Technology

I really hate this kind of headlines

tldr; it’s $900 and has very fancy audio equipment.

Well… it won't matter once you listen to music on them with your shitty 20 USD headphones.

Lots of audiophile bullshit pseudoscience words in this- at the end of the day, can I really hear a difference? If so, it’s probably worth it- but if this is just a version of the famous $1000 Denon Ethernet cable, then fuck off right?

I think they would have been a lot better off if they had included a fully functional phone. Who wants to carry around TWO bricks for slightly better audio?

I think the real missed opportunity is that they didn't create a super hi-fi wireless headphone protocol and absolutely best-ever wireless headphones sell them together with the walkman.

Get that clickbait title out of here!

...None of this is new? Portable, standalone DACs have existed for years. Even DSD isn't new. What Sony's charging isn't even out of line. Fiio charges (IIRC) $1200 for their Android-based player/DAC.

This feature ensures the NW-ZX707 can transform standard MP3 or PCM audio to the ultra-high frequency 11.2 Mhz DSD audio stream.

That doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

• Humans can only hear up to about 20kHz, so you're not getting much benefit above about double that.

• Even assuming that humans could hear frequencies hundreds of times higher, audio isn't generally available sampled at 11.2 Mhz. If you're getting music, the recording and audio engineering work, the microphones, etc, aren't designed to accurately capture data at high frequencies.

• Even assuming that none of that were the case, the audio engineer and artists weren't trying to make audio that sounds good at that frequency (which they can't hear either). The music doesn't intrinsically have some aesthetically-pleasing quality that you can extract; they were the ones who added it, and they did that via making judgments using their own senses, which can't hear this.

• Even aside from that, it doesn't look like this comes with headphones. Whatever you are plugging into this has to induce vibration in the air for it to make it to your ears, and probably does not have a meaningful frequency response at that frequency.

The NW-ZX707 also gets Sony's proprietary digital music processing technologies, including the DSEE Ultimate technology, developed in-house to restore compressed music files to the quality of a CD by interpolating sound algorithms.

And it makes even less sense if your starting audio has actually thrown out data in frequencies that humans can hear by using lossy compression there, even if we aren't terribly sensitive to those.

I feel like the author is pretty clueless when it comes to audiophile grade digital audio players. They’re remarking about the $900 price tag like it’s some kind of high water mark for a device when there are Astell & Kern and iBasso units that cost 2-3x that.

The Sony Walkman devices are consistently well-rated. This is going to be a good player for those looking for a dedicated music device.

oh boy everyone will argue about audio specifications again. For the record standard MP3 is fine and is perfectly representative of the recording it did within the bandwidth of human hearing

Interesting read. Honestly it sounds cool with all the specs underneath the shell. But obviously it's just not worth unless you have the ear for it. In other words, you'd have to be a sound engineer to really get the most out of something like this.

I own this.

I’m guessing the author doesn’t have this issue, but the model sold in the US has a volume ~~limiter~~ limit on them. My daily headphones aren’t easy to drive, so this was a concern I have that many other people might not care about.

I ended up having to import mine to get a device that doesn’t have this enforced.

Edit: Sorry I was clumsy with my words. It’s a limit on volume, since it’s an option for high gain.

I am very upset that I can't find good midrange players. Either cheap crap or hyper-expensive things like this. My last one broke and I don't buy the replacement parts solely because I still have hope of finding an appropriate one. For now, I use a perma-offline, degoogled smartphone for this (because I heavily prefer not to use a smartphone in daily life normally), but using a relatively big and heavy brick for a player is VERY inconvenient if you're used to a small lightweight device.

Sony is taking advantage of audiophiles’ desire to compulsively spend more money on better measurements with imperceptible improvements. Nothing wrong with that - most audiophiles are self-aware and know that it’s really higher prices that make music sound better. It will be interesting to see what audiophiles say about these new Walkmans.

There are already similarly priced and cheaper alternatives, including a $350 option by Sony, and $800-$1500 options by Astell & Kern. Stand-alone music players aren’t extinct as this writer seems to think.

I look forward to Techmoan blowing his money on one of these to do a video.

How come it's called Walkman when it doesn't play cassettes?

It's very silly that this exists but it's also cool that it does?