Rock icon Neil Young took his campaign for higher-fidelity digital music to the stage of All Things D’s D: Dive Into Digital conference. The Huffington Post reports that the master of the one-note guitar solo says he was discussing a Hi-Fi iPod type device with the late Steve Jobs.
Young said the Apple (AAPL) co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn’t use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home. Instead, he used a physical format well-known to have better sound. “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl (albums).”
Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Young says that he spoke with Jobs about creating a high fidelity format that has 20 times better than files in the most current digital formats, including MP3.
Such a format, he said, would contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to 5 percent in compressed formats including Apple’s AAC. Each song would be huge, and a new storage and playback device might only hold 30 albums. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download, which is fine if you leave your device on overnight, he said. “Sleep well. Wake up in the morning. Play some real music and listen to the joy of 100 percent of the sound of music,” he said.
Although Young didn’t have a practical plan for developing such a format – saying it’s for “rich people” to decide – he said Jobs was on board with the idea before he died. “I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it,” Young said. “You’ve got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I’m trying to do.”
Walt Mossberg, a journalist with News Corp.’s All Things D website, which hosted Jobs at its conferences confirmed Young’s opinion of Jobs. Mossberg said Jobs expressed surprise that “people traded quality, to the extent they had, for convenience or price.”
An Apple Inc. spokesperson declined to comment to the HuffPost.
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- Neil Young and Bill Ford (rbach.net)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
