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."

Comments

Clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the only music player worth buying. I mean, if it doesn't fit ALL of your music at once, it's absolutely no good to anyone.

Re:Clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

If you give your credit card details to Sony to purchase this thing you probably deserve to lose them the next time they're hacked...

Re: Clearly

[O('_')O_Bush]

They give you enough space to store $40k in legally purchased music... in comparison, $1200 is chump change.

Re: Clearly

[ArmoredDragon]

I don't think that would be enough storage for a typical audiophile's full collection if it was all lossless, which this device espouses. For $1,200 it should be at least 512GB IMO, which the NAND storage alone should have a BOM cost of less than $100.

Anyway it seems that Sony made the same mistake in the MP3 player market that Microsoft did in the smartphone market; they saw the incoming demand for a new kind of product and just flat out ignored it.

Re:Clearly

[cayenne8]

If they price this thing in the ballpark of an iPod, I'll buy it.

I do with they'd offer a hard drive version of the thing, I still love my iPod classic for my main traveling music player so that I can fit most all of my music collection on it as well as some video and podcasts. This is the one I keep in the car and fly with...the smaller ones are just for the gym with a sub selection of my stuff.

But I have longed for a good portable player I could use with flac which is what I have my music ripped to on my living room BIG system (tube amps, klipschorn speakers, etc).

Re: Clearly

[O('_')O_Bush]

My math is perfectly fine, going by the "industry standard" conversion of storage space to songs used by device makers of 3MB/song. Unrealistic maybe, but that is how their marketing team would advertise it.

Re: Clearly

[twistedsymphony]

I don't know where you came up with that figure. The device is designed to run FLAC files. CDs converted to FLAC format take up about 3 CDs worth of music per GB. Given a digital albums cost at around $10... that's only $3840 worth of music.

Re: Clearly

[Anonymous Coward]

3MB/Song? Man, are my ears glad they ain't listening to your crappily encoded collection. For mp3 files 3MB/Song, (assuming 3min duration/song,) suggests to me a playback bitrate of no better than 128kbps. If you find you cannot distinguish between files of this poor quality and say a CD original, then by all means continue pumping that crystalised mess into your shell likes, I however can discern the difference. I no longer keep any mp3 files, (even 320kbps sounds awful,) the few ogg vorbis files i still have are being replaced as and when I have the chance to snag a flac copy of the track.

If Sony had thought of this a couple of years ago I might have been tempted, I now have a particularly good android phone and five 32GB microSD cards with all of my music available on the go. Sure swaping out the card can be a bit of a faff but I tend to keep the music sorted by mood so that the correct card is in, in advance, plus i never miss a call, SMS or email. I also have the option to connect to available bluetooth amplifiers at different locations.

Things are very different at home, I never use the phone for audio there. I have a pc with an M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 soundcard, (sure its a bit old but still rock solid,) connected to a Cambridge Audio A5 amp running B&W DM602 studio monitors, (early '90s models,) and i have a few Raspberry Pi's dotted around the house which allow me to control the sound server from any room. Just in case any of you are wondering I am a musician and also use the home setup for recording hence the anal level of tone chasing.

Re: Clearly

[MightyYar]

I pity you folks with golden ears. I can't hear any artifacts in MP3s (*) when I use Lame's extreme preset.

* OK, so one time there was this post on hydrogen audio where someone posted an artifact that I could actually hear. It has not come up in my own collection of mostly crap rock 'n roll.

Re:Clearly

[TWX]

If they price this thing in the ballpark of an iPod, I'll buy it.

I won't. We're at a tipping point, on the verge of a paradigm shift in personal devices. The smartphone has already replaced the functions of consumer-grade cell phones, personal digital assistants (calendar, e-mail, task list, alarm clock, contacts list), GPS receiver and mapper, and casual point-and-shoot camera. It's also marginally replaced music players, though the software for on-device libraries is seemingly mediocre at best. Introducing slightly better audio hardware into a smartphone and writing better software for both library management and for the audio codecs for less-lossy storage is the future, not adding yet another device.

If Sony wants to go into this arena, they need to make a phone that actually gets its OS updates in a timely fashion and fits the rest of the bill for what they're looking to do with the music playback. Hell, put two or three Micro-SD sockets and make some software that intelligently balances writes between the cards so that individual card is not the limiting factor on amount of music anymore.

I WOULD pay good money for an Android Smartphone that gets regular updates not carrier-dependent, has a decent 4/3 camera, has a good music player that actually does a good job of organizing and arranging playlists, and still maintains the other PDA and phone features that have been useful. I'm actually okay with a device that's closer to 5/8" thick too, if it actually did all this stuff and was fairly rugged.

Re: Clearly

[Quirkz]

No kidding. I never notice "poor quality" from mp3's. Frankly, even if I could tell, I don't think I'd care. I mostly listen to music at an office (plenty of background sounds and I'm focused on work), in the car (tons of noise), or at home with the family making so much chaos the music is at best an accent and at worst a distraction I have to turn off. I'm trying to imagine a scenario where I've got enough quiet and focus that I could be so absorbed in the tunes the encoding quality would tarnish the experience.

Re: Clearly

[sudnshok]

This is exactly what I was thinking. I am actually in the market for a device like this but I need 1TB of storage space for my music collection (in FLAC format). Having such a small amount of disk space will ensure this product has no chance of making it - especially at that price point.

Re: Clearly

[gbjbaanb]

there's poor quality and then there's poor quality - you can compress it a bit too much after all, but assuming anything other than that there's little to no difference in sound quality.

I used to know a sound engineer and he told me about these frequency response levels that high-end audiophiles keep on about, expecting perfect reproduction at 10 or 10,000 Hz and he said that is was all a bit useless - the studio microphones weren't that sensitive so cutting off the top and bottom isn't cutting anything that's not already present... and then couple that to human hearing and you're trying sooo hard to reproduce nothing audible.

128kbps is enough for practically everyone, and even those who are able to tell the difference between it and 256 are only going to notice if you compare the same track side by side.

Re: Clearly

[BarbaraHudson]

Instead of just audio, they should make a more flexible product - audio and video streams, able to connect to an HDTV via hdmi or whatever, or play on an included touch-sensitive screen, and an HDTV tuner so you're not limited to the Internet when you're on the go.

Re: Clearly

[slazzy]

Sometimes I'm glad I can hardly tell the difference between 128kb encoded mp3s vs anything higher. At least my wallet thanks me.

Re: Clearly

[kimvette]

It depends on the source. If I am listening to jazz, classical, or progressive rock (Pink Floyd) the difference is immediately apparent - especially through my home system. In my SAAB with its crappy stereo that I cannot upgrade without fudging up the CAN bus (the stereo head unit is a CAN hub - can you believe that?!) it's not so noticeable but on my home system with Klipsch reference series speakers or through even just halfway-decent headphones there is a WORLD of difference between 128kbps, 320kbps, and a CD or high definition DVD or Blu-Ray audio. On my home system highs are nice and crisp with the source material but with compressed audio the highs are distorted - almost a "sizzle" sound.

With highly compressed pop music, yeah, it's not much of a difference. It all depends on the subject matter.

Re: Clearly

[Falos]

> it doesn't mean it isn't a valid product
It's a valid product.
It's a valid music player.
China says it's about $0.10 to add such function to your consumer electronic.

The product's capabilities decide whether it's $1200 valid, and they're delivering three-figure at best.

Re: Clearly

[TWX]

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.

Re:Clearly

[ameoba]

It's FLAC so 128GB is really only enough space to hold The Wall & Frampton Comes Alive.

Re:Clearly

[cayenne8]

But, I still consider a phone a phone although the calendar and GPS work well with that.

However when I want to shoot serious images, I have a dedicated DSLR for that, a 5D3. For my music that I like to listen to in as good a quality as I can, I have a nice system for home and I prefer to have as nice as I can for out and about too.

I know the gym and the car are probably the worst listening environments available and that's why I don't mind doing mp3 for that, but if flac were available portable and at the same price for a player, I'd be a market for that.

