Neil Young and Steve Jobs believed to have been ?working on? vinyl-quality iPod

Rock legend Neil Young has claimed that he was ‘working on’ a vinyl-quality iPod with the late technology icon Steve Jobs, Music Week has reported.

As one of the industry’s most vocal figures on the subject of mp3 audio quality, Young has often argued that the format offers just five per cent of the fidelity offered by vinyl and other methods of playback.
“If you take a 2192 file – the highest res recorded music today – and you compare that to a vinyl record or analogue tape master, they’re both pretty similar [in sound quality],” Young told an audience at All Things D’s Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday.

“The copy is very good. If that’s 100 per cent, now we have 5 per cent with mp3. The problem is that there’s no alternative living in that space. You can’t associate poor quality with convenience.”

It was then that Young made the suggestion that a “modern day iPod” be introduced, saying that full lossless audio files, such as FLAC, would take 30 minutes per album to download onto a device. Having also indicated that he believed that a portable device would be capable of storing around 30 albums, Young was asked why he hadn’t put his idea to any hardware manufacturers, to which he replied: “I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it.”

However, he then revealed that “not much” progress had been made since Jobs’ death.