Top shelf Pono audio player launches next week

If £950 for Sony’s latest Walkman, the NW-ZX2 is too steep then you may be happy to hear that Neil Young’s Pono player will soon be available for a fraction of the Sony’s asking price.

The Pono player managed to raise over $6 million on Kickstarter last year and the device has already shipped out to Kickstarter backers. Now the music player will go on sale in the US on Monday retailing for $399 – quite a bit less than the $1,200 Walkman.

Pono will be sold in Fry’s stores in the US and will launch at around 80 stores initially.

The Pono player supports high quality audio formats such as FLAC, Ogg, Apple’s Lossless Audio Codec, WAV, AAC, and MP3. It will come with 64GB of onboard storage which in all honesty would be exhausted rather quickly if one were to fill it up with only FLAC files, but I’m guessing that it’s more about quality, not quantity. At least the ZX2 has a decent amount of storage which can also be expanded.

As yet there are no details on when the device will be made available in other countries but if I hear anything, I’ll let you know. Natch.