Legendary rocker and campaigning audiophile Neil Young has said that he was working with Steve Jobs on ideas for a hi-fi iPod before the Apple guru’s death.
Neil Young Neil Young
Young (66), an avowed opponent of MP3 and other compressed audio formats, claimed during an interview at the D: Dive Into Media technology conference that the pair had been considering ideas for a new iPod specialising in “high-resolution audio”, which would download content “while you’re sleeping”, to get round the extended download time required for very high resolution audio files.
Both men were apparently concerned with the lack of high resolution formats available for audio files – Young even criticises CD, claiming that it only delivers 15 per cent of the information available on master recordings. He said: “Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music, but when he went home he listened to vinyl… I have to believe if [Jobs] lived long enough he would have tried to do what I’m trying to do.”
Since Steve Jobs died last October however, Young admits: “There’s not much going on.”