Stefan Mileschin

While Apple's Steve Jobs claimed that he listened to music on his iPod and Apple boom box, he really had a low tech approach to music.

His chum and popular beat combo artist Neil Young is currently campaigning to get a return to the days when the sound quality of a record was a hell of a lot better than it is now. Young is fed up with the standard of compressed music and wants to get the world back into hi-fi again.

According to AP, taking his campaign for higher-fidelity digital sound to the stage of a technology conference, Young invoked the ghost of Steve Jobs to back him up.

Young said the Apple co-founder was such a fan of music that he didn't use his iPod and its digitally compressed files at home.

Steve Jobs was a pioneer of digital music and his legacy was tremendous, Young said. But when he went home, he listened to vinyl.

Young told the "D: Dive Into Media" conference that he got Jobs interested in creating a format that has 20 times the fidelity of files in the most current digital format.

His aim was to create a format which could contain 100 percent of the data of music as it is created in a studio, as opposed to five percent in compressed formats including Apple's AAC.

Young admits that each song would be huge, and a new storage and playback device might only hold 30 albums. Each song would take about 30 minutes to download, which is fine if you leave your device on overnight.

However, Young said he did not have have a cunning plan for developing such a format, it was up to rich people to come up with. He said that Jobs was on board with the idea before he died.

If Jobs really did want to improve the quality of sound in Apple products then why did he tell punters that the Apple boom box, which was selling for a couple of hundred dollars, was better than his stereo at home which was worth a three figured sum?

News Corp hack Walt Mossberg confirmed Young's story and said that Jobs in the past expressed surprise that people traded quality, to the extent they had, for convenience or price.

The answer to that is that Jobs lowered the standards of everything, and the price of all things and then was surprised that everyone followed him.

http://news.techeye.net/software/ste...tened-to-vinyl