Neil
Musicians such as myself attempt to record music at the highest sound quality available. We take excruciating care to preserve every detail from each instrument, each voice, and the surrounding environment. We do this knowing that the more you hear, the more you feel the music in your soul.
However, today’s recording and tech industries just don’t care about the sound of music. They’re content to deliver music at a much lower quality, essentially stripping and dumbing down the art of recorded music, so that listeners are able to hear only a small part of the original audio recordings. These original recordings can have depth, breadth, and clarity that captures all of the subtleties, echoes, reverberations, and characteristics of the performance environment. The compressed versions, on the other hand, lack all of those details, sounding muddy, one-dimensional, and flat. The decision to compress music not only affects what we hear now—it will affect what we’ll be able to hear in the future, too.
To Feel the Music is an account of my efforts to challenge the music industry and the technology community on behalf of all artists and music fans to restore audio quality to what it once was and to save the soul of the music, thereby saving the future of music. This effort to rescue music is the most important professional undertaking of my entire career.
This book chronicles how I and a small team invented and brought to market solutions that serve as an example of what could be done. With Pono, my early effort at creating a high-resolution music player and download service, we showed the industry that it was possible to deliver the highest-quality audio to thousands of music lovers at an affordable cost. What we did was not anything extraordinary. Others in the industry could have done it, though few seemed to care. But that was not the end of our efforts; it was just the beginning.
As music streaming increased, the industry moved to even poorer-quality audio. The sound of music went from bad to worse. Yet, I was convinced there must be a solution. If streaming was the future, couldn’t it be better? To that end, I worked with an even smaller team, including a tiny company in Singapore called OraStream, and we developed new streaming technology that is far superior to anything else available. I’ve introduced this high-resolution streaming on my Neil Young Archives (NYA). Called Xstream by NYA, it was my follow-up to Pono, to marry the convenience of streaming with the best quality that users’ devices can handle. High-res streaming is my second initiative to show the industry what can be done.
I’ve put my name and reputation on the cause of better audio. I’ve pointed out the failures of the tech giants to deliver it and will continue to do so because it’s something I believe in very deeply. I’m going to continue this quest on behalf of musicians and music lovers so that all of you can hear what you deserve—just what was intended by the artists who created it.
Phil
I first met Neil in 2012 when he asked me to help him develop a new music player. I encountered not just the famous musician whose work is legendary, but also someone who had a passionate mission extending back decades to save music. He wanted to restore what had been missing since the invention of the CD: high-quality audio. Throughout all these years his mission hasn’t changed. It was his passion before I met him, and it continues to be his passion now.
I had the luck and opportunity to make a small contribution through the development of the Pono music player, a simple-to-use, low-cost device that delivered music of unparalleled clarity. And, more recently, I’ve worked with Neil to help develop the NYA website and apps, which delivers the music as well as Pono does, using an innovative streaming technology.
I was able to see how important high-quality audio is to Neil and how all-consuming his goal was. It is completely altruistic on Neil’s part, not motivated by making money, certainly not for fame. While some critics have had trouble understanding this or have questioned his motives, I have been there for all the discussions and the meetings, and I want to help tell the real story.
While visiting the Musician’s Hall of Fame in Nashville, I was struck by how much effort has been put into perfecting the recording and playback of music over the past century to bring audio of the best possible quality to those who could not be present at a live performance. From the gramophone to the radio to reel-to-reel tape recorders to the tape cassette to huge speakers and amplifiers, each invention was about creating a faithful reproduction of the original. Yet modern technology has taken us in a different direction, replacing quality with convenience. The long history of these efforts that I saw on display in the museum suddenly came to a stop and began to reverse course.
Although I’m not a musician, I have a background and career in technology, so this regression really hit home. Technology, which we think of as improving our lives, was failing music lovers. This put into perspective what Neil, I, and the rest of the team had been doing.
To Feel the Music is also about what it takes for a small company to begin with an idea and turn it into a product. It’s the story of a technology startup business with grand ambitions but limited resources and the challenges it faced trying to turn Neil’s vision into reality. It takes the reader through the numerous steps required to develop, manufacture, and sell a consumer hardware product.
I try to expose the product development process, with all the imperfections and unexpected challenges that befall most products. It’s a process that depends on a group of people from diverse backgrounds coming together and working as a team, often with conflicting goals and ideas. It shows how the product idea is often the easiest part, and how complex and unexpected the implementation can be. And then when the product is done, what is its measure of success? Is it a product that performs as it was envisioned, one that can be manufactured inexpensively, or one that’s successful in the market? To Feel the Music takes you into all of these areas that rarely are written about.