[cheponis]

I am rather bothered by a lot of the comments here. Have any of you actually talked with Neil about these issues? I have. He's an extremely passionate promoter of high-quality sound. I truly feel sorry for those who cannot tell the difference between 192kbps MP3s and CDs. I can always hear the difference with my headphones and eq settings. But Neil is not satisfied with CD-quality; he wants higher quality than that. At the time I chatted with him (several years ago now) he was leaning toward 24-bit 192K samples/second, as I recall. This was before Blu-Ray.

Since the original article was so vague, and we don't have a particular product to critique, can we at least give Neil the benefit of the doubt? His heart is definitely in the right place (and, in case you're wondering, he's more than just a bit of a geek - he's a first-class geek! - And not too shabby a musician, either...)

[akd]

I think Neil Young is misguided here. He is a very successful musician and has spent his whole life in sound. Obviously he's going to have a much more finely tuned ear than the general population.

But the number of people who are like him and you is not enough to support a new format or business model. Most people can't hear any differences beyond a good bitrate MP3.

Consumers over the last 50 years have been on a relentless trend towards greater convenience and poorer quality (look at the quality of any of today's household appliances). A quality play is simply obsolete.

[rms]

>I truly feel sorry for those who cannot tell the difference between 192kbps MP3s and CDs.

Have you listened to a properly encoded ~200 kbps MP3? Under what circumstances can you tell the difference between a proper MP3 and a CD? Do you think you could under double blind circumstances with music you pick?

If Neil wants to launch a competitor for HDCD and DVD-audio, great, but I doubt it will be more successful than those. He didn't say what the product actually was, so hopefully he has something better up his sleeves.