Pono Music Kickstarter- Looking Back

It was two years ago today that the historic Kickstarter campaign for Pono Music began.  In the first 10 hours Pono reached it's goal of $800,000 and eventually closed out with over $6 million in pledges.  Later in 2014, the Pono Music Store was launched and sales of the innovative Pono Music Player began.

Hands on Sound had the honor and privilege of being part of Pono from Day 1 in 2009 when Neil Young first presented the idea as something to begin working on.  We had just released NYA Vol 1 in multiple formats including Blu-ray, which provided the opportunity for users to play music at high resolution 24 bit/ 192 kHz.  At that time there were few options for listeners to enjoy high resolution digital music besides Blu-ray set top players and the Sony PS3.

We developed an iPad app controller that allowed for simultaneous playback and switching between audio qualities and built out a traveling sound system in a 1970's Cadillac as a demo testing/ listening platform. Listening shootouts on various DACs and compiling a library of tracks for testing lead the way to the eventual consumer player and the online store.

With the major record labels on board, there is now an ongoing program to go back to the original album masters (whether that be analog tape or digital) and make them available for sale at the highest quality possible.

Stereophile magazine named the PonoPlayer The "Digital Product Of The Year" for 2015.

“Three of this year’s top vote-getters are portables, the others being the Astell&Kern AK240 and Sony NW-ZX2. Even more interesting—but not, in my view, surprising—was the PonoPlayer’s considerable margin of victory: This was the least close race in our 2015 Products of the Year voting.”

Learn more about Pono at: https://www.ponomusic.com

Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps films to Blu-ray & DVD

I'm pleased to report that two films we worked on the post-production and restoration of have had release dates set for Spring of 2016.  Both will be available on Blu-ray and DVD.

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies-dvd/

These classics, Rust Never Sleeps and Human Highway, saw a nationwide screening last month as a double bill, courtesy of Fathom Events.

http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies/

For Rust Never Sleeps, we went back to the original negative of the film and had Bob Brian's team at Headquaters in Burbank painstakingly clean and restore it frame by frame.  On the audio side, I had the film mags transferred by Skywalker Sound at 24 bit/ 192 kHz which allowed Tim Mulligan at Redwood Digital to improve upon both the sound quality and overall mix.  For the home stretch, Tim and I put together a 5.1 surround system in the big room at Upstream Multimedia where we fine tuned the surround presentation of the film before it got married to picture.

Human Highway saw a much longer and indepth restoration.  It began with our team, lead by Toshi Onuki, in finding and restoring as many of the original picture elements and then working under the guidance of Neil Young to build the Director's Cut...a version that had been left on the cutting room floor in the early 80's.  Not just figuratively, but literally left as strips of cut off film…on the floor.  Added to this was some narration provided by voiceovers that Neil, LA Johnson and others had done almost 10 years ago.

I took the original 2" 16 track audio masters to Chace Audio and made Hi Res transfers only to find that we didn't have clean dialogue tracks.  This sent me on a journey of playing back the source tpaes that were recorded to a Nagra deck on set...and locating the exact takes used in the edit.

After Mark Faulkner had put all the element together for picture and sound, we went to Pasadena, where Tamara Johnson created a tremendous mix.

Here is a nice article that discusses some of this audio work that was undertaken for Human Highway-

http://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2014/9/10/the-story-of-the-audio-restoration-of-neil-youngs-human-high.html