Neil Young says the Macbook Pro has “Fisher-Price” audio quality

Musician Neil Young and tech executive Phil Baker have been trying to push the tech industry to make it easier for consumers to listen to high-quality audio for almost a decade now. The duo’s hi-res music player Pono aimed to fix problems they said plagued MP3 players like the iPod and music software like iTunes — like compressed, lossy, and low-fidelity audio files that were not similar enough to their original recordings. But five years after the Pono was released, Young believes the tech industry has still not advanced enough for consumers to easily listen to high resolution audio. The two men’s new book, To Feel the Music: A Songwriter’s Mission To Save High Quality Audio, details the hurdles they had to overcome to create the Pono, as well as what the tech industry should do in order to get consumers to realize what their missing with streaming and “CD-quality” music. In an interview with The Vergecast, Young tells Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel that even though Grammy-winning artists are able to make music almost anywhere they go on their laptop or mobile devices, they’re still sacrificing on audio fidelity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:02Nilay Patel?

  Hey everyone, it's Neil I from the Vergecast. On this week's interview, we've got the one and only Neil Young. That's right, Neil Young, the rock star. And I'm gonna be honest with you, I think I pissed him off a little, but in like a good way, in a good way. Neil just wrote a book with longtime tech executive Phil Baker called To Feel the Music, which was about their quest to build a pono music player and make high-res audio happen. We talked about his feelings on the tech industry, why music sounds worse now. I pushed him a little bit on some of his ideas about why music sounds worse now. That had what I would say the expected outcome. But mostly, he told me that he really just wants people to listen to great sounding music, which how can you fight that? Honestly, it was a great conversation, a lot of energy, a lot of fun.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  He's Neil Young. Check it out.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Neil Young and Phil Baker, welcome to The Vergecast. Thank you, it's great to be here.

• 1:58Speaker 03

  Thanks.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Neil, let's start with you. You have been working on, obviously, music for a long time, but in particular, increasing the quality of music for a long time. And you've just written a book with Phil called "To Feel the Music," about that process, about making the porno. What inspired you to get into the tech side of this world?

• 2:16Speaker 03

  Well, I live in it. It's what I do. I've always been in it. You might say I'm inspired to try to save the sound of music from technology.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  I appreciate that. So, a challenge I have as a reviewer, as somebody who writes about music, who, Vergecast listeners know, I care a lot about audio quality and music gear. With TVs, I can just count the pixels. With phone screens, I can say, "Look, it's sharper." With cameras, I can say, "Look, the photo's clearer." Audio seems more subjective, even though it isn't. It's much harder to convince people that there's tiers of quality, I have found. Is there a way that you think about it, or you talk about it, or that you think people should be listening to understand the differences here? Because that, to me, is the foundational problem of the whole thing.

• 3:11Speaker 03

  Okay, there is a way, but you have to associate visuals with audio, so that you can make the comparison. For instance, if you're watching a show on, say, Hulu, or Netflix, or whatever, one of these shows that's streamed, and you're watching it, and the place you're at, you're watching it, you notice every once in a while, it gets really fuzzy-looking. It's like, it's not clear, and then it comes back. Do you know how streaming looks like on a screen?

• 3:46Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  How it gets very soft, and fuzzy-looking, and not really there?

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  And then eventually, the signal improves, and it comes back?

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. All right. Well, when the signal improves and comes back... Back to perfect, that's where we were up until the digital age began. Okay, basically, that's where everything was at. Analog was all there, was everything was clear like that. Now, if you take the softest looking thing, that's where we're at now. That's where Spotify is, that's where Apple Music is. That's where these, the streaming companies are streaming the lowest common denominator of quality to avoid having dropouts.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  So I agree with you. I think the question I have is, what should people be listening for? With a screen, I can tell them what to look at. I can point at it.

• 4:38Speaker 03

  You can't tell them what to listen for, or go, what, you know, you can't do that. It's a personal thing. You have to feel it. That's why it's hard to explain, because it's a feeling. Uh, when you put on a phonograph and you listen to an old record that was made all from analog and it's coming over a vinyl record player, or something equivalent to that, like a super high res, in digital, which isn't even as, isn't even equivalent, but it's the best we have, when you, when you listen to music and you hear it, all of it, that's what it is. It makes your body feel different, it makes your, your senses, it wakes you up, and it makes you feel what's going on. That's what's missing. If you take all of that away, that's where we are.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  So I read the book, and, and the argument here that you're making, just to make it a little bit more accessible for audience, is...

