LEGENDARY ROCKER NEIL Young has said late Apple founder Steve Jobs shunned his iPod when in the privacy of his home – and listened to vinyl LPs instead.
Young made the comments on the stage of a technology conference, as part of a campaign for a higher-fidelity digital sound.
He said Jobs was such a fan of music that he didn’t use his iPod and its digitally compressed files in the house. Instead, he used a physical format well-known to have better sound.
“Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music. His legacy is tremendous,” Young said. “But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.”
Young told the D: Dive Into Media conference Tuesday that he spoke with Jobs about creating a format that has 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital formats, including MP3.
Such a format, he said, would contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to 5 percent in compressed formats including Apple’s AAC. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download.
Although Young didn’t have a practical plan for developing such a format – saying it’s for “rich people” to decide – he said Jobs was on board with the idea before he died from cancer at age 56 in October.
“I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it,” Young said. “You’ve got to believe if he lived long enough he would eventually try to do what I’m trying to do.”
Young’s opinion of Jobs was confirmed by interviewer Walt Mossberg, a journalist with News Corp’s All Things D website, which has hosted Jobs at its conferences before.
Mossberg said Jobs in the past expressed surprise that “people traded quality, to the extent they had, for convenience or price.”
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