Scene and Heard

NEIL YOUNG CORK:

While Neil Young is busy gathering cash through online funding site Kickstarter for his PonoMusic project, it’s good to hear that Ireland may benefit through the involvement of Cork-based company PCH International. Corkonian businessman Liam Casey will manufacture the music players, presumably in one of his Chinese facilities.

PonoMusic includes an online music store, and a playback device, the PonoPlayer. Young is aiming to bring a “studio-level” quality to digital music files, and while it’s still unclear as to when the players will be available, a retail price of $399 has been mooted. According to PonoMusic, the format will recapture the emotion of music in a way that reflects what the artistes recorded: “They [musicians] describe how we take them back to the same feeling they had in the studio.