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Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman
An anonymous reader writes: The Walkman is one of the most recognizable pieces of technology from the 1980s. Unfortunately for Sony, it didn't survive the switch to digital, and they discontinued it in 2010. Last year, they quietly reintroduced the Walkman brand as a "high-resolution audio player," supporting lossless codecs and better audio-related hardware. At $300, it seemed a bit pricey. But now, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony has loudly introduced its high-end digital Walkman, and somehow decided to price it at an astronomical $1,200.
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
That's the genius of Hi-Res Audio, the same company can both create the problem and sell you the solution.
Sony Music releases extremely loud, clipped and generally crap sounding CDs. Then they release a Hi-Res version that also happens to be properly mixed, but you need an expensive player to listen to it.
Their plan is working. In Japan Hi-Res Audio is a big deal at the moment, but many people don't realise that it is more to do with the recordings being properly mixed and not insanely loud than it is the higher sample rate and bit depth.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
The Pono player is the same thing, allegedly, and costs only 1/3 as much.
http://ponomusic.force.com/
Guess what the price of the MZ-1 was 22 years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.minidisc.org/part_S...
Well, it was 1200$ in Canada....
I was a Sony fanboi back then and having one of the first MZ-1s was like being a space alien. Just ejecting the disc on the Metro (subway) was a reason for complete strangers to ask what it is! Fun times.
Sony, like me, now appears to be a grumpy middle-aged man with graying hair denying that it's 2015...
Mostly random stuff.
This highlights the one and only problem with Sony: It is always too expensive.
I think the product longevity issue that Sony has *might* be a slightly bigger problem. I don't have any real data other than my personal experience, but I have owned a slew of Sony products and with the exception of our two Sony CRT TVs growing up, they have all shat them selves within 18 months. The two TVs we had when I was growing up lasted for over 8 years each. I think the second one needed to have a transformer replaced at some point, but that was about $20 in the early 90's.
Other than those two products, my personal experience has been awful. I don't think I ever had a sony walkman that lasted more than 6 months due to stupid things like belt clips that were TOTALLY inadequate for doing anything other than standing still. My Sony amplifier shat itself the same month the warranty ran out. The display crapped out and was eventually repaired by re-soldering and bending the PCBs. My Sony car stereo crapped it's display about a year after I bought it. No amount of blowing, hitting, or poking around inside could fix it. The digitizer in m Sony Clie (late Palm Pilot clone) shat its self a few weeks after the rotary encoder at the base of the display filled with pocket lint and stopped working. After the Clie disaster, I have refused to buy a Sony electronic device. I'm not going to get burned again.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
Provided they don't screw it up with DRM, I think they could sell quite a few of them. I had a NetMD player when mp3 players were first starting to get really popular. That thing was awesome in that you could spend $5 and get a rewritable disc that would store 1-4 CDs (depending on compression rate). At the time, 64 MB SD cards were over $100. So being able to bring 100+ songs with you was kind of a non-option with MP3 players. There were some hard drive based players, but they were much more expensive.
The big downfall of the Minidisc player was that it came with ridiculously bad software that limited the number of copies of a particular song you could write to Minidisc, and you had to check-in/check-out songs to make sure you didn't run out of licenses. The software was also really slow and would crash all the time too. They had a great technology that was miles ahead of the competition in portable audio but they screwed it up by messing up the software in the name of DRM. They would have lost out to flash based MP3 players eventually, but the Minidisc could have ruled the market for 5-10 years had they not screwed up the implementation.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Sony thought that their playstation game console would outsell everyone
Result? Another also-ran product
What the fuck are you talking about? Sony created the modern market for games consoles, moving it away from the child-aimed Nintendo & Sega offerings towards the nascent adult gaming market which now economically dominates the entire industry. They then launched the PS1 and PS2, finally got some competition from MS, crapped all over it for the first iteration, kept level on the PS3/X360 and now they're vastly ahead worldwide on PS4 vs XBone. Not one of their consoles has been an "also-ran", they've launched first on every generation except PS3 and their consoles have been at least as powerful as the competition, except the original XBox which launched *way* after the PS2 did. The PS4 is the clear technological winner in this generation, and it terms of sales Microsoft has a lead *only* in the US, with every other market preferring PS4, including many markets that MS don't even serve.
If you call that an "also-ran" product you're obviously just a Sony hater, and nothing you have to say on the subject is of interest.
to be pedantic it is actually about properly 'mastering' the audio. Generally the mix stays the same and you create different masters - from squashed to hi-res - from that.
Sony's smart-phones are actually pretty damn good nowadays, possibly because their brand-recognition is bad in that area.
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Neil Young already has the Pono Player. It plays FLAC.
Cooler name origin, just $400 (BKA one third the price), Kickstarter funded. And helps you keep on rockin' in the free world
My cube mate has a $300 bland iPod-ish thing with it's own FLAC capable firmware, and a true hardware amp. Did i mention $300, B.K.A. one fourth the price.
Methinks this is a non-starter. They will sell when heavily discounted, much like the HP Tablets finally sold (as Linux devices) when prices came down.
How large is the market for those people though?
Bear in mind I'm talking specifically about portable devices for audiophiles that want them despite the environment in which they're attempting to use them being subpar.
I don't think the market is big enough to justify the development of the device. I very well may be incorrect, but the difference between a $300-cash dedicated music player or a $600-cash multifunction smarthphone that plays music well enough versus a $1200 device that just plays music is a pretty steep curve to ask while the former options, with high-end headphones, are already available.
Look at another market that Sony played in, the Laserdisc market. Was for high-end customers, also played music from compact disc perfectly well, and was meant to be integrated into a home theatre system with multispeaker surround sound where the owner could control the environment. It was unlikely to be dropped or damaged or otherwise lost and didn't require the user to do anything more than load the media to play the content. Despite the relative ease-of-use the Laserdisc was not a runaway success, and Sony only made a handful of players before effectively yielding the entire market to Pioneer. It was not a particularly profitable market even when the premium content at the time was vastly superior to the next step down, the video tape. Jumping to now, we can look at the differences- On-device content is competing with on-demand streamed content, modern devices like smartphones run loadable software so new things like codecs can be added, and the sound-reproduction end-device, the headphones, isn't an integrated part of the device but a user-selectable module. All that remains in-question is the quality of the audio reproduction in the DSP in the smartphone itself, but since the advent of computer-based sound at 44KHz, 16-bit with the sound cards of the mid-nineties, the differences between low-end sound and high-end sound have been very, very hard to differentiate.
Given that the cell phone is so ubiquitous, I find it very unlikely that even most audiophiles will want to carry a dedicated device in addition to their phone, and throwing a steep price on top of it isn't going to help matters.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.