Steve Jobs was ‘working on' vinyl-quality iPod with Neil Young

Young has long argued that the mp3 format offers just 5% of the fidelity that consumers can experience from vinyl and other playback options, and questioned why larger 'lossless' file types are not dominant.

“If you take a 2192 file – the highest res recorded music today – and you compare that to a vinyl record or analogue tape master, they’re both pretty similar [in sound quality],” Young told an audience at All Things D’s Dive Into Media conference on Tuesday.

“The copy is very good. If that’s 100%, now we have 5% with mp3… The problem is that there’s no alternative living in that space. You can’t associate poor quality with convenience.”

Young then called for a ‘modern day iPod’. He said full lossless audio files would take 30 minutes per album to download onto a device – and that he believed a portable device that carried 30 albums was possible.

Then came the biggest revelation of all.

When asked why Young hadn’t taken the idea to hardware manufacturers, he replied:

“I talked to Steve about it. We were working on it.”

When asked what progress had been made since Jobs’ death, Young replied: “Not much.”

Popular lossless audio file types include FLAC, which is currently incompatible with Apple products.

Watch Neil Young's full interview at Dive Into Media through here.