Neil Young and Pono will have their place in Audio history as Pioneers of High Res Lossless music players.
This is the crawling phase of High Res music players and acceptance.
Its all about the continuation of creating a better more convenient source to reproduce recorded music.
Wow, glad most of you did not have input to Edison while he was working on sound recordings and reproductions. It took some time but eventually Edison produced the Perfected Phonograph with a wax cylinder that played about 3 minutes. Within 15 years, the public started buying in larger numbers phonographs and records from Edison. I was not around at that time but I have been involved with audio systems as Stereo was coming of age to replace monaural, yes I am that old, well I did start with electronics and music at a young age.
The hard core audiophiles did not like Stereo and the flood of recordings that used the ping pong effect to demonstrate the right/left channels and how Stereo recordings worked, provided you even had a two speaker stereo system, otherwise Stereo continued to sound monaural. Also, who is going to buy a Stereo record player / turntable, new preamp / amp, and another speaker? Not to mention the large investment already in mono recordings. Does any of this sound familiar to todays audio? MP3s will give way to high res music players. As pioneers like Neil Young take the arrows eventually most all portable music players will be High Res music players.
The biggest event will be when Apple goes to High Res Lossless CD quality players in products. Apple purchased Beats to stream better quality music (and make money). For the last few years Apple has asked its labels and artists for high resolution content for its masters for the iTunes program. The likely biggest hold up for Apple is that the wireless Carriers do not want Apple to put the High Res chips in the phones because the capacity with Cellular networks can not handle the increase in data demand, and the consumer can not afford the price. Once the cost of Data and capabilities of the nations Cellular system expands, so will Lossless music players, and Apple will be out front with this NEW technology that by then is 10 years old (a guess).