I generally dislike using my phone for media consumption as that I don't want to run out of battery when out and about and not be able to call or text in an emergency situation.

Re: Clearly

[MightyYar]

Those old fixed-bandwidth 128kb files can be pretty crappy with high frequencies starting to sound "swimmy". Anything with a lot of cymbal in it will go nuts. Of course if you grew up with cassettes and LPs, then distortion, "noise reduction", hiss, and pops are all old friends and yet we still listened to music. If you are old enough, you will remember how blown away you were by hearing a CD for the first time.

Re:Clearly

[TWX]

That's why I'm willing to accept a physically-larger device, so that the battery life and durability can be vastly improved. The office I work out of has really terrible cell phone reception, I'm on Edge or 1G most of the time. Doesn't matter much for call availability, I have a landline phone for that, but it does mean that the phone spends a whole lot of battery trying to communicate with the tower network. If the recent rulings allowing for more cost-effective roaming between carriers means that my service improves, great, but in the mean time I'd like my phone to last 24 hours in this building before dropping to 10%; now eight and I'm about done.

My main desire for a 4/3 point-and-shoot is that those are getting smaller and have Android on some of them now, and if one's willing to accept a physically larger device, then finding room for a larger CCD and lens is probably easier too. I've handled a few of these point-and-shoots at the store, and I would be willing to carry some of them as phones if they had cell phone capabilities.

Re: Clearly

[Noah Haders]

> it doesn't mean it isn't a valid product

It's a valid product.
It's a valid music player.
China says it's about $0.10 to add such function to your consumer electronic.

The product's capabilities decide whether it's $1200 valid, and they're delivering three-figure at best.

the audiophile market is a weird place... you can pay $100k for a pair of speakers. seriously, the laws of normal economics do not apply. I don't swim in that pool, but for those that do, this product could be highy valued.

why would you say it costs a dime to add the function to a consumer electronic? What kind of oncommon connectors will they be using? Will parts need to be custom-designed for the high quality audio? The DACs alone can get complicated (and bulky). And what about the engineering and marketing costs for a product that will go to a specialty audience? and how much would such an audience pay to get a high-fidelity audio player?

Re: Clearly

[Noah Haders]

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.

what good is a high-end set of headphones if you don't have a clean signal to listen to? If you spent a lot on headphones, then you got them to listen to high quality music.

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.

dude, you are SO not an audiophile. go into a high-end speaker store and ask them what the difference is. They have the gear and the setup to show you.

Re: Clearly

[blackomegax]

It costs a couple of bucks to produce a headphone, and the bulk of the research into sound quality was finished decades ago, yet people still spend 300-5000 on high end headphones that don't sound much better than a 50 dollar pair.

Re:Clearly

[unrtst]

But I have longed for a good portable player I could use with flac which is what I have my music ripped to on my living room BIG system (tube amps, klipschorn speakers, etc).

Android has supported FLAC since 3.1 : http://developer.android.com/g...
So nearly any android phone or media player will do it. Samsung Galaxy Player was a decent iPod-touch-like device.

In addition, the Sandisk players (I don't know if it's all of them, but at least the Sansa Clip) support Flac, and they can be found very cheap.

Archos was one of the first with a really polished player that also supported Flac, and kept making a HDD based one for quite a long time. Sadly, I think Archos backed out of the media player arena (probably because people kept saying "I have longed for XYZ", and then not buying it when they made it).

This Sony thing has a little more than normal onboard memory. Otherwise, it's nothing special AFAICT.

Re: Clearly

[hoelk]

My 50â sansa clip plus plays flac. And with an extra 64gb microSD card (another 50 bucks) it has 72 GB memory

Re: Clearly

[Jahoda]

Wow, so I guess you aren't the target market for a portable device designed to be use with headphones, carrying the "Walkman" brand? But thanks for letting telling us about your unique, insightful, and deeply relevant life experience, as most music lovers spend their lives in a cacophony of children and distractions with no opportunity to experience and enjoy high fidelity.

Re: Clearly

[cayenne8]

the differences between low-end sound and high-end sound have been very, very hard to differentiate.

My Klipschorn Speakers would beg to differ with you....

Re:Clearly

[cayenne8]

I'd use the camera on a phone over a point and shoot, but for real picture taking I take my DSLR...

Re: Clearly

[blackomegax]

> bitching about SQ of 320kbit mp3 > bluetooth wat!?

Re: Clearly

[hairyfeet]

How big is the market? As close to zero as one can get?

The problem is this...I've dealt with quite a few audio snobs at the shop due to my branching out into HTPCs and guess what? The audio snobs like to build AROUND a brand, they don't like piecemeal. While you may see an odd speaker or receiver that got great reviews in some magazine by and large they care about the visual as well as audio aesthetic and that means building around a brand. And Sony just doesn't have the clout left in their brand for the audio snobs to build around the Sony brand, they killed that rep in the early 00s.

So they can raise the price all they want, is as ludicrous as MSFT thinking they could just slap a high sticker price and open some stores and threaten Apple's sales. Sony as a brand just hasn't had the clout to sell in that market in a loooooong time as previous management traded all their reputation of being a high end quality brand from the 70s through 90s for selling the same Cheapo Chinese Crap at an inflated price. Their quality went to shit which gave them some short term gains (all anybody seems to are about anymore) and then their rep went to shit.

It'd take a good decade of selling solid quality products to build that rep back up to the point they could sell in that market and be a contender. Right now? Yeah if they sell 1000 of these I'l be amazed.

Re: Clearly

[Lord Apathy]

128kbps is enough for practically everyone, and even those who are able to tell the difference between it and 256 are only going to notice if you compare the same track side by side.

128K is plenty for casual listening, well hell its good for just plan listening. I spend most of the day listening to 128K mp3 streams from shoutcast. And the music I listen too, smooth jazz, is very sensitive to compression artifacts. You would notice them more there than you would say heavy metal or most rock.

Where I use greater than 128K, flac is better, would be for archiving music. So that as technology advances and you need to recode to a new format you have the best quality source for that recode.

Re: Clearly

[TWX]

You're helping make my point. It's the speakers, much more than the digital signal processor, that affects the sound quality. Sure, there are better receivers/amplifiers/DSPs that do a better job, but the difference between a $200 receiver and a $2000 receiver is hard to hear with identical speakers, compared to the differences between a $100 set of speakers and a $1000 set of speakers with identical receivers, even when properly calibrated for the speakers.

A moderate, mid-market music player will do good enough of a job that it's very hard to justify a high-end music player when so many other factors (like the ambient environment) are not in the listener's control. I don't care how high-end the earbuds are, they're still earbuds, and will still produce sound hampered by the form-factor, even if the music player has a complex equalizer to help calibrate the signal to a given pair of earbuds.

Re: Clearly

[AK Marc]

This is a FLAC player, not an MP3 player.

Re: Clearly

[TWX]

So they can raise the price all they want, is as ludicrous as MSFT thinking they could just slap a high sticker price and open some stores and threaten Apple's sales. Sony as a brand just hasn't had the clout to sell in that market in a loooooong time as previous management traded all their reputation of being a high end quality brand from the 70s through 90s for selling the same Cheapo Chinese Crap at an inflated price. Their quality went to shit which gave them some short term gains (all anybody seems to are about anymore) and then their rep went to shit.

That's a good point. I'm using a Sony receiver for my home theater right now, mainly because I was on a budget and had to shop around certain constraints (types of inputs, conversion of video signal, etc) and the Sony receiver took a lot of setup effort to reduce the ambient white-noise that it produced when there was no audio being played. I also don't use the setup enough to justify a more expensive unit.

Re: Clearly

[TWX]

The laws of supply and demand do apply, but the more high-end a good becomes, the geometrically more expensive it becomes. Increase in quality happens, but is far offset by the cost to make that increase, to the point that there isn't a lot of legitimate reason to make that increase. Those that are fans or hobbyists aren't doing it for economic reasons though, so as long as someone is willing to pay $100,000 for a pair of speakers, someone is willing to try to push the envelope to make a pair of speakers that they can try to justify selling for $100,000.

