New Music Player By Neil Young Lands on Kickstarter March 15

“Crowdfunding” appears to be the strategy being used by Neil Young to realize his dreams of a high fidelity music streaming device.  Young’s company PonoMusic will be launching a Kickstarter campaign on March 15 that will let you reserve the PonoPlayer, an audiophile-worthy portable jukebox. 

The 128GB device will cost $399 when it goes on sale, less the Kickstarter discount.  The device’s creators are promising audio fidelity worthy of the price tag, as they had better be.  The hardware will use natural sounding digital filtering from Ayre Acoustics, EES’ most advanced digital to analog converter, and “perfectly flat” frequency response with almost any set of headphones.

And of course there will be online retailers that deliver high resolution tunes to play on the device.  No word yet on when the device will be available to the consumers, or how much the high-res music will cost.  I personally cannot imagine having to rebuild my music library to cater to a new device; I think this market is not crackable, but I have been wrong before.