you hear it through, go to Sirius FM and try to imagine. yourself listening to a Fisher Price record player, and you'll be right in the groove. The solution is not more stuff or high-end audio. The solution is something everybody can hear that's available to everyone. And that just means playback has to be improved on the phones. People have to be able to accept the fact that if they use wireless phones, that they're not

going to have the same quality if they used a wire. Because you have to go through more. more technology to get there. You have to decode it and encode it to get in and out of those devices. And that's the problem. Are you two still pushing the industry? I mean, obviously with Pono, you tried really hard to push the industry, obviously with X-Stream and now your site you're trying to push the industry. But are you still out there making the argument to these executives? Well, as a matter of fact, we're making the argument right now to all the record companies that they're living in the past. They're trying to charge more for quality. Digital has made it possible to have many different levels of quality.

So bean counters in their ultimate ignorance of quality have nothing to do other than put different prices on different levels of quality. So they price real quality out of the market. For instance, my own record company has supplied masters that they downgraded to half of the quality because they think that people should pay more for the higher quality.

So the end result is, when Kobuz plays one of my songs, it's half as good as it could be because Warner Brothers gave them a piece of crap compared to what I made. They gave them a 96, I made a 192. The bean counter said, that's too cheap. It's too expensive for 192. Well, wait a minute. Why not just give the people one price and let the people decide what they want to hear? Let the people buy the song, not the technology.

Bits don't cost money, okay? If you get 192, which is the highest or 384 in your dreams, then you get that and you have a chance at hearing that if everything else in your chain is good. But why should you not hear it because it costs more? It's an elitist piece of shit. You really need to get it so that everything is good or people pay the same price for an MP3

as they pay for a 192 of the same song. It's the same piece of music. Paying more for quality is just a bean counter wank. Okay? What they've done is downgraded it so no one hears quality anymore because they think that quality should cost more. It shouldn't cost more.

It should all be the same price and let the people decide what they want to hear. We don't have that today. We don't have that kind of freedom. The freedom's been taken away from us by the bean counters, the record companies, everybody following these people telling them what to do that doesn't have anything to do with the end experience. All the time when I grew up, everybody heard the same quality.

There was no difference. Okay, granted, a cassette will have more surface noise than an album. So that's the difference. Okay, if you had a cassette, it had more surface noise. But if you turn it up really loud, the music would come blasting through and you'd hear all of the music. And then when the music was over, you'd hear a shh. And that's too fucking bad. But that's it.

At least you heard the music while you were blasting it and it was great. You know, it's hard to understand that everybody had the kind of quality that I'm just trying to get anybody to hear today. Everybody had it. Now nobody has it. that's the reality. I don't care how many bells and whistles, how many special cords, how many D to A converters you have in line. All of that crap is no good. I'm sorry. So I'm the wrong guy to ask. You should just erase everything and not hear it. No way. This was a privilege. It is a unique perspective in our time and I'm happy to have heard. Well, I was there and my friends were

there and we made these records and we know what the fuck they sound like, okay? and you guys, in today's world, you're missing it. It's unfortunate. I wish I could tell you how to do it, but you need a time machine, apparently. All right, I have taken up way too much of your time. This was truly an honor and a really fun conversation. I hope more people listen to you about this stuff. Don't hold your breath.

Phil Baker, thank you for joining us as well. Okay, thanks. Thank you. Hey, quick, you've got to plug the book. This is why you're here. Tell them about the book real quick. Yeah, well, Neil and I sat down and wrote a book. I was working with Neil and the Pono,

and I saw how anxious he was about the quality of music. And, you know, I'm a technologist, and I didn't know. And, you know, I learned a lot from Neil, and I wanted to tell the story about what he believed in. And over the time of my developing the Pono with our team, I was able to tell the difference. there was no issue about not being able to tell. My friends were able to tell.

It was so obvious once we heard good music. So the purpose of the book called to Feel the Music is to articulate what Neil believed in and what he felt. And it's also to tell the story of what it takes to start up a small company with a hardware product and develop it and take it into manufacturing. and then deal with the technology websites that some of them, not the verge,

but a few others, made fun of what we were doing. But I think it's a really interesting story for anybody that's in the hardware business wants to do a hardware product, what they come up against some of the issues. So it's really two stories in one. It's about what's happened to the quality of music and Neil's words

and what it takes to be. build a company and a product, in my words. Well, that sounds very interesting. It's available now. It's available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. It's called To Feel the Music by Neil Young and Phil Baker. And the good news is that books cannot be degraded in quality by going over digital services. Some of the image quality could be better.

Of course it is. Oh, I walked right into that one. No, no. All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Hopefully we'll have you back soon. Thanks for the opportunity. It was great talking with you, Neelai.

Thanks a lot. Okay, my thanks to Neil Young and Phil Baker. You can check out their book to feel the music. It's out now. It's a fun read. We'll be back later this week with the chat show, then on Tuesday with the interview show and on and on we go. Love your feedback.

Please tweet at me. I'm at Reckless. I'll talk to you soon.