Re:Clearly

[TWX]

Exactly. I won't always have my SLR on me, because it's a boat-anchor when not taking pictures, but if I see something cool that I want a picture of, I always have my phone on me.

Re: Clearly

[Lord Apathy]

halfway-decent headphones there is a

This is one more layer that people need to think about if they use bluetooth headphones. That bluetooth audio stream isn't coming across as pure lossless audio. Depending on the profile and quality of the headphones you are using the encoding of the audio stream for bluetooth can be worse than a 128K mp3. But not matter what head set you buy, if it uses bluetooth the audio is compress and not lossless.

Re:Clearly

[DigitAl56K]

Archos was one of the first with a really polished player that also supported Flac, and kept making a HDD based one for quite a long time. Sadly, I think Archos backed out of the media player arena (probably because people kept saying "I have longed for XYZ", and then not buying it when they made it).

Archos's players were crap from numerous standpoints (I owned a higher-end one):
* Promised support for high resolutions that never came
* Constant random reboots that were never properly fixed in any firmware upgrade
* Hard drive constantly sleeping while device is sitting in a powered dock attached as USB storage, causing the attached system to stall waiting on IO regularly
* High-priced add-on hardware with proprietary connectors
* Didn't have certain docks like the battery doc in stock around launches, forcing you to buy higher priced TV capture docs if you wanted to rapid charge
* Touch-screen volume controls such that if you were wearing earbuds and touched the wrong part of the screen you'd blow your ears out
* Piece-meal buying of additional codecs for your device

I bought one for FLAC and large HD storage. I will never buy *anything* from that company again, *ever*.

Re: Clearly

[DigitalHammer]

Huh? You can buy music? :P

Re: Clearly

[grumling]

Or 1/10 of that price if you shop for used CDs and frequented the “going out of business” record stores in the 2000s.

Re: Clearly

[Bonobo_Unknown]

There is also the Veblen good effect where at higher price points items become more attractive to potential consumers simply because they are expensive. This is kind of a distortion or even contradiction of the normal supply and demand effect - Read the Wiki article here.

Re: Clearly

[virtualXTC]

It costs a couple of bucks to produce a headphone, and the bulk of the research into sound quality was finished decades ago, yet people still spend 300-5000 on high end headphones that don't sound much better than a 50 dollar pair.

WRONG: I've never heard a $50 pair of head phones that are anywhere as accurate as the Etymotic er6i which had an MSRP of $99. Unfortunately, I broke mine and Etymotic discontinued production. I found their newer offerings are to uncomfortable for extended use, so I switched to the Shure SE215-K, which also has an MSRP of $99. The SE215-Ks sound almost as good, but are far more durable, and like the ER-6is, no $50 headphone compares.

Re: Clearly

[arglebargle_xiv]

the audiophile market is a weird place... you can pay $100k for a pair of speakers. seriously, the laws of normal economics do not apply. I don't swim in that pool, but for those that do, this product could be highy valued.

You can easily spend over a million dollars on a full system. That's not some exotic custom-build one, that's an off-the-shelf stock system. OTOH if you're going to be that crazy then you don't buy Sony, you buy David Ling Labs Exclusive Pro Ultimate Audio System gear made from a hand-turned magnesium-alloy body with Black Label solid-state capacitors and... oh I don't know, I can't keep this up, a pile of other exotic-sounding wank, but whatever it is it won't say Sony on it.

Re: Clearly

[hairyfeet]

Well look at it THIS way....if you were gonna spend say $40K on a sound system wouldn't YOU want it to look nice and professional? THAT is what you get when you build around a brand, the pieces all have the same color schema, they have been designed to work together and compliment each other, its just a nicer experience.

And as you found out when it comes to Sony? The quality just isn't there, they traded their rock solid rep for short term gains and now the chickens have come home to roost.

Re: Clearly

[gordguide]

When surveyed, people claim their #1 Priority criteria for headphones is "sound quality". And then they buy "Beats by Dr. Dre", which do not sound terrible, but have never won a direct comparison versus the brands that have been building 'phones for Pro's for 60+ years. The premium headphone market ($100+) is worth about $1.6 Billion annually; "Beats" sells about $1.5 Billion annually. This SONY seems to be trying to compete with the ASTELL & KERN products, such as the $2500 AK240, which sells in small volumes but does sell. As for $ six-figure+ sound systems being "off the shelf", well, no, they're not. They are a fixed specification, but sales figures like "5" or "2" are not unheard of. Lexicon, a fairly well known Home Theatre manufacturer, indicated in print it expected to sell "about 30" copies of it's flagship BLU-Ray player, for example.

Re:Clearly

[speardane]

The Astell & Kern (upmarket iRiver brand) has almost identical functionality, and are established and committed players in this marketplace - the sound from my AK100 is remarkably good when paired with good headphones and Hi Res music. (The price of the DACs in that or the Sony would be prohibitive for a phone).

.

My problem with this selling is Sony and their attitude to security & privacy. I'm inclined to believe they are only sorry they got caught hacking people's PCs (rootkit) and they don't seem to feel any responsibility for their disastrously lax security.

Personally I neither believe stealing, nor cracking is acceptable - I just wouldn't forget to fit locks on my doors and rely on ranting and war-mongering to put off potential hackers (whether criminal / corporate or governmental variety)

Re:Clearly

[Shirley Marquez]

They already have a product in the price ballpark of an iPod: the NWZ-A17. No touch screen so the UI isn't as fancy, but it still does high resolution audio playback. http://store.sony.com/64-gb-hi...

If you're looking for a bargain in this space, the FiiO X1 is your player. It's a mere $100, but it has no internal storage so plan on spending another $100 or so on a 128GB Micro SD card. http://www.fiio.net/en/product...

Re: Clearly

[grachus]

$1200 WalkMan is a $1200 DeadManWalking.

Re: Clearly

[russbutton]

I'm in agreement with you. I have about 450G of flac formatted music files in my collection on an Ubuntu laptop that I play them off of. Your $1200 would be much better spent on quality audio gear. Actually, that $1200 would get you into a Linkwitz LXmini setup, which is some of the best sound money can buy, at any price. True absolute hi-end audiophile quality at a price human beings can afford.

http://www.linkwitzlab.com/LXm...

Re:Clearly

[youngone]

I won't buy it, I won't have one even if they give them away. I won't ever buy a Sony product again, due to their shoddy rubbish failing repeatedly just outside the warranty period, (2 x Playstations, 2 x TV's).

Ha

[Enry]

Maybe they should talk to their friends in Sony Music about the Loudness War first before going on about music purity.

Re:Ha

[AmiMoJo]

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.

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Except even some of those hi-res files are brickwalled as well. Those hi-res files are for bilking tards of money.

Re:Ha

[petermgreen]

Out of interest are they using DRM to stop people buying the high res release and downconverting it themselves? or are they just relying on people to be too ignorant to realise that is an option?

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Ha

[Lunix Nutcase]

"Hi-res" does not imply that it has not been DRCed or that it was properly mastered. A recent Bowie CD, for example, that was brickwalled also had hi-res audio that suffered the same issue. "Hi-res" is mostly audiophile marketing fluff.

Re:Ha

[Lunix Nutcase]

No, it's just normal FLAC.

Re:Ha

[wolrahnaes]

I don't know the answer for sure but this is Sony, is there really a question?

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

the same company can both create the problem and sell you the solution.

Sounds just like a church... Just saying.

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

No chance. Sony as an electronic consumer product manufacturer, beyond the scope of gaming, are done. Even their rabid fanboys boycott them due to their consistent anti-consumer practices at the behest of their America SPA and SCAE overlords.

Re:Ha

[pr0fessor]

As a musician who also has many friends and a brother that play in bands {some signed to crappie indie labels and even universal} and have recorded at various studios. It really depends what you start with... how well the original recording was done. Otherwise it could just be hi-res feedback and static.