• 5:29Speaker 03

  I don't want to argue about what's accessible, accessible for the audience. If the audience wants to hear music, they haven't had a chance if all they're doing is listening to Spotify. So there's no way they could ever know. They could not know. I have the ability to talk to you from a long time ago and now, because I'm like three quarters of a century old. Okay? So I can still remember when everything sounded great. But now, it's been a long time since everything has sounded great. So none of the people that you're trying to convince have anything to relate to. How can they relate to it? They don't even know what we're talking about. The thing is...

• 6:10Speaker 03

  That people who were there know that it was really a lot better. And now, what we have is, music is basically a content deliverable. It is wallpaper. It's the background. It's the sound of a ringtone. It has nothing to do with the quality of a top-notch recording developed by artists in the studio so that a musician or singer or someone can emote and you can actually feel it. That's what's gone. So, there's no comparison. You can't ask somebody, one of your, one of your audience who may not have heard quality. They may have only heard what they think is great.

• 6:54Speaker 03

  And music is great. There's no doubt, music is great. But the music that's out there today on Spotify and Apple is terrible. It's shitty. That's basically what it is. There's nothing there. It's like that part of yours, when you're watching a streaming news show or something and it gets really fuzzy and then it comes back. Where the fuzziest thing that you see is what you hear all the time on Spotify. It's less than 5% of the digital masters of a high-res master. And a high-res digital master is, truthfully, just not as deep as an analog master. So, we've come a long way into a dark hole. You know, you can't explain it. You can't, you can't say to people, "Well, what, what do I, what should I look for?"

• 7:39Speaker 03

  Because that's the quandary. There's a people that you're trying to convince have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. Where are they gonna go to hear the difference?

• 7:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, I mean, this was kind of one question that I've been dying to ask you. So, there is a vinyl resurgence going on right now. I have a huge library of vinyl records. I have a vintage 70s WattWar amplifier, you know, the whole thing. And you see that resurgence. You see vinyl sales are steadied up. You see people are still interested in record players. Do you think that that is a valid comparison? You think people should be A/B testing that stuff to the digital stuff? And they should hear it? Because then, because that stuff is so prevalent now... You might be able to say, "Well, you can feel it differently. Pay attention to this." And that's really what I was getting at.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  Okay, so if you have a record that's a classic record that you know is great, that you have, and you've got the old record that was made then from the analog master, and then you go to Spotify or Apple and listen to the same exact song through the speakers that you're listening to your phonograph through, and the amp, everything, you know, put it the same, just change the source that you're listening to, then you'll hear the difference. The thing is, going to new vinyl, you're at the mercy of marketing gurus at record companies, which is, "Oh, man, vinyl is happening. We've got to make it in vinyl." So they make it in vinyl from the master that actually made the CD.

• 9:12Speaker 03

  So you're listening to a digital master that may be, you know, like 20% of what it could be, and it's on vinyl. You're not going to hear it. So you've got to be very careful that you know what you're listening to. So if you want to do these comparisons, you have to listen to an old vinyl record or one that has an actual provenance listed on it that shows you where did that vinyl music come from, because vinyl is just a reflection of something. Instead of being a reconstitution like digital's, ones and zeros going together to fool you into thinking you're hearing music. Whereas vinyl is a reflection of something that actually happened, like Mount Shasta in Lake Shasta.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  You look at it on a perfectly calm day with no waves, you see a beautiful reflection of Mount Shasta in Lake Shasta. That's what analog is. That's the way records work. It's a reflection of the sound. So when you're listening to a vinyl record that was made from a digital master that was used to make, you know, like Spotify or Apple or CDs or something like that, you'll never get the difference. So you've got to be careful that you're not marketed into a hole by people going, "Oh, vinyl's great." Vinyl is great. If what's put into it is great. So you have to be careful. You know, on my records,

• 10:38Speaker 03

  I list where they came from and everything. And they're all analog masters. Many, but probably 80% are all from analog masters on my stuff. But that's not the way everybody is. They'll put out a vinyl version of a CD because they know that people like vinyl. Those people are getting ripped off. I hate to tell you that. But buying new vinyl, you have to be really careful what you're getting because it's just a ripoff.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's nothing, actually, one of my biggest pet peeves is badly mastered modern vinyl. You can hear it right away. The format is not well suited for the dynamic range of a CD. So that kind of leads me to the next question, which is, so many artists today write their songs on tour in a hotel room on a MacBook. They're not starting with the big analog studio. They're not starting with tape. They're starting digitally. Does that carry through? Is that, is it even worth it to talk about that, the output format when, you know, it's teenagers in bedrooms writing hits right now?

