I really hate this kind of headlines
It's rampant click bait. I try not to reward the behavior with clicks, but sometimes I'm genuinely interested in the topic. This is not one of those times.
From the first line:
We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.
and when I copied that string, they added this to my clipboard:
Read More: https://www.slashgear.com/1347620/new-sony-walkman-cost-price/
This is just an ad from a garbage blog.
Then do like I do and downvote posts that have such shit titles
Well… it won't matter once you listen to music on them with your shitty 20 USD headphones.
No no, I use the beats fit pro that are recommended in the article underneath. They actually suck hard, but the review seems to think they’re the second coming. So take all this with a grain of salt.
Yea, I have found by far the biggest effect for me (and I have to imagine most people) is the speakers / headphones, not the digital processing or even the audio converters.
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.
They did. It's called LDAC. Many would also agree that they make the best headphones and earbuds, I swear by their WH1000s and WF1000s
I swear by their WH1000s and WF1000s
Its a good thing lots of people do, cause they make my Xperia purchases $250 cheaper. The freebie buds go right to eBay.
I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.
There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.
Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.
I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.
720 x 1280 pixels. The device runs Android 12 and also gets 64 GB of onboard storage
😂😂😂😂
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?
It will sound better than streaming directly from your phone but it's not worth it to most people. The cable conversation is a whole other subject. There are still audiophiles that claim that cables costing upwards of $1000 are worth it and sound better. It blows my mind.
I would just wait for techmoan or crinacle to test it and explain what is what, probably some sort of a cash grab is the correct answer but.. maybe?
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.
Wait until people hear about Astell&Kern’s ~$4000 ear buds.
$4k and they're not even custom fit‽‽
I'm sorry if I'm paying FOUR THOUSAND REAL DOLLARS they'd better not come with the fucking tips I get with $20 buds.
Nice, they pre-tangled them for you.
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.
MHz refers to the samples per second, not the pitch. CD audio for example is 16-bit/44.1kHz. What that means is there are 16-bits of sampling (audio) taken 44,100 times per second. DSD on the other hand is 1-bit samples taken 11.2 million times per second, this is referred to as DSD256. What that translates to is a digital wave that looks a lot closer to an analog wave than a CD does. It has nothing to do with the frequency of listening in this case.
If you'd like to learn more, check this out.
Yeah the entire article smells like gold plated HDMI cables from Monster, as if that somehow improves the quality of digital signals.
Sony has judiciously used gold across the internals of the NW-ZX707, including its solder and reflow solder elements, to further improve sound localization.
Gold has a higher resistivity than copper. Resistance adds noise. It's probably just for corrosion resistance.
Another reason audiophiles have come to appreciate the NW-ZX707 is something called the vinyl processor that lends the unmistakable character of vinyl discs back to their digital tracks.
So they further distort the sound to replicate lower quality equipment? They're definitely not making it sound more like the original by introducing vinyl artifacts.
This is some serious hobbyist pricing bait, but I can't judge since I've got my own dumb expensive hobbies.
This feature ensures the NW-ZX707 can transform standard MP3 or PCM audio to the ultra-high frequency 11.2 Mhz DSD audio stream.
I think the article is just incorrect. Sony probably means it can just decide .dsf files. And you are confusing 1 bit DSD with 16 bit PCM. The most common DSD format is DSD64 2.8Mhz which is equivalent to 16 bit /176khz, 24 bit/117khz, or 32 bit/ 88.2khz. And the microphones and instruments do work at these high frequencies.
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.
Yeah "Costs more than you think" no I think it costs about what I expected for a lossless player. DACs are a feature these days.
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 have hard time believing that anybody can hear difference with this and good quality phone.
I associate audiophiles for people that think they can hear difference when they pay extra but actually don’t when blind-tested. This seems to be perfect product for them.
Audio engineer here, it's a trainable skill that takes a long time with comparing audio side-by-side
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
That depends on which MP3 though. Is it 128kbps? Because that's dog shit. 192 will sound fine to most. I don't go below 256 and that's only if I can't get 320.
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.
There are dozens and dozens of options for a music player in all price ranges. Look at the list below for a start.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hi-res-portable-daps-comparison-chart-2022.961903/
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.
As an audiophile I would never spend this much because I also know that getting transparent audio is dirt cheap these days and these high end devices often don't measure well in ways that do matter, for example their output impedance.
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?
The Walkman brand has been attached to lots of over devices by Sony over the years, it just means portable music player, not specifically tape.
They made Walkman CD and MP3 players before this, it's their branch of portable music players.
It's very silly that this exists but it's also cool that it does?
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
