Just last week Music Times came up with a short list of relatively recent albums that we'd like to see get the full hi-res treatment at Pono, assuming that our vinyl copies of older records would do for the time being. Apparently not however, as rumors suggest CEO Neil Young and the team at PonoMusic have gotten ahold of the rights to The Beatles catalogue and are working to remaster it in full 192 kHz. The new version of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is "going to blow your mind," reportedly.
That claim comes exclusively from Showbiz411, whose Roger Friedman doesn't cite a source behind the rumor. However at one point he does speak with Black Eyed Peas frontman Will.i.am, who provided the aforementioned quote (although he doesn't confirm that Pono has the rights per se).
The story also mentions that Paul McCartney, most likely to be the one behind such business decisions, is eager to have his band's work released in the FLAC (free lossless audio codec) format. If The Beatles are one PonoMusic's online catalogue by 2016 that will mean it got there a heck of a lot quicker than it did for iTunes, which had to wait nine years for The Beatles to jump onboard.
Although Will.i.am is a guy that has worked on music all his life, obviously as is Young, some have suggested that the full 192 kHz treatment may not make much of a difference to Joe and Jane Public, who won't be tuned in enough to hear the quality difference between that and regular 44 kHz CD-quality work. Even anonymous engineers at PonoMusic have suggested that despite the honest audio difference in products, most buyers won't have any real recognition of the change (according to a story from The New York Post).