• 11:36Speaker 03

  What's the problem with teenagers in bedrooms writing hits?

• 11:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're starting on their MacBooks, recording straight to MP3.

• 11:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. But if that's what they want to put out as a record, that's a problem.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  Right. But I'm saying, look, I'm looking at the new 16 inch MacBook Pro. Like, Apple gave me a review in it. They said, look at all the artists who use this thing with Garage Man to start, right? But you're saying that shouldn't be where recording starts?

• 11:57Speaker 03

  It's a piece of crap. Are you kidding? That's Fisher Price quality. That's like Captain Kangaroo, your new engineer. The MacBook Pro, what are you talking about? You can't, you can't get anything out of that thing. The only way you can get it out of it is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you can't get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a whole bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has. Because they're not aimed at quality. They're aimed at consumerism. That's what Steve Jobs told me, told me that exact thing. We're making products for consumers, not quality. So they don't want audio quality. They don't want to spend a lot of time on that.

• 12:38Speaker 03

  Audio quality, for your reference and for anybody else that's listening, is, is deeper than visual quality. You can look at it, you can look at things and think you're seeing everything with a high-res, whatever you're looking at in a picture. But true audio dimension is so deep. There's so many, there's so much data there if you want to capture it all. In the echo, in the softness, and the loudness, and the difference as things are decaying and getting smaller and smaller as they go away. That's part of the beauty of, of sound. And the beauty of music, based on that, is, is that you can hear all of the detail. Now, when you talk about doing that on a MacBook Pro, it makes me barf.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  This is where we are.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  But I, I see so many artists, we talk to artists, we interview them, and they say, "Look, we did a, a video with a guy, I want to, lots of Grammys, works for lots of people, and he's like, "I assemble samples in the back of my car using my MacBook Pro, I love it, this is how music is made."

• 13:38Speaker 03

  I never won a Grammy for music, so I wouldn't know about that quality.

• 13:41Nilay Patel?

  Sure, I'm just, I'm just saying, like, we, we talk to the people who are making the money, and they're like, "I assemble samples in my MacBook Pro."

• 13:48Speaker 03

  It's not about money, it's not about hits. It's about quality, it's about sound, it's about museum quality, it's about the real thing, the facts, the real sound. What happened when you opened your mouth and sang? What went into the air? That's what we're not getting with the new technology. The older technology used to give you a reflection of it, so that you could still feel it. Today, it's reconstituted, it's poorly sampled, it's, uh, it's garbage that has less bits to save people memory, which is not even relevant anymore, we have so much memory, it's got to come out our ears, yet we're still saving memory, saving quality to, so we can store more crap.

• 14:30Speaker 03

  It's just, uh, it's just, we've gone down this bad street, and we're way down it. So if you talk to somebody about quality, and they're using anything from that, they're not going to hear it. They're going to hear today's quality. And they may be great as far as today's quality goes, but to me, that's just, just like, it doesn't matter.

• 14:48Nilay Patel?

  So there are sounds that you maybe couldn't have gotten with analog, that you maybe couldn't have gotten with vinyl. I'm thinking, a lot of the EDM today is sort of outside the dynamic range of pre-digital stuff. Something like the big 808 sound in hip-hop, a little bit farther afield of, you know, it's gotten louder and louder and louder. That stuff is a little bit farther afield of what analog could do. That stuff has really exploded with digital. Do you see that relationship between the kinds of music people are making and the tools, even if they are inferior, that enable them to do it?

• 15:17Speaker 03

  Well, here's, if you look at loudness, loudness is a function of less dynamics, okay? The louder something is, the less dynamics it has. If you take everything and make it all loud, nothing's soft. So when you do this compression thing and you make everything loud, like these records are made, and bless their pointed little heads, they're making great records, they're fantastic, it's the sound of the times, I got no problem with that. But I'm not from this time. I'm from a time when, if you want to listen to a symphony orchestra, if you want to listen to a great acoustic guitar, you want to listen to somebody sing, or a band play in a room together, you mean like it really happened? Not something

• 16:02Speaker 03

  that somebody built in their garage using a MacBook Pro. Not something like that, but a real piece of sound that was actually captured. That's the difference. And we're so far away from that now, that to try to, for you to try to compare that and tell somebody what to listen to, it's like asking somebody to go back like five generations or something. So it's like not really realistic to think that you could explain this to someone who's only listened to Spotify and Apple. They'll never hear it.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  So it does seem, and I was reading the book, and you talk about your interactions with Steve Jobs and the iPod, and trying to get them to support the file formats. But it seems like, with the iPod in particular, the acceleration towards convenience over quality just went faster than ever. And it's still going, but there are these attempts, like- Apple made the HomePod, which has all this like computer process beam forming.