{I want to use my amazing sounding tube amp from the 60s that has no audio out and goes nuts if you place any other electronic near it especially a mic... this is the last thing a recording engineer wants to hear}

Re:Ha

[Rick Zeman]

Maybe they should talk to their friends in Sony Music about the Loudness War first before going on about music purity.

I never knew there was a wiki article on this phenomenon--thanks! I tend to look at "Digitally Remastered" on an older title to be analogous to" Fair Warning."

Re:Ha

[Guy From V]

They'd probably go APE if they knew about that.

Re:Ha

[kimvette]

High resolution audio does not guarantee they have not compressed the dynamic range to shit. It just means that instead of being mastered at 44.1kHz they have mastered it at a higher rate, like 96kHz.

Re:Ha

[ahaweb]

Or beer.

Re:Ha

[Anonymous Coward]

Why? Monkey's audio (.ape) requires zoodles of CPU to decode. Not good for anything battery-powered.

No lossless audio format produces a compression ratio significantly better than the others. FLAC takes very little CPU to decode and has excellent support. The BSD-licensed library doesn't hurt either. Those are very good reasons to prefer FLAC.

(I apologise if you were making a silly pun.)

Re:Ha

[macs4all]

"Hi-res" does not imply that it has not been DRCed or that it was properly mastered. A recent Bowie CD, for example, that was brickwalled also had hi-res audio that suffered the same issue. "Hi-res" is mostly audiophile marketing fluff.

I noticed that too, like on the recent CD "The Next Day". And that's amazing from Bowie; since he seems to care quite a bit about sound quality. His early RCA vinyl recordings (esp. during the Ziggy Stardust days) were really quite well recorded and mastered.

Re:Ha

[frank_adrian314159]

Sony is like XML. If Sony is the answer, it's a sure bet you asked the wrong question.

Re:Ha

[wolrahnaes]

I remember a time when Sony was a maker of quality consumer electronics. They were usually more expensive than the competition, but usually better made as well. Then at some point in the '90s they sort of followed Bose down the path of compromising engineering and quality for marketing more and more while keeping their prices the same. Since the death of the CRT and Discman I can't think of a Sony product I've been able to comfortably recommend over its competition for it's primary purpose.

The PS2 and PS3 both had a time where they were a great choice if you wanted a player for their respective movie formats before the ultra-cheap players hit the market, but I'd never recommend either as a game console unless you are tied to the platform by exclusive games or more of your friends you want to play with having one.

Re:Ha

[Lunix Nutcase]

Which is pure fluff since it says nothing about the actual quality. I can take an 8-bit 8khz mono track that was heavily DRCed and export it as faux stereo 24-bit/192khz FLAC. Sure it is "hi-res" due to fluff specs but it's gonna sound like shit.

Re:Ha

[Lunix Nutcase]

No it doesn't. ABX tests have shown this pretty consistently.

Re:Ha

[jjhues7676]

Sounds like JP Morgan and the housing crash :-)

Re:Ha

[Trogre]

I wonder if that is part of the appeal of vinyl to audiophiles.

Given that the ability of vinyl to accurately reproduce music is demonstrably much worse than that of CDs, is there an appeal other than nostalgia? Are music industry masterers applying less dynamic range compression to masters destined for vinyl for example?

Re:Ha

[Trogre]

Umm, you know you could apply that argument to just about any specification, right?

Example:
The 12-bit 3840 x 2160 specification of my UHD monitor is pure fluff since I'm using it to display a 256-colour image that was upscaled from 640x480.

Hint: It's not the device that's at fault; it's the source material. GIGO.

Nothing New for Sony...

[happy_place]

This highlights the one and only problem with Sony: It is always too expensive.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[txoof]

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.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[jbmartin6]

I hate their products since they tend to not do what I want. For example, I have a Sony DVD player (last Sony product I will ever buy) that will not allow me to eject the disk after powering it on until it has finished reading and loading the disk that is already in there. So I have to sit there for a minute waiting just to get the damn drawer to open.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[jbmartin6]

And of course don't forget the unskippable warnings and menu animations. That isn't unique to Sony though.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[gstoddart]

That's far from the one and only problem with Sony.

They're assholes. They're anti-consumer. They're constantly trying to achieve vendor lock in. They treat the security of their consumers data as an afterthought.

Sony is a malicious entity, and has been for the last 20 years.

From what they do as part of the *AA mafia, to rootkits, to pretty much every damned thing Sony does ... they do not deserve your money or your respect.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

I thought that was Apple's problem...

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

And they wonder why pirated versions are so popular...

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[war4peace]

Apple arguably offers higher-quality (made) stuff, Sony doesn't, not really.
To me, "overpriced" means "I'm selling the same shit anyone else sells but at twice the price because the logo on my shit says $BRAND".

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[JRV31]

I am also a one time Sony customer, I quit buying Sony when they put viruses on CDs. Citation: http://www.zdnet.com/article/s...!

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[ihtoit]

tried using an emergency mechanical ejection tool?

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Yaotzin]

Sony's smart-phones are actually pretty damn good nowadays, possibly because their brand-recognition is bad in that area.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[operagost]

I reluctantly bought a Sony Blu-ray player because reviews seemed to indicate that just about every other player on the market had serious performance issues with the built-in streaming apps. It definitely has its annoyances. Other than the disc drawer issue you mention, the number of video protocols its can decode is small, inexplicably that list is even smaller if using DLNA rather than local media, and it tends to crap out between songs when controlled remotely under DLNA, making it impossible to play your playlists without interruption.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[ihtoit]

ever considered it might not actually be the hardware that's locking the tray?

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[CaptainDork]

Buying Japanese is distinctly un-American.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Pontiac]

As another bonus Sony made their blu-ray players stream netflix through Sony's own proxy servers. So rather then use the caching servers netflix places all over the country they are forced through a single bottle neck.. Streaming on that thing sucked ass while every other device in the house was streaming fine. I got a Roku and never had another problem.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

Doesn't China own most of America's debt these days? ;)

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[h4ck7h3p14n37]

The old MiniDisc players were pretty solid. You could throw them to the pavement and they'd work just fine.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[ganjadude]

i dont know, Ive had the same sony vaio laptop in the same timeframe that my friends have gone through 2-3 macbooks, and I should get another year or 2 out of it before i retire it. I dont think apple makes "quality" they just make "shiney" or did you forget antennagate?

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[AqD]

Being expensive is not the problem.

Sony is NOT professional at making audio devices. Their amplifiers, speakers, headphones etc are all consumer-grade stuff with cool functions and effects but not much quality, and definitely not the type you would use for decades. It's hard to believe they would make any real high-end audio player, portable or not.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[maestroX]

Sony produced some very nice equipment (ES, Series 5000, early good price/performance speakers); the audio market has been difficult since the end of the 70s.
Nowadays, electronics resembles the food market in many ways

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Copid]

No, it doesn't.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[CaptainDork]

Doesn't your computer have Google®?

The largest owner of U.S. debt is Social Security.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Copid]

Boy, that didn't come across clearly or nicely. Americans and US government agencies actually own most of US federal debt. The breakdown for the debt that's held by foreigners is here. Looks like China is the biggest holder of about 7% of our total debt and about 20% of our total foreign debt. Japan is a very close second, but for some reason they stopped being a major bogeyman sometime in the 90s.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[war4peace]

This was not about how long they last, but about what they can do compared to similar products from the competition.
How long they last depends mainly on how well the user takes care of said products.
Guy A who puts his MP3 player in his back pocket next to his keys, weights 250 pounds and has a tendency to sit on stuff without removing contents from his pocket would break a Sony faster than Guy B who is protective of his belongings.

"But it's rugged/shiny!" doesn't fly for me, I take good care of my things. What I'm interested about is "how feature-packed is product A compared to product B" and "does that feature difference justify the price difference?"

