The push for loudness is nothing new. It's been around as long as recorded music. What’s changed over time is increased freedoms to abuse it. 50 years ago that took the form of control shifting from white-coat engineers to producers, squeezing more loudness onto LPs and 45s, although limited by the constraints of the vinyl medium and the mastering tools available at the time which set limits on how far that could go.
The CD removed the constraints on loudness inherent to the vinyl medium. The irony is that the availability of a superior performing medium made loudness abuse much easier. Once digital problems on the recording side were ironed-out well enough so that well-mastered CD’s could fully rival LP quality reproduction by ’90 or so, it only took a few years until the increased headroom and performance capability of the new medium was consumed by the same old pressure to push loudness as far as possible, driven by new tools which became available making doing so progressively easier, while pushing it progressively farther.
Today, digital audio reproduction is more than capable of superior fidelity over vinyl although its advantages are rarely used that way, and in my opinion, there lies Mr. Young’s primary missed opportunity. He could have offered what truly matters most: especially well-produced and mastered material with an emphasis on audio quality. Sure, market its high-res formats to sell it if necessary, but as mentioned by others, what would have made the real and very welcome difference would have been some sort of certified process underscoring better quality production and mastering, clearly differentiating the audio product from what is available elsewhere else.
That’s the music production and distribution side of it.
The capability of the playback side of things has also improved in terms of the performance of equipment, especially inexpensive digital gear compared to where it was a couple decades ago. Yet, economic pressure for producing inexpensive, simple-to-use devices dominates over pressure for high audio quality, just like the pressure for loudness from the production side. This is the hardware realm the Pono player was meant to address. Ironically Neil probably got the playback side somewhat more closely aligned what’s necessary for high-quality reproduction, but that in itself is just not competitive by itself in the hardware market. I don’t know much about the Pono hardware, but what it should have had to differentiate it from competing hardware is not just well-designed circuitry and outputs, but very high-quality controllable compression and sufficient EQ capability to tailor the playback of those high-quality full-dynamic-range music files to the listener’s needs. Let the end user squash it as much as they need to depending on what they are doing. Let them load personal headphone calibration curves if they care to. Sell it as not just super-quality high-rez audio, but as a system adaptable to all lifestyle uses of those who care about music.
Produce and master the content for ultimate excellence, blessed by the AES, the ME quality club, famous named musicians with golden ears and all that, rather than for lowest common denominator use, and let the end user ‘dumb it down’ as much as necessary at the playback end, under their control, with as much or as little tweaking as they want, providing a return to the ‘missing connection’ with the music that the neo-vinyl generation gets from playing LPs, futzing with players and cleaners and stylus’s and pretending it’s about sound quality when it’s about the experience.
The genius behind the success of Apple’s Ipod/Itunes revolution (ongoing with Iphone/pad/Apple-Store) wasn't just content or hardware; it was the linked combination of the two. They become inseparable. Neil could have done something similar with Pono, showing people that music doesn't need to be compromised to be adaptable to a modern lifestyle, and they needn't become audiophile weirdos with unwieldy equipment to enjoy great quality audio with a deeper connection to the music.