By RYAN NAKASHIMA | Associated Press
DANA POINT, Calif. (AP) — Legendary rocker Neil Young took his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound to the stage of a technology conference Tuesday, saying a giant of the industry was on his side: the late Steve Jobs.
Young said the Apple co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn’t use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home. Instead, he used a physical format well-known to have better sound.
“Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl (albums).”
Young told the “D: Dive Into Media” conference Tuesday that he spoke with Jobs about creating a format that has 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital formats, including MP3.
Such a format, he said, would contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to 5 percent in compressed formats including Apple’s AAC. Each song would be huge, and a new storage and playback device might only hold 30 albums. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download, which is fine if you leave your device on overnight, he said.
“Sleep well. Wake up in the morning. Play some real music and listen to the joy of 100 percent of the sound of music,” he said.
Although Young didn’t have a practical plan for developing such a format — saying it’s for “rich people” to decide — he said Jobs was on board with the idea before he died from cancer at age 56 in October.
“I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it,” Young said. “You’ve got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I’m trying to do.”
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