As none other than Neil Young, who I just watched on Colbert this morning, sits tables behind me at Starbucks, I want to talk about some good news of the day, a show of progress if you will: HBO has announced it will start an online streaming service of some kind that does NOT require a cable subscription of any kind! Hallelujah! It certainly took long enough, but this is just excellent and I will be one of the first to put his money where his mouth is! It’ll probably be more than the $15 add-on it is now, but hopefully not much; I’m saving $25 by not patronizing Time Warner anymore, and would gladly pay that for perhaps Showtime and HBO on my computers. Now let’s hope that other talented content providers get on-board and we can shake this thing up a little….
BTW, Neil Young was promoting some music player device that gives you “100%” where an MP3 player gives you “5%”. He is of course strictly speaking correct, simply because the bitrate of the latter is normally a tenth of hat a CD has, and the former probably uses 96Khz, 24Bit audio. Of course our brains are so easily fooled, and I bet you 99% of all people would not be able to distinguish between the two formats, especially with the sonically limited material we listen to today.
Well, I decided to look it up: the device is called the PonoPlayer and costs $400. The corresponding Ponomusic service promises to always provide the highest resolution file-formats available for any particular content, with 44 Khz 16-bit as the lowest. The player does many formats up to 192Khz 24-bit….there you have it!
