Canadian rocker Neil Young, an outspoken promoter of high-definition audio, calls out Apple in his latest diatribe about declining standards in the streaming music biz.

While ripping Apple Music for distributing what he calls “low-quality audio,” he throws down the gauntlet and challenges Apple to make music great again.

Eccentric rocker Neil Young has never been swayed by the critics. He has always made the music he wanted.

But he may not be able to be so carefree, as some critics eviscerate his latest musical endeavor – a pricey, Kickstarter-funded digital music player aimed at rescuing music from the MP3 format.

The PonoPlayer, resembling a Toblerone bar in shape and color, was supposed to revolutionize the digital listening experience and with a $400 price tag, not to mention a $6.2 million Kickstarter campaign, expectations were high. Users can download music from the Pono site and listen to high-quality files that restore the quality historically compressed out of digital music.

Turns out, it sounds no better than music on an iPhone, according to several critics who have put the PonoPlayer through its paces.

Keeping with the times, musician Neil Young is set to launch a storming attack on Apple’s iPhone iPad iWatch iPod with his forthcoming PonoPlayer.

Young is set to exhibit the PonoPlayer, alongside a music download store called PonoMusic, at this year’s SXSW.