 So if you're not familiar with T-Bone Burnett, he is who did the Oh Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack. He does lots of bluegrass, the Americana things. You hear I am a man of Constance Sotaro, the soggy bottom boys, whatever. We can thank this man. So here's my thing. He has come out with the pinnacle of recorded sound that him and Bob Dylan did some development on. And so basically what it is is a new analog audio format that basically seems to improve on existing formats like vinyl. It's called an iconic original, and he says, not only is an iconic original the equivalent of a painting, it is a painting. It is lacquer painted onto an aluminum disc with a spiral etched to it into it by music. This painting, however, has the additional quality of containing that music, which can be heard by putting a stylus into the spiral and saying it. Now, I'm of two minds with what I just heard here. My first mind here is that one, when you're the inventor CEO or the spokesperson for a product, you really gotta talk a big game. I've told you all this about your music. You must really learn to sell it. Really learn what's great about you and how to sell it. I think I said it in one of my videos that like my friend Ben Wyman from Dillinger Escape Plan once told me that the main job of a manager is being a person who can sell and convert people to get onto the team and be like, yes, I should give this person an opportunity. And when he said that, I didn't believe him. But then as my years went on in the music business, I realized Ben's a very smart guy and knows what he's talking about. So any, this right here is really selling some bull. So it's one, I'll get into some of the. But come on, my dude, this is a painting. Let's look at this thing. I'm not hanging in that in my house anytime soon. Come on, guy. Like album artwork, vinyl, sure. I got a gold record and it's beautiful. I got a poster of break-ins over there. I got a 1975 poster right here. I'm gonna put art up, but that, my guy. Come on, not a thing. Okay, but let's move on because there is more interesting thing. When describing the quality that raises analog sound above digital sound, the word warmth is often used. That's an understatement. Analog sound has more depth, more harmonic complexity, more resonance, better imaging. Analog has more feel, more character, more touch. Digital sound is frozen. Analog sound is alive. Oh, man, T-bone. First off, analog sound has more depth. So here's the problem. If you're using analog as a medium, unless he's done something new and no analog medium invented right now has technically more depth than a 24-bit piece of art. Vinyl does not have the resolution to do that. More harmonic complexity. Now, harmonic complexity is an interesting word here because really what harmonic complexity means is distortion. And so for that, you'd be right, but here's the problem. When you're talking about a sound format, you want it to not distort more than the original creator chose it. This is literally one of the things that we're all trying to get to translate. I can remember mixing for radio back in the day, and we'd have to think about, radio's gonna put a little bit more distortion on it and you'd sometimes get a whole different mixing master just for how much distortion radio adds because you don't wanna have that. And so now you're already telling us that this greatest invention you've ever had has some distortion, more resonance. Now, resonance is one of these words we can use it a lot. You know, resonance can mean how much you feel the music or it could actually mean when you hear surface noise on a vinyl. Like you put it down, you hear that classic sound before it plays. That's technically resonance. Better imaging. Sure, imaging is a very interesting thing that like, you can argue that there's these oral things that happen because with bits and hertz and digital audio, you're getting things put in a box and then there's not in between the boxes. But with the level of resolution we're at when we're at 96 or 192 and 24 bit, is it beyond human, a lot of juries out there. I'll grant them that. But analog has more feel, more character, more touch. Yeah, that's obvious because you can touch it whereas digital, you can't, but digital sound is frozen, analog sound is alive. My brother, chef's kiss for this level. Okay, but a press release notes one of Burnett and Nets aims is to reset the valuation of recorded music. He formed a new company to do Neo Fidelity, Inc. which plans to just record and distribute future Ionic originals. So now this is the interesting thing is that all these people when they do and they sell these to the investors and I would love if we got a higher format. Truly, I listened to title loss lists on my insanely expensive $800 headphones that I have two different things of through an insanely expensive converter. Also I can hear music as good as I can hear it. I love it. I'm a nerd for laying on my nice couch and listening to music. But there's this little tell that always happens with these companies which is that they then want to distribute and own all of it kind of the way Apple tried to with having the iTunes store. Anyway, what I would think of when I think of this is that they're always trying to make like their own marketplace and this gives me the tell that this is not for the good of the audio community, this is for the good of their pockets. So then we get to the next sentence which is really the cringe apocalypse of all of this. So it's like a digital NFT but make an IRL my dog. Like the whole thing with NFTs is it's a digital thing, an IRL it is not. Like the whole thing that distinguishes painting from digital art is literally the difference in medium. You cannot have it both. This is some serious grade A, my guy. But he also says it's a collectorism. Pono, except that it's the disc. Now if you don't know what Pono is you'd be forgiven because it just means you weren't extremely online for a extremely cursed few bunch of years where Neil Young basically made this player. In fact, I made a tab to, there we go. This is what a Pono player goes for. This is what it looked like. Fun fact, I pre-ordered one, tried it out for one minute, saw how much they were going for on eBay when they first came out because the people who pre-ordered it and I sold it immediately for a triple profit and I don't regret that decision for one moment in my life if I'm being honest. Anyway, the Pono was this cursed thing Neil Young did that would have better conversion. The hilarious thing is by the time he put this out it had worse conversion in it because it took him so long to develop it that so many other things that were out on the market like laughably bad. At the time I was just literally listening through my Digita Design 192 which was not known as the pinnacle of high quality conversion even though those things sounded great. The 192 immediately sounded better than it. Unfortunately when these old codgers get in the tech game I'm a middle-aged guy, it's a young person's game like you're missing the boat here chief. This is not the thing we need to be doing. But with that said, I will reserve some judgment. I'm not judging the format because I need to hear it but what I am judging is the packaging it. I'm judging very hard T-Bone and I really don't feel good about the way you're selling this but I will tell you the second I can get my hands on this I will do the Pono. Yeah, I'd never want to see that thing again. I feel bad for any of you who didn't know what it was and I just introduced it.