Rocker Neil Young is determined to give digital music fans a better-quality alternative to iPods and Mp3 players after developing a new service that will launch in 2013.

The part-time inventor has come up with a new digital music service called Pono, which will be comprised of an online download store, a tool that converts digital audio files into analog-sounding recordings, and a series of audio players.

Young showed off a prototype Pono player to David Letterman during a recent appearance on The Late Show in America, boasting it will offer music fans "the best sound anyone can get".

The After the Gold Rush rocker insists many major record labels are onboard with his invention and will endorse it next year, and now he's revealing what sparked the idea for his latest gadget.

He says, "I'm walking down the street and I see some beautiful girl walking along and she's got these white things coming out her ears and I'm going, 'That poor girl, she's listening to real c**p!' And I go, 'It's so easy to fix that,' and I put together a team of people and we fix it.

"People don't have Mp3 listening parties. They have vinyl listening parties and people, like my own daughter, who is having her wedding, she's so excited, she called me up: 'Daddy, I got a Dj, they're only gonna play soul 45s, real 45s on a turntable'. They're doing this because if you can feel it, you can hear it.

"What we have in Pono is not your mother's digital."