For the vast majority of Sony products, the answer is NO. And a short disclaimer: I don't own any Apple products, and never have owned any. I dislike Apple for a variety of reasons but that's outside the scope of this conversation anyway :)

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Luthair]

I still use my ~25-year old Sony Dream Machine alarm clock every day!

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

Even more unsustainable then....

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[CaptainDork]

In what way? Nobody is pulling out of investments.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Etcetera]

I'm still quite happy with my Sony Dash as an alarm clock every morning. It's is only 5 years old, but that's relatively ancient in internet time.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[steveg]

I used to think of Sony as a premium electronics company. But that was in the 70s and 80s. I kind of stopped paying attention for a while (all my electronics were already bought, and in those days they lasted) and then the 90s came along.

I bought a CD changer that lasted almost a year. Not learning anything, I bought another, which lasted less than that. And so on.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

And all Social Security does is pay out.

More people are living longer and the population is aging, and cost of living just keeps going up.

Where's all the money going to come from?

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[Khyber]

Hah, the sony blu-ray player I have can't even play newer BD-discs. Game of Thrones? Nope, not playing.

And there are no firmware updates for this model.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[CaptainDork]

The word, "all" is hyperbole. There is a concern that Social Security will need fixing before 2030.

There's no way in hell "And all Social Security does is pay out," there have been NO reports that SS has stopped payroll deductions.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[mjwx]

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 Sony Timer

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[MitchDev]

Yeah, and they can't keep out with all the outgoing money.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[CaptainDork]

You get a redo.

Re:Nothing New for Sony...

[ganjadude]

oh for the vast majority i agree with you. I was only speaking on laptops

Not expensive for an audiophile device

[popo]

Audiophile equipment often costs in the tens of thousands of dollars -- and there will always be a market for it.

Regarding your title: SONY clearly does not think *you* will pay $1200 for this device. But they know that *someone* will. This isn't a mass market device. It's a very niche product, well-targeted at its niche.

More importantly: It's great for publicity. After all, it's already being discussed on Slashdot.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Racemaniac]

i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost?
most of the hardware isn't stellar (the software is android, probably not the fastest chip, some decent batteries and screen on it, some audiodecoding software that is probably already available for all android devices)
So all that is left is the hardware for actually creating the audio signal, which should be worth a lot in this thing, is there really hardware that is so suberb in quality that it's worth this price?

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[jones_supa]

You will get good equipment if you pay tens of thousands of dollars for audiophile equipment. But there is also a lot of air in that price.

Pro shops like Thomann demonstrate that you can buy real HiFi gear for very reasonable prices.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Anonymous Coward]

No, there is no hardware that is so superb, but there are people who think there is. We call them audiophiles.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

For the "audiophile" market, it's all about marketing. There are companies out there that are quite successful at selling multi-thousand dollar speaker cables to the gullible with deep pockets. It doesn't have to actually "sound better". I doubt they expect to move these in high volume, but there are certainly a number of folks that will buy it as a prop and show that they really care about their music. :)

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, it's already being discussed on Slashdot.

Yes, the standards to show up here are quite high.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[laird]

I'd hope that you do in fact get higher quality DAC hardware, connectors, etc., so the actual sound quality is better. But the price is also "inflated" by the product being a niche, audiophile product. That is, if they're targeting a smaller market, they have to cover development costs, marketing, profit, etc., on a much smaller number of unit sales. For example, if they had a $1m marketing budget, and sell 10,000 units, that's $100/unit just for marketing. The same marketing budget for a product that sells 1m units would only be $1/unit. Now do the same math for covering the cost of everything about the product (R&D, running a manufacturing line, support team, etc.). It's the same reason that, back in the day, a "workstation" cost 5x as much as a "desktop computer" - there were some functional differences (unix, etc.), but most of the price difference was just due to the niche market having smaller volumes, so less "economy of scale". Heck, look at sports cars - they don't really cost 20x as much to make as a regular car, it's that they're covering the costs on a tiny fraction of the sales volume.

This is why, in every market, the best "price/performance" is for the most popular models. When you go up from more you're always paying disproportionately more for better than average.

I used to think this was insane - why doesn't everyone buy the best price/performance? Then I realized - if you're rich, and you need one of something (car, audio system, watch, etc.) and you can pay a lot more for it to be better than average. As an extreme example, a $24m watch (http://edition.cnn.com/2014/11/12/business/24-million-gold-watch-sothebys-record-patek-philippe/) doesn't keep time better than the $10 watch, but it's literally one of a kind, an insanely cool piece of engineering that packs astounding functionality into a mechanical watch. But price/performance is near-zero - a $10 plastic watch tells better time, and your smartphone has more functionality.

So Sony's aiming for the "willing to pay more for better than average" crowd.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CastrTroy]

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.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[BitZtream]

I don't think even 'audiophiles' that think they can tell the difference between 128kbs and 320kbs MP3s on their PC speaker are that stupid ... their are already phones with 'premium' sound that do everything this does.

Hell, it probably runs android too, meaning its EXACTLY like the premium phones ... except without the phone part.

Oh and they can't subsidize it on your phone contract either.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[jaymz666]

The zx1 seems better and a lot cheaper, and has been on the market how long?

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[BitZtream]

Just to be clear incase it was missed, yes, I'm aware it runs android, thats meant to be (poor) sarcasm.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[MitchDev]

You owe me a new monitor...and a cup of coffee....

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[pla]

i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost?

Low-oxygen solder. To reduce bit-slew, of course.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ihtoit]

love minidisc, fucking hate the lock-in. I don't use Sonicstage because of the lock-in and the fact that it crashes like Richard Hammond on roofies. Analogue hole all the way here, but I do sometimes miss the insane speed of USB. Which basically means I use MD for live recording and streaming transfer to my editing suite.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ihtoit]

my laptop has JBL speakers in it. Funnily enough, the drivers look pretty identical to the ones out of my Dell laptop. Sound about the same as well (ie shit). I thought JBL speakers were supposed to be good?

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[RevWaldo]

I had a great player geared for audiophiles, but it cost $1500 and the battery life was terrible.

And the vacuum tubes kept setting my messenger bag on fire.

.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[TheGratefulNet]

there is zero market for this.

I just tested a friend's android samsung g5 with usb/audio dongle out and flac players. it truly did play back 24bit 96k audio that I gave him as a flac file. just get an OTG cable and a usb/uadio (uac1 prefer but maybe someday they'll all support uac 'event' style protocol) and a good flac player app.

no reason to carry a music player anymore if you have a phone. and more phones are starting to support usb OTG and that opens up the usb/audio dongle market to them..

sony can't be trusted to build electronics anymore. they are more chinese than japanese, these days (if you get my drift) and their caps are as fake as any ebayer's from china. they'll last a year, then blow and then the unit will need new low ESR caps again. if you do the fix, it will probably last years after that, but sony has taken a nosedive like all the rest of the cheap no-name china vendors.

30 yrs ago sony was GOOD. even great. now, they are the most hated company to many of us (tech wise) and I'll never buy a sony finished product as long as I can help it.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[drinkypoo]

I use MD for live recording and streaming transfer to my editing suite.

So are you getting a minuscule recording period due to lack of compression, or is ATRAC shitting all over your recordings? Either way, how do you justify not using a more reliable media which supports non-streaming transfers?

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ihtoit]

being as each session rarely goes more than an hour, I use SP mode and carry half a dozen spare discs. I have plenty of discs, yet each is infinitely re-recordable (not had one fail yet after twenty years). And who the fuck uses compression on session recording masters??

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[rsmoody]

Oh, there is market for this. I personally have a iBasso DX90. If you think this is expensive, look up the AK 240 by a now rebranded iRiver.

I have never used my smart phone as a media player, I just don't want to. There is not enough storage and I strangely want to make sure my phone has enough power to make phone calls and playing music will impact this. To each their own here.

If I had the extra funds, I would have an AK 120II in a heartbeat, I just cannot justify $1200. It's on par with this offering, wifi, Bluetooth, Android, touch screen, etc. Sony's previous offering was still a bit steep at around $600 and with no SD card slot so you were locked into the on-board storage. At least they finally added the SD slot (every other player manufacturer has one, sometimes two see the Fiio X5). If Sony used their size and lowered the price to $300-$400, they would kill Fiio and iBasso and even AK assuming the quality was there.