• 17:00Speaker 03

  That's a bunch of bullshit. It's all math. The whole digital thing is math. All you have to do is look at the numbers and you can see there's no way it's ever gonna have the detail. It's limited by what it is.

• 17:10Nilay Patel?

  So, Apple in particular will tell me that they will never do uncompressed audio because they fully believe no one can hear it.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, that's right. They can't hear it, so why should they believe anybody? They fully believe no one can hear it?

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I've asked them a bunch of times. You know, their title exists.

• 17:25Speaker 03

  Guess what Steve Jobs did when Steve Jobs went home from working at Apple with all the dickheads? You know what he did? He listened to vinyl.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:33Speaker 03

  The reason nobody can hear it is because nobody makes it. It's just not there.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  Have you ever worn AirPods in your life?

• 17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I've had those.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  The AirPods? What do you think?

• 17:44Speaker 03

  You mean?

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  Apple's wireless headphones.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  The wireless? What the fuck? What are you talking about?

• 17:50Speaker 03

  What are the numbers?

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think AirPods sound horrible, but this actually leads to a real question.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Just look at the numbers. They're starting with a low-res master and downgrading it to get it into those things.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm only asking because I'm trying to lead to, when you were putting out the Pono, you said one of your first ideas was, "We'll build a case for the iPod," right? Or "We'll build a case for the iPhone and we'll do this thing." And then Apple limited you because of the connector, which is a real thing the whole industry faces. Now, you've got an app, you can stream high-res from your website, but nobody can plug headphones into their phones anymore. It's all Bluetooth and Bluetooth is sort of necessarily compressed, particularly on Apple devices. There's no other way to get a Bluetooth codec in the mix. It's just whatever they want you to use, which is AAC. How do you win in that scenario?

• 18:40Speaker 03

  That's a losing scenario. Technology has crushed music quality, period. Everywhere you turn, you're fighting your way through. LG phones, they try, okay? They have a 192 DAC. They can play things back. They do the best they can. They're actually trying to do it in the digital realm. That's as good as you can get. If you get a good file from like one of the- The files that I have on my site or other people that have sites like mine or Cobuzz or something like that, or even the new, under great circumstances, the new Amazon will give you everything. Thank God for them actually taking a step in the right direction.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  Rather than sitting in their big office in Silicon Valley and going, "No one can hear it if it's not compressed." Who are those people? They ought to stay in their offices in Silicon Valley and never come out. They have had such a negative impact on the arts that it's, you know, you can't have the arts if you don't have quality. You can't hear it. And most of the time, you can't see it. Like, if you went to a movie and you looked at an old 35-millimeter print and you actually saw a movie and you saw something, and then you saw the high-res DVD or Blu-ray or whatever, or high-res streaming of that same thing, you realize it doesn't even look the same. It's like all jacked up. That's, you know, they take the edges and make them clearer. They do all this stuff.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  It's like we're living in an age where if you can screw with something and make it different and tell people that it's better, then you've got something you can sell. And that's what people do. But what they need to do is leave everything alone and let people hear what happened. But we're past that now.

• 20:32Speaker 04

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• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  I noticed as I was reading the book, you guys worked with an engineer who was trying to build a master quality format. Didn't work out for y'all. That format's now used by Tidal. How do you think Tidal's doing?

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Uh, Tidal, you know, they're trying to do something good, but it doesn't sound that good to me. Like, I, you know, it's, it's 44.1 generally across the board. It's CD quality. Every once in a while, they have higher quality than that. It's gone through some program called MQA. Why do you need a program called MQA? Why do you need anything? Why not just put the whole file out there and let people listen to it?

• 22:08Speaker 07

  That was meant to try to save memory, which you don't need to save anymore.

• 22:12Speaker 03

  It's the 21st century. We don't have a memory problem anymore. All of these tiers, you know, like the 320, the 256, all this stuff was all built for ancient times. We're not there. 5G is right around the corner.

