[Zigurd]

Fine art photography made a transition from all chemical to 90% digital, yet the manipulated RAW image is treated identically to a negative.

I find that remarkable. The other thing that's remarkable is how accepting people are of highly compressed and decimated jpg images on uncalibrated monitors for viewing the work of professional photographers (while wearing $400 headphones, listening to highly compressed mp3s).

It is also remarkable that Neil Young is among the first to try to fix the fidelity issue, for music anyway. I hope someone sees that photography and images of other fine art need something analogous.

[anigbrowl]

On Neil Young, there were a bunch of FLAC-compatible portable music players on the market 2 years ago: http://www.cnet.com/news/best-mp3-players-with-flac/

* Free Lossless Audio Codec

The super-high sample rate stuff is totally bogus, and I say that as an audio professional of many years' standing. Neil Young is a nice guy, but Pono is basically a branding exercise, not a technical innovation.

[dublinben]

Neil Young and his snake oil are nowhere near the first attempts to sell high fidelity audio. You're forgetting reel to reel tape, DAT, SACD, DVDaudio, HDtracks, and any number of other ventures.

[lukifer]

Part of the difference is that audio is temporal, while an image is static. The odds of noticing an artifact in an well-compressed MP3 are small; the psycho-acoustic model is built on the assumption that many frequencies will be discarded by the brain anyway, and so the listener won't notice their absence.

However, an image doesn't change moment to moment, so the eye is free to wander and immerse, and thereby notice some oddly pixelated macroblocks that would have been ignored with a momentary glance.

[cma]

Neil Young's player does thing like add in fake record pops to make things sound retro. It may or may not have a good DAC, but is mostly a gimmick device.

[niels_olson]

I find it interesting that some of the best audiophile education I got was on torrent sites. The scum of the earth apparently think hard about Laplace transforms

[001sky]

Instagram has sort of killed the concept of colour fidelity.