Pre-order Neil Young’s Pono portable audiophile player this weekend

If you cast your mind back to September 2012 you may remember news that Neil Young’s new music player, Pono, was announced. The latest news is that you’ll soon be able to pre-order it.

The Pono player will be available to pre-order from March 15th via its Kickstarter page for $400.

The big, bright triangular digital music player promises the listener “studio master-quality digital music at the highest audio fidelity possible”. According to PonoMusic this means that the user will “experience music the way the artists intended.”

Those are quite big claims and, with the popularity for DAC such as Meridian’s Explorer and Director units as well as those offered by Musical Fidelity, it shows that people are wanting more from their digital libraries.

The music player has 128GB of memory and can store from about 100 to 500 high-resolution digital-music albums though you’ll be able to expand that with a memory card. It also has both a touchscreen LCD and some physical buttons, too.

It’s designed to work with an associated PonoMusic.com service, which will provide users with the highest-resolution digital music from both major labels and prominent independent labels.

Although I’ve not been able to see a comprehensive list of confirmed artists.

I feel I need to add that it has been said that the device will not feature any DRM restrictions. So, that’s some more good news.

Whether a standalone portable digital music player will be able to cut it, or perhaps it might just find its way in to compact digital Hi-Fi systems, is yet to be seen.

I have a feeling that there’s enough audiophiles looking to be able to listen to top quality audio on the move to make this happen.

What do you think?