Honestly, I would have been happy if Apple had increased the storage, or added a SD slot with the Nano. I loved that little thing. Small, light, good battery, just crap for space considering it maxes at 16GB and about 1-2GB of that is the OS and file system overhead. But then I found the DX90 and went that direction. I could have gone with a SanDisk and flashed the firmware with RockBock, and probably should have. But I'm very happy with the DX90 (except for battery life, but I can deal with that) and frankly, that's all that matters here.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Pope]

Beats by Dell, yo!

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It doesn't help that Sony's historical areas of strength have either been commodified pretty heavily(they still do make some pretty nice TVs, on the higher end; but the difference in quality between theirs and similarly priced or cheaper competitors is definitely not what it was back in the CRT days) or are now heavily reliant on software that isn't a crime against humanity.

At least with hardware, Sony can still manage "better than the competition, pity it's not better enough to justify the price" products when they are having a good day. With software, the only impressive thing is that they can even manage to commit acts of malice in the face of their sheer incompetence.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CastrTroy]

The buttons on mine crapped out a few years after I bought mine. If it wasn't for that, I might possibly still be using the thing. I definitely wouldn't have bought the iPod nano i used to replace it. It was quite convenient once you got the discs recorded. Being able to bring a few different discs with you was pretty nice. The fact that you could expand the storage for so cheap was a big plus at the time. Now you can get 16 GB SD cards for quite cheap, so I don't think I would buy a new one. But for the time between 2002 when it came out an for at least 5 years it was the best thing going in affordable portable music players.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CaptainDork]

This.

I remember the irritation of artifacts in vinyl that everyone bitched about and stuff.

Now, vinyl is back, complete with the nostalgic background hiss, and faithful scratch reproduction.

The audiophiles, who used to scoff at inferior vinyls are scarfing up the degraded, yet hyped up, obsolete shit.

No, thank you.

I'll wait for 8 track.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CaptainDork]

That crowd is great for this kind of shit.

Next up: Scratch-cancelling headphones to rid live performances of those irritating artifacts produced by bow on string.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CaptainDork]

Not this.

This is a Walkman. That means it is a publicly-visible device.

We're talking about park joggers, gym rats, Starbucks® groupies.

It's not the ear ... it's the gear. © 2015 CaptainDork

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[tinkerton]

Actually a lot of audiophiles have always stuck to vinyl . It was the CD they scoffed at. Then later on they got a new reason to despise CD when record companies started to use more compression on CD while the dynamics on vinyl was left intact.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ihtoit]

it's still the best thing going, when it comes to replacing my MD gear I've already got that sorted: lossless recording via Audacity at 48kHz with the same microphone I've been using for MD. A portable MD recorder is a better option than lugging a netbook around, though, so while I still have that option I'll just carry on using it. :)

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[CaptainDork]

Well, I have some experience here. I'm a musician and I've run into a boatload of audiophiles who bitch about the nuances of soundboard settings and stuff.

I think I could put corks in their ears, explaining that silence is golden, and the assholes would complain about hearing their own heartbeat.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[j33px0r]

Nice observations, especially in the marketing scale! I would also add that if the wealthy didn't buy all those disproportionately priced items then no one would be making them, loss of jobs, etc. In some ways it reminds me of art benefactors. The benefactors simply throw a little disposable income away for a moment of pleasure. Not so different from buying a expensive bottle of Champagne at a restaurant, an expensive suit/purse, or other items associated with prestige.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Minwee]

SONY clearly does not think *you* will pay $1200 for this device. But they know that *someone* will. This isn't a mass market device. It's a very niche product, well-targeted at its niche.

As a dedicated audiophile I wouldn't touch this product unless it came with directional audio cables (honestly, half of you plebians have yours plugged in backwards!), headphones with integrated vacuum tube amplifiers, a solid gold power cord to preserve the fidelity of the charging signal and a place to put my Shakti stones. Not being able to install my own high performance teak knobs is also a big problem.

I don't know what Sony is thinking here.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[nabsltd]

I'd hope that you do in fact get higher quality DAC hardware, connectors, etc., so the actual sound quality is better. But the price is also "inflated" by the product being a niche, audiophile product.

No, it's inflated because it's Sony.

This player has a high quality DAC, etc., gets great reviews from audiophiles, and yet only costs $350. Sure, you need to spend an extra $100 for a 128GB MicroSD card, but that's still $750 less than Sony wants.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[drinkypoo]

being as each session rarely goes more than an hour, I use SP mode and carry half a dozen spare discs.

So you're carrying around a bunch of bulky, rattly junk instead of one sleek device with a HDD which would store way more? Just allergic to spending money, then. Which I understand, but it's not like it's a wonderful invention by modern standards.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[wonkey_monkey]

there is zero market for this.

Have you done more market research and held more focus groups than Sony, then?

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Anonymous Coward]

No - you can get good equipment if you're willing to pay tens of thousands of dollars. It doesn't mean you will...

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[Falos]

Zero is an absolute and should be reserved for logistic impossibilities or exaggerations.

"Pathetic number of sales" and "Sony will make money" can be simultaneously true.

Especially when it costs shit to do, mostly in the form of "it's shiny!" marketing.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[shadowrat]

i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost? most of the hardware isn't stellar (the software is android, probably not the fastest chip, some decent batteries and screen on it, some audiodecoding software that is probably already available for all android devices) So all that is left is the hardware for actually creating the audio signal, which should be worth a lot in this thing, is there really hardware that is so suberb in quality that it's worth this price?

Once you hear it, you will realize it's far superior to any other listening experience. Of course, you might not be a prosumer audiphile with the refinement and experience required to properly enjoy it. Maybe you can just stick with your beats by dr dre and ipod shuffle like the rest of the plebes.

run along now. my highly acute audio perception wants to enjoy the miracle of hi-res audio as it was meant to be heard, devoid of the racket of the unwashed masses.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[steveg]

Note that you don't have to buy the card to match the Sony -- the player you pointed to already had 128G internally. The card would add an *extra* 128G.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ultranova]

i'm wondering, can there be anything in there that justifies this cost?

The assembly line moves arythmically to prevent resonance from causing distortion-generation biases in crystal formation during solder solidification. Also, a currency filter allows only electrons which meet strict quantum mechanical specifications into the battery, thus preventing playback artifacts due to variations in elementary charge. Finally, every unit is manufactured with enough employee oppression to make even the most satanic of heavy metal messages unable to cause further damage to the listener's soul.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[JackDW]

But SP mode is compressed, isn't it?

"Standard ATRAC ("SP") is 292kbps, LP2 is ~132kbps, LP4 is ~66kbps"

Not that it matters all that much. I certainly couldn't tell the difference. It was one of the nice things about minidisc, in the days before MP3 players with decent storage capacity.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[ihtoit]

doesn't make a difference really with spoken word, it's music recording you need something with a little more kick, which is when I break out the DAT recorder and the line filters.

Re:Not expensive for an audiophile device

[laird]

Good points, Mr. Anonymous! Product positioning based on price sensitivity is probably what drives it. That is, there are plenty of products in the market already, but Sony saw an opportunity for the higher-end MP3 player than what's in the market, so even though it's by definition a smaller market, it's a better business opportunity than competing directly at the low-end (the dirt-cheap generic MP3 players) or the mid-range (Apple).

Me? No. Audiophiles? Yes.

[Kjella]

They have defective bullshit detectors, it''ll sell.

I won't buy it, you won't buy it...

[GameboyRMH]

...but there are a lot of stupid-ass rich people who will buy it.

Sony thought ...

[Taco Cowboy]

Sony thought about a lot of things, but unfortunately they did a lot of things wrong

For example:

Sony thought their Betamax video tape format was so much superior to the VHS they disallowed their Betamax format to be used by the porn industry

Result? VHS won

Sony thought that they could come to America and buy up MGM thus controlling Hollywood

Result? Under Sony's management, MGM has yet to produce a movie that can be said to be 'innovative'

Sony thought that their playstation game console would outsell everyone

Result? Another also-ran product

The problem with Sony is that although they hire professionals as CEO the real power still resides with that controlling clan back in Japan

And that controlling clan back in Japan often acted as if they are the master of the universe, that all the rest of the human race must kow-tow to them

Well ...

Re:Sony thought ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Sony thought ...

[ihtoit]

1. uh... VHS won with marketing. Simple as.

2. In your opinion. I'm sure there are people who get PAID to critique movies who would heartily disagree with you.

3. PS1, PS2 and PS3 hold three of the four top spots of the greatest selling video games consoles of all time. Nintendo hold #3 spot with the Wii. Source: Tekrevue. By what metric is the PS3 an "also-ran"??

Re:Sony thought ...

[RogueyWon]

I won't disagree on Betamax or MGM, but describing the Playstation series as "also ran" is one of the dumbest statements I've ever heard on slashdot - which is really saying something.

The Playstation series revolutionised the video games industry and opened up whole new demographics to gaming. Sony may have stumbled a bit around the time they released the PS3 (the wrong hardware at the wrong price), but with the announcement today that the PS4 has achieved 18.5 million units sold to consumers in just over a year on sale, they're clearly back on form. By contrast, the Xbox One is sitting at just over 10 million units shipped to stores in the same time period (which is itself "not bad" going off historical comparators), while the Wii-U hasn't even managed 8 million shipped to stores in around twice the time (which is sub-Dreamcast pacing).

Many of Sony's other brands may be struggling, but the Playstation series is a startling success story.

Re:Sony thought ...

[gordguide]

VHS was licensed by JVC to anyone who asked, while SONY refused to license BetaMAX. So inertia built on the VHS format because everyone would sell you a VHS deck, even off-brand units at Wall-Mart. Then the *other* studios started dropping their BetaMAX releases. SONY did eventually decide to license their format, but once the software supply narrowed, it was just a matter of time. I'm not sure "marketing" had much to do with it, but even so, SONY's well-known propensity for exclusive formats was the real killer.

MicroSDXC?

[hackwrench]

But is it a MicroSDXC slot?

Re:MicroSDXC?

[ihtoit]

given that the SD 1.0 standard is deprecated, and that to be supplied preformatted (AT ALL) a card can ONLY be formatted wtih exFAT (necessitating a licence from Microsoft) and still be called "SD-anything", necessarily so.

It'll sell a few, anyway

[argStyopa]

Nostalgia + Audiophiles = sales.
Both of those groups are notorious for a) having lots of $, and b) spending it stupidly.

Not You, Them

[Fulminata]

Sony doesn't think "you" will pay $1200 for an MP3 player. They think that the people who pay hundreds of dollars for Monster cables will pay it, and that there are enough of them out there for the product to be profitable.

Re:Not You, Them

[hcs_$reboot]

What would you do with 10 iphones anyway?

Price wrong! Sony was hacked recently...

[hcs_$reboot]

Sony was hacked. The hackers changed maliciously the selling price. It's actually $12,000.

Re:Price wrong! Sony was hacked recently...

[antdude]

Hackers should had made it cost a penny!

Output amplification

[jones_supa]

They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal.

Well, does it have proper headphone amplifier? The audio output of typical mobile gadgets is poor for driving good chunky headphones: there is noise, there is not enough energy to deliver good bass, and the sound is just smudgy.

On the plus side

[Rik Sweeney]

It does come with a microSD slot!

Re:On the plus side

[alantus]

It does come with a microSD slot!

I don't know if you are kidding, but this is Sony: they could have used Memory Stick instead of microSD.

Re:On the plus side

[ihtoit]

the 1.0 specification, with the max capacity at 64MB??

Re:On the plus side

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Memory stick? That's practically a standard these days! If Sony cared about this product they would have rolled a totally new storage format, like they did for the 'Vita'.

3x the cost of the equivalent

[Anonymous Coward]

The Pono player is the same thing, allegedly, and costs only 1/3 as much.

http://ponomusic.force.com/

Re:3x the cost of the equivalent

[CastrTroy]

It only has 8 hours of play time, so that's a major downside right there. I remember my old minidisc and portable cassette players getting 20+ hours of play time in a single AA battery. It's kind of sad that people think of 8 hours as acceptable.

Obvious

[jbmartin6]

This is Sony's revenge. At that price no North Korean can afford it.

Ah, Sony...

[50000BTU_barbecue]

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...

Re:Ah, Sony...

[Solandri]

The original Walkman cost $150 in 1979. Toss that into a handy inflation calculator and you get $487.92 in 2014 dollars. So this high-end audiophile device is priced about 2.5x what the first mass-market portable music player. Not really outlandish if you think of it that way. Even less so if you factor in that it has 128GB of built-in storage - other companies charge $300 for that much flash alone.

Phone calls

[geeper]

But does it make phone calls?

Stupid, stupid, stupid

[sandytaru]

They also discontinued their $50 MP3 headphones with 2 GB of storage. (2GB is plenty if you're swapping in a fresh podcast once a week, after all.) These were also Walkman branded. You can still get the $99 4GB version, but the design is different and it's not as simple to use. Those $50 headphones had surprisingly good sound, they were water resistant, and they survived years of harsh treatment. Mine only finally kicked the bucket when they got stepped on. I was heartbroken.

Re:MP3 is pants

[StripedCow]

I always wondered why codecs do not parameterize over known musical instruments, detect them, and subtract them from the signal, to encode the remainder using psychoacoustic models.

pretty light on specs.

[nimbius]

for sony to slap a little golden sticker on what essentially amounts to a modern mp3 player is a little rambunctious without at least contextualizing its price in terms of features and performance. Rarely does an audiophile acquiesce to the horrorshow pricing offered to their demographic without a full breakout of exactly what and how a device functions. showing it off at CES is fine, but Sony is a little late to this game if they assume 'walkman' nostalgia alone is going to carry this device.

for much, much less, (on the order of 100 bucks) you can pick up a Cowon media player. the A5 or J3 boasts a WM8960 codec driver and is worlds away better than what you'll find in an ipod or android cellphone, even with your cheapest headphones.

Re:MP3 is pants

[KermodeBear]

Cymbals are even worse when you're listening to orchestras, and then there's gongs and whatnot. Encoding has gotten a LOT better over the years, but even today you need to encode at 192kbps at least for it to have an okay sound. Certain instruments just don't encode very well.

Better Value

[Junior Samples]

I paid $79 for a Motorola Luge Android 4.4 pay as you go smart phone at Best Buy specifically to use as a low cost media player with no phone service. I have it connected via Blue Tooth to my GM Bose "MyLink" Audio System. The audio playback is superb! It sounds as good or better than the other resident audio sources that come with the vehicle (XM, CD, HD Radio). Media Information is displayed via BT to the "MyLink" Console. Limited navigation and media selection can also be performed via BT.

Seriously, I was amazed with the performance of the $79 Luge being used as a vehicle audio source. I really doubt that Sony's $1200 product would sound or perform any better.

Re:Better Value

[gl4ss]

well with bluetooth, the dac used is the cars dac, so it would sound exactly the same.

hmm...

[Charliemopps]

This is not a terrible idea.
The price is WAY off though.
It needs to be in the $200 range.
Include wifi and some way to sync it with your home audio collection automatically.
The drive size is perfect.
Give it a display port so I can plug it into a hotel television.
Make sure I can use streaming services like pandora if wifi is available.

Yea yea, I know I can use my phone. But my phones full of stuff and hard to deal with in the car. I'd like something I could generally leave in the car that would sync my music collection over night, etc...

But again, it'd have to be way cheaper.

Obligatory

[Shakrai]

No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.

Re:Obligatory

[Kethinov]

No wireless. Less space than an obsolete iPod Classic. Lame.

