The PONO Player

PonoMusic recently smashed there kickstarter goal of $800,000 with well over a month to go. Currently there at around $2.5 million of funding. But what is it?

PonoMusic seem to be selling more of a philosophy than a standard portable media player. The product its self is a triangular prism with a touch secrren, 64GB of built in a storage and a micro SD card slot that focuses on providing hi quality audio rather than a huge collection. This is by no means the first "high quality" audio file player. Astel&Kern have a range of these type of devices however they do not have an online store for such high quality audio.

This is possibly where Pono have ironed out the concept offering an online store for audio up to 192 kHz sample rate.  To put that in to perspective a standard CD has a sample rate of 44.1kHz. This raises another question of how audible is the difference and how many artists are being recorded at this level of detail.

Clearly there is a high demand for this level of audio fidelity however will we see much uptake when the product is launched?