The PonoPlayer, a music playback device backed by musician Neil Young, has doubled its target on Kickstarter shortly after starting its campaign. The high-fidelity player has so far raised over $1.6 million on the crowd-funding site, beating the $800,000 the campaign originally asked for within 24 hours of launching, with the pledging period set to continue for another 33 more days.
Designed to work with the PonoMusic music store, the PonoPlayer is said to allow users to play back high-quality audio from major and independent record labels. The store will offer music under the FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec), including master recordings at up to 9,216kbps (192kHz/24-bit).
PonoPlayer
The PonoPlayer itself is a triangular media player said to weigh 4.5 ounces, with its 8-hour Li-Ion battery chargeable over micro USB. Software for Windows and Mac will access the store itself and synchronize music with the device, which will have 64GB of built-in storage and will be supplied with a 64GB microSD card providing more capacity. While it will have three buttons for power and volume controls, the color display is a touchscreen which will provide the main music selection and navigation controls.
PonoMusic is offering the PonoPlayer for $300 through the Kickstarter campaign, though the first 100 reserved theirs for $200, with its price expected to rise to $400 after the campaign ends.