Fear

[Sqreater]

I know it is presently small, but could this be a response to the rising vinyl movement?

Re:Fear

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

More or less any digital audio player is going to be mostly orthogonal to the interests of vinyl enthusiasts. That said, I'll definitely award some extra credit to the first company whose cell phone can use its camera, and an appropriate machine vision algorithm, to 'play' a record rotating underneath it...

For $1200

[sabbede]

it should come with free access to Sony's entire music catalog.

Why?

[morgauxo]

Why does anyone buy a music player anymore when there are smartphones?

Re:Why?

[morgauxo]

These are portable devices.

Is an audiophile, ever searching for the best sound possible going to find it in a pocket sized device? Maybe I'm just too far behind the times but I would expect them to use a desktop computer with quiet fans and a super expensive soundcard hooked to a modular stereo system for that.

As for portable devices... well.. carrying one device is better than carrying two. You aren't going to hear the difference while traveling anyway, background noise will see to that.

Cassette tape SD carousel

[Dareth]

If it had a cassette tape SD carousel where you can load multiple SD cards in and swap them in out with "fast forward" and "reverse".

short playback on FLAC?

[SkunkPussy]

Why is FLAC playback so battery-intensive? Is it because its not implemented in hardware while the mp3 playback is?

Re:short playback on FLAC?

[TheGratefulNet]

yes, and flac means the data rate is higher so you have to fetch more data from the media into memory and then spool out audio from memory.

with mp3, you get a bigger compression ratio so you fetch once and then spool out, say, 10x before the next i/o seek and read.

finally, mp3 is now in pure hardware so needs no cpu time at all. flac never had full hardware support. wav, yes; but you have to expand flac to wav and that needs cpu.

Re:short playback on FLAC?

[serviscope_minor]

I was wondering that too. Another reason might be that it is much more bandwidth intensive so more energy is being spent reading the flash storage.

Re:short playback on FLAC?

[JackDW]

MP3 codecs are only implemented in hardware on really cheap MP3 players - the sort that don't have the CPU power to do it in software. Those devices can't do anything other than MP3.

On anything more expensive - ipods, Sansa Clips, etc., it's all software, and the device can support lots of different formats.

There isn't really much of a battery power win from doing MP3 in hardware, and dedicated MP3 hardware is no good for the other formats that the average user will want to play. The average user may think he has an "MP3 collection", but he is probably not even aware that some of the files are in other formats, because every music player just plays them all.

Audiophiles want analog

[davidwr]

Analog may or may not be better than a very good digital file, but enough audiophiles with money to burn think it does, so if you are going after the "audiophile" market, that's what you should aim for.

Now, how do we fit studio-quality analog tapes and a near-perfect player with excellent earbuds in a lightweight portable package with 33 hours of battery life?

Re:Yes, but you'll likely have powered headphones

[ihtoit]

mod parent "+1 hysterically ironic". BOSE?? Of all the steaming great piles of SHIT to compare to Sony, you pick BOSE!?

I want one!

[mwvdlee]

I want one!
It'll go great with my Beats® headphones.

Re:I want one!

[meta-monkey]

And it better be made with Monster Cables, too.

At least it takes Micro-SD.

[pecosdave]

Being Sony you would think they would fuck their own product over by insisting on Memory Stick.

Re:A FLAC player with decent sound quality?

[RDW]

And a microSD slot? Where on earth would I get one of those cheaper?

It would be very interesting to run some double blind tests and ABX comparisons between a $50 Sansa player and the new Sony. 'Audiophiles' tend not to like these sorts of tests, for some reason...

Re:Cunning strategy

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

In so far as I can tell, Monster cables are largely a joke in audiophile communities too. Monster cables are sold to schlubs who think they're getting audiophile quality cables at big box shops.

If you really want quality, Monster cables are too cheap.

Not totally high-end

[T.E.D.]

They could have gotten $3000 for it, if they could have found a way to wedge a couple of vacuum tubes into it.

No need to get one

[kilodelta]

Since Sony has lost the audio player market to cheap cell phones. I should know, I buy nothing but sub $100 cell phones and the capabilities just keep going up and up. The only inviting thing about the Sony unit is the 128GB of internal storage - but cell phones go up to what, 10GB of internal now and can take 64GB SD cards for far less than $1,200.

Re:MP3 is pants

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I think that the odd wording was the tip-off. MP3 is lossy, sometimes badly so; and even among lossy formats its greatest virtue is ubiquity rather than superiority. However, people who talk about signals having 'purity' tend to be moving in the direction of mysticism at a decent clip.

FiiO

[Lehk228]

it looks like a crappy and expensive knockoff of my FiiO X1

Re:FiiO

[PlatinumRiver]

I'm surprised more people aren't mentioning this. I have a FiiO X3. It plays pretty much all hi-res audio files, it can be used as a DAC, it has some internal storage with a MicroSD slot, and it's a fraction of the cost at around $200. Even the newer, more powerful X5 with dual MicroSD slots is $349 on Amazon. The new Sony Walkman seems rather pointless.

What did a Sony portable DAT deck cost when new?

[swb]

What were those priced at? I seem to remember in the early 1990s a DAT deck was kind of the unaffordable Holy Grail of audio recording and a portable DAT deck the unaffordable Walkman.

Pono Player?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

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.

Re:Pono Player?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

And lightning connector available for super cool bitrate audio to headphones.

Re:Pono Player?

[tlhIngan]

Neil Young already has the Pono Player. It plays FLAC.

I have one, and its technology sucks balls.

It's got a great DAC - an ESS SABRE 9016 - that powers many modern A/V receivers. Point there.

The problem is the amplifiers suck.

Ayre amps supposedly have no feedback, and that makes it "good". I suppose it is given they sell amps for $20,000 that are handmade in Colorado. However, just because you can hand make something doesn't translate into a mass-manufactured product. First off, the amp in the Pono is fully discrete (transistors, no op-amps). This is fine, if you manage to match all the transistors in each stage properly. Also fine in a $20,000 handmade product where you can go through and characterize every transistor and find matching pairs so they behave identically. But in a mass manufactured product, they probably are grabbing transistors off a reel, which means instant mismatches since they're within their specs, but will deviate due to manufacturing issues.

So a discrete amp already is at a disadvantage because without taking time to characterize every part, you're going to get an amp that behaves differently between channels and between units.

Yes, integrated units are better - best are dual units because matching within a die is far better (under 1% difference) that matching between dice (over 10-20%). IC designers know this, and they know that manufacturing can trim the differences down to practically nil within a die (in IC manufacturing, everything is based on ratios - you cannot say you want a 1K resistor because you'll get 1K +/- 30% tolerance. But you can design two transistors that will be well within 1% of each other, even if you need a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio or more - so designers work on ratios rather than absolute values). It's why you have dual DAC and dual op-amp or even more (6 channel DACs are common too) in a single package - the matching between the parts will be remarkably close, brought in closer because they can be laser trimmed during fab.

The next problem is lack of feedback causing a REALLY HIGH output impedance - about 5 ohms. If you don't know, this causes EQ because headphones with 8 ohm impedance can really vary between 1-12+ ohms over the audio range. This causes EQ (equalization) which means the amplifier actually produces different gains at different frequencies, a la a graphic equalizer. You can use an EQ to reverse this trend (that's what they're actually for - to equalize the response), but that's a bunch of processing. I've seen comments that say you should go for 8 times the output impedance at a minimum - so 40 ohm headphones or higher to minimize the EQ (at 8 times, the variance is around 0.5db).

Again, Ayre amps may do this because you're going to pair it up with good speakers that already will have higher impedances so you won't notice. But Joe Average will be using jellybean 8/16/32 ohm headphones (most common impedances).

The problem with Pono is that it hits EVERY audiophile rumor out there. Discrete good, op-amp bad (true back in the 70s with early opamps, but since the 80s we've had great audio op-amps that have excellent transfer characteristics). Feedback is bad (because feeding back a "time delayed" signal just ruins the audