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Neil Young's music player for audiophiles reaches Kickstarter on March 15th
We now know how Neil Young plans to make his dreams of high-quality digital music come true: crowdfunding. The artist's company PonoMusic is launching a Kickstarter campaign on March 15th that will let you reserve the PonoPlayer, Young's long-teased, audiophile-grade portable jukebox. The 128GB device will set you back a whopping $399 when it goes on sale (less with the Kickstarter discount), but its creators are promising audio fidelity worthy of the price tag. The hardware will offer natural-sounding digital filtering from Ayre Acoustics, ESS' most advanced digital-to-analog converter and "perfectly flat" frequency response with most any set of headphones. As you might expect, there will be a matching online store that delivers high-resolution tunes. The PonoMusic team hasn't said just when its media player will reach your pocket, but it shouldn't be too long before you're listening to a pristine version of Harvest while on the move.
Vivo Xplay 3S unveiled with a 6-inch 2K display, powerful audio amp and fingerprint reader
We came away rather impressed with the Vivo Xplay from China, so today's launch of its successor, the Xplay 3S (which is a bit odd as there was never an "Xplay 2"), is something that we've been looking forward to since the teaser way back in October. As mentioned before, this new Android phone is still the first to pack a 2K (2,560 x 1,440) display, which works out to be a ridiculously high 490ppi density on the 6-inch panel. Like other recent Vivo phones, you'll find a pair of dedicated audio chips on the Xplay 3S -- here you have ESS Technology's ES9018 DAC and Texas Instruments' OPA2604 amplifier, both of which are said to be the crème de la crème in their respective categories. This should go nicely with the built-in DTS Headphone:X feature that brings 7.1 or even 11.1 surround sound effect to your stereo headphones; plus Vivo's video streaming service already hosts about 200 Headphone:X-capable movies (along with over 400 movies in 1080p and over 1,000 movies in 720p), with more to be added each month.