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  I have to say, this is the most compelling argument for 5G I've heard yet. Uh, cause I hear a lot of them and they don't sound any good to me. But do you think that's actually going to lead to a shift? That we're going to get 5G and Qualcomm's going to start streaming higher quality bitrate music to people?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  I don't know what they're going to do, but I know that Amazon and Co-Buzz are streaming high-res to people now. Uh, Co-Buzz gets pure high-res out there. Amazon gets high-res out there to whatever the quality of your player is, and then they cut it off at that level. The thing is, at our place, at my site, we stream adaptive bitrate streaming, which is, it gets you all of the, uh, all of the bits that can get to you through the air. So, you know, like if it's in the air, you're going to hear it. If the, if the bandwidth is high enough, you get all of it. It's all about bandwidth now, anyway.

• 23:21Speaker 03

  With digital and bandwidth, if you're streaming, it's gotta be, you know, a great situation. If you're in a great situation, just like when you're watching MSNBC and you're streaming it, it's going to be clear. And, you know, the announcer's going to be clear. You're going to be able to see all of that stuff. But if you're in a rural area and the signal's not as clear, it's going to be real fuzzy. You're going to look at it, it's going to get fuzzy, then it'll get clear, then it'll get fuzzy. That's the same thing that's happening with music. It's fuzzy all the time. The digital thing is, it's just inherently got huge problems, even the best.

• 23:55Nilay Patel?

  Neil, let me ask you, is that, is that just a rule for you that analog is always superior to digital? Cause I'm not sure I buy it.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  No, I don't, you're, it's not for sale.

• 24:03Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I've listened to some really bad analog audio in my life.

• 24:05Speaker 03

  Oh, no shit.

• 24:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, just, I mean, I don't want you to get caught in that trap of saying that analog is always better. Cause I don't, I don't know that's true.

• 24:12Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no. Analog is not always better. I did not say that. I said analog is superior as a carrier to reflecting everything that happened. If you've put up a full 192, 24, or 32, or whatever file out there with everything digital has to offer today, and you have a, have a really good analog representation of the same thing, I would like the analog better because I like more warmth, and I like more depth, and I like more air in my music, and I like to hear all of it. Not where it cuts off at 192. I want it all, as I can hear it.

• 24:53Speaker 03

  So, you know, maybe I'm an exception to the rule, but I, I, I'm, I'm not saying that all analog is good. I'm not saying that at all.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I didn't want you to fall in that trap, because I, it's like the digitally mastered vinyl, right? Like, there's, it's an analog product, but it doesn't, it doesn't, to me, it doesn't sound any good.

• 25:11Speaker 03

  You know, you can't be saved just because you have analog. That's not it. You've got to get good analog. You've got to get analog that came from a good place. Maybe not six generations down because Universal's, you know, burnt all their records up, you know, in their warehouse. Who knows what happened to the tapes? They're gone. You know, people are, you know, people are copying and copying and copying, and putting those out now like they're, like they're, you know, analog masters. You know, analog masters disintegrate after a while. They start to, to go away. So, the, the thing about recorded sound is to get good analog masters and copy them to the highest resolution digital, and then at least you have that.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Is that happening?

• 25:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, in some cases. Record companies are doing that. I think Warner Brothers does it more than anybody. And people do want to do it. There's a lot of libraries in all of the major companies making records. They want it. They want to do this. But the cost of doing it is remastering and doing all this stuff. It costs, you know, $2,000 or $3,000 a record to do it. They got hundreds of thousands, millions of records. You know, they might go broke. But I say, you know, what are your 100 best-selling records that everybody, of all time? What are the ones everybody's used to listening to that they loved?

• 26:28Nilay Patel?

  But I do want to push on this trade-off a little bit. Because I see both sides of it. Like I said, I spend a lot of money on records and analog equipment, and I'd probably talk to you about that all day and all night. On the other side, what I see, what The Verge is about, is that technology democratizes creativity for people. So it is much easier to be an artist now and record your stuff and get it out in front of people than ever before in the history of music. You don't even need a label, right? You're seeing the artist-label relationship change pretty dramatically. You're seeing the nature of what gets produced and how it gets popular change dramatically. The price of that is digital technology. And I'm just trying to get a sense of how you see that. Because

• 27:13Nilay Patel?

  I'm with you that everything sounds worse and that AirPods sound bad and that we consistently pick convenience over quality. Completely agree with you. But the benefit that I see is that a generation of artists did not have to go through any gatekeepers to reach their audience.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  What other choice did they have?

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they could release more high-quality files. And when I was in a band, we actually released like four different bundles of MP3s. Nobody listened to them because the band wasn't any good, but we did it.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  How would they do that?

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you're saying that Spotify and Apple are the gatekeepers and that's that?

• 27:44Speaker 03

  No, I'm not. I didn't say that. You're talking about somebody creating art, being able to use all of the new things and create their records and everything. That's what you were talking about, not Apple and Spotify. But you're saying that they could make this and it's great for artists where they have the tools, they can create these new records, they can do all kinds of things they couldn't do before. And that's true, they can. But what choice do they have?

• 28:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm saying culturally, do you think that trade-off is worth it? That's the real question, I think, at the heart of it. Right? Is it?

• 28:13Speaker 03

  I don't think so.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  Do we lose some quality? Will we catch up to it over time? Because technology tends to advance that way.

• 28:18Speaker 03

  If technology is advancing that way, what's happening to the audio? What happened? Technology has not advanced. Technology has regressed. There's nothing that compares with the way a sound is. The way we're reproducing it. And all of the hoops you have to go through. And all the playback devices are all limited. Bluetooth is limited. All of these things that everybody has are all limited. So you accept that you're living in a limited world. And I don't accept that. I'm not going to sit there and go, oh, yeah, that's good. Well, more people are able to create. That's fantastic. I'm going, OK, fine. I was there when it sounded great. And I'm here now, and it doesn't sound great. So, well, I'm not going to pretend that it sounds great because I'm still here.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  I'm not going to pretend it's great because many people can make records in their garages, or in their house, or in their car, wherever they want to do it. That, to me, that's great. It's fantastic. But it doesn't sound good.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  So obviously, you got together with Phil. You made the Pono. You tried to push the market. You tried to get everybody involved.

• 29:21Speaker 03

  We were backwards. We came out at exactly the wrong time with Pono. We made the classic mistake. So Pono is not a good example, other than the quality. Because Pono's DAX are fantastic. They sound better than anything that's out there now. Now, the guys at Stereophile, when they compare what's happening now, they still compare it to the Pono player, which hasn't been out in like four or five years, whenever it was out. So, and that is a digital, you know, digital high point for sound. But it's not like, it was backwards. It was a download system when streaming was just coming in. So, yeah, great. We tried to make it great. And now, now we can do high-res streaming,

• 30:06Speaker 03

  which we didn't think we could do at the time when we were doing Pono. But we were wrong about that, too. As if we'd have been very futuristic looking at things, we would have located people that can do high-res streaming. And the thing to do is to make it as good as it can be, so that when the rest of the playback world and capturing and everything and all the devices catches up and starts actually capturing quality and playing it back, that you still have created something that they'll be able to hear the difference on. If you dummy it down and go for something that's going to sound great on Apple today, or anything, by the time you get finished and you get to the other end, you've just got a piece of crap that

• 30:49Speaker 03

  sounds like Apple today. You can't make it any better because it's a piece of shit. And that's where it's at.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there are other high-end players now. There's the Astol and Kern. Sony makes some ridiculously expensive Walkman. But Phil, from your perspective, do you still see a market opening for a dedicated piece of hardware that meets Neil's expectations?

• 31:11Speaker 07

  I think there's other devices out there. Some of them cost as much as $3,000. And I don't think they sound much better. They may have different features and have wireless and other sort of things, but there's good products out there. And you can download music today from a number of sources, and you can get good results. But I think it's only, they're only playing to the audiophile market.

• 31:38Speaker 03

  Right. It's not an elitist thing. Good sounding audio is not an elitist area. It used to be everybody heard it. The whole world heard quality. Now the whole world hears shit. And only audiophiles, apparently, are able to find quality, which I don't believe, even that. I'm just saying, call it what it is. It's just no good. You can debate and you can at the verge, you can talk about all these different things that people can do, and the devices that everybody has, and I'll just sit over here and I'll just say, "They all sound like shit to me."

• 32:16Speaker 03

  They do. And other people say, "It sounds great." And I'll ask them, "What have you compared it to?" And if you look around at the marketplace today, it's very hard to find anything that compares, you know, that is actually better than what the status quo is. Because you have to get through these dinky little devices to hear what's in it. And all the playback and Bluetooth and all this, you know, I'm just not impressed with it. We're living in the age of technology, and audio sucks.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  Neil, what do you listen to at home? Just for point of comparison, if I want to build Neil Young's setup, what do you listen to at home?

• 32:55Speaker 03

  What I listen to at home is the least amount of stuff that I can find. You know, I liked Air's equipment. I got some great speakers that Charlie Hansen turned me on to. I used to have a couple of pairs of those. Now I only have one pair. One of them burned in a fire in Malibu that was apparently started by a digital network. No, just kidding. But you never hear anything about the fire originating from an analog record. It never happened. That's very technical.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  Those are your speakers. What's your turntable?

• 33:33Speaker 03

  What's my turntable? We got a couple of turntables. You know, basically, I use, you know, the kind of portable ones that you can just buy that are old ones. Trying to think what my wife's, what the name of hers is. I don't have a high buck, big turntable thing. I don't, I use an analog amp, and I use, you know, the smallest amount of things that I can use between what I'm playing and what I'm hearing. The least amount of devices possible. No conversions, none of that stuff. I don't, I don't like it.

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  What year is your amp from?

• 34:08Speaker 03

  I don't know what year it's from. The bus, you have a NAD. Yeah, I had an NAD on the bus. Right.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good. I'm just, I'm just asking, because, you know, there's a part of me that wants to go home and buy exactly your setup, so that I know, right? Like, I know what good sounds like to Neil Young. And there's a part of me that wants to tell people, like, "Look, you can go out and buy, there's lots of good turntables out there, and there's lots of good analog speakers, and you can just pair them together and start." But, you know, that time, I read a lot of old, like, 70s and 80s audio reviews because they put me in the right frame of mind for how to communicate now. And that stuff was just as subjective as anything, right? And this is the era of gold-plated speaker wires or whatever. And I don't know that that was really valuable to people. I think people convinced themselves they were getting more than they were just because they were paying money.

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  That's where I started and that's where I want to end, is you can feel it, sure, I buy it, I felt it, but I still don't know how to instruct people on what they should be, what they're getting, right? Like, here's what it actually feels like, here's what you should be paying attention to. Close your eyes and pay attention, look for this, listen for this. And I'm wondering, after this conversation, if you have a little bit more of a direct instruction.

• 35:21Speaker 03

  If you can feel it and you think you're getting it, the only comparison you can make is an old record of a song that you really like, you get a good copy of it, play it back on a record player through an amp, take whatever player you have, play the current digital copy of that thing through it, put it through the same amp after you go through whatever things you're gonna have to go through digitally to get there, which are all crap. You know, I'm like from another world, okay? It's like I talk a different language. So, I'm not into, you know, gold speaker wires, all of that, I'm not into any of that stuff.

• 36:04Speaker 03

  I'm into, it's just basic things. We don't want all these extra bells and whistles. Nothing is worse for music than attaching an elitist label to someone who listens to quality. We all used to hear quality all the time. Now it's gone. That's what happened. There's no explanation for it, you know, the human race, we're supposed to make things better, technology's supposed to improve your life. That's all bullshit. It didn't happen. With audio, it didn't happen. Even with pictures, it didn't happen. It's all about money, and it's all about selling you features. The more

• 36:45Speaker 03

  features you have, the less quality you have. If you get very simple and just play it back through something very simple, that's the best chance you have at hearing the kind of quality that I heard when I started making records and when I started listening to music. Everybody heard the same, the same thing. When I heard Bob Dylan doing, you know, Highway 61, or Subterranean Homesick Blues, or something like that back in the day, in the 60s, whenever it was, I heard it either off a radio, coming off a vinyl into a, something that broadcasted into my analog radio in my car, and it sounded great. Now, when you hear it through, go to

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Sirius FM, and try to imagine yourself listening to a Fisher Price record player, and you'll be right in the groove. The solution is not more stuff, or high-end audio. The solution is something everybody can hear, that's available to everyone. And that just means playback has to be improved on the phones. People have to be able to accept the fact that if they use wireless phones, that they're not going to have the same quality if they used a wire. Because you have to go through more technology to get there. You have to decode it and encode it, to get in and out of those devices. And that's, that's the problem.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  Are you two still pushing the industry? I mean, obviously with Pono, you tried really hard to push the industry. Obviously with Extreme, and now your site, you're trying to push the industry. But are you still out there making the argument to these executives?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  Well, as a matter of fact, we're making the argument right now to all the record companies, that they're living in the past. They're trying to charge more for quality. Digital has made it possible to have many different levels of quality. So bean counters, in their ultimate ignorance of quality, have nothing To do other than put different prices on different levels of quality. So they price real quality out of the market. For instance, my own record company has supplied masters that they downgraded to half of the quality. Because they think that people should pay more for the higher quality.

• 39:03Speaker 03

  So the end result is when Co-Buzz plays one of my songs, it's half as good as it could be. Because Warner Brothers gave them a piece of crap compared to what I made. They gave them a 96, I made a 192. The bean counter said, "That's too cheap, it's too expensive for 192." Well, wait a minute, why not just give the people one price? And let the people decide what they want to hear. Let the people buy the song, not the technology. Bits don't cost money, okay? If you get 192, which is the highest, or 384 in your dreams.

• 39:42Speaker 03

  Then you get that and you have a chance at hearing that if everything else in your chain is good. But why should you not hear it because it costs more? It's an elitist piece of shit. You really need to get it so that everything is good. Or people pay the same price for an MP3 as they pay for a 192. Of the same song, it's the same piece of music. Paying more for quality is just a bean counter wank, okay? What they've done is downgraded it so no one hears quality anymore. Because they think that quality should sound more, should cost more.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  It shouldn't cost more, it should all be the same price and let the people decide what they want to hear. We don't have that today, we don't have that kind of freedom. The freedom's been taken away from us by the bean counters, the record companies, everybody following these people telling them what to do. That doesn't have anything to do with the end experience. All the time when I grew up, everybody heard the same quality. There was no difference. Okay, granted, a cassette will have more surface noise than an album. So that's the difference, okay? If you had a cassette, it had more surface noise. But if you turn it up really loud, the music would come blasting through and you'd hear all of the music. And then when the music was over, you'd hear a shhhhh.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  And that's too fucking bad. But that's it. At least you heard the music while you were blasting it and it was great. You know, it's hard to understand that everybody had the kind of quality that I'm just trying to get anybody to hear today. Everybody had it, now nobody has it. That's the reality. I don't care how many bells and whistles, how many special chords, how many D to A converters you have in line. All of that crap is no good. I'm sorry. So I'm the wrong guy to ask. You should just erase everything and not hear it.

• 41:45Nilay Patel?

  No way. This was a privilege. It is a unique perspective in our time and I'm happy to have heard.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  Well, I was there and my friends were there and we made these records and we know what the fuck they sound like, okay? And you guys, in today's world, you're missing it. It's unfortunate. I wish I could tell you how to do it, but you need a time machine, apparently.

• 42:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. I have taken up way too much of your time. This was truly an honor and a really fun conversation. I hope more people listen to you about this stuff.

• 42:16Speaker 03

  Don't hold your breath.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  Phil Baker, thank you for joining us as well. Okay, thanks.

• 42:23Speaker 07

  Sure, thank you.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  What's, hey, quick, you gotta plug the book. This is like, this is why you're here. Tell them about the book real quick.

• 42:28Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, Neil and I sat down and wrote a book. I was working with Neil on the Pono and I saw how anxious he was about the quality of music. And, you know, I'm a technologist and I didn't know. And, you know, I learned a lot from Neil and I wanted to tell the story about what he believed in. And over the time of my developing the Pono with our team, I was able to tell the difference. There was no issue about not being able to tell. My friends were able to tell. You know, it was so obvious once we heard good music. So, the purpose of the book, called To Feel the Music, is to articulate...

• 43:12Speaker 07

  What Neil believed and what he felt. And it's also to tell the story of what it takes to start up a small company with a hardware product and develop it and take it into manufacturing and then deal with the technology websites that some of them, not The Verge, but a few others, made fun of what we were doing. And, but it's, I think it's a really interesting story for anybody that's in the hardware business, wants to do a hardware product, what they come up against, some of the issues. So it's really two stories in one. It's about what's happened to the quality of music in Neil's words and what it takes

• 43:54Speaker 07

  to build a company and a product, in my words.

• 43:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, that sounds very interesting. It's available now?

• 44:02Speaker 07

  It's available on Amazon and everywhere books are sold. It's called To Feel the Music by Neil Young and Phil Baker.

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  And the good news is that books cannot be degraded in quality by going over digital services.

• 44:14Speaker 07

  Some of the image quality is, could be better.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  Of course it is. Oh, I walked right into that one.

• 44:19Speaker 07

  No, no.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, gentlemen, thank you so much for joining us. Hopefully, we'll have you back soon.

• 44:23Speaker 07

  Thanks for the opportunity. It was great talking with you, Neil Young.

• 44:27Speaker 03

  Thanks a lot.

• 44:28Nilay Patel?

  Okay. My thanks to Neil Young and Phil Baker. You can check out their book, To Feel the Music. It's out now. It's a fun read. We'll be back later this week with a chat show, then on Tuesday with the interview show, and on and on we go. Love your feedback. Please tweet at me. I'm Matt Reckless. I'll talk to you soon.

• 44:46Speaker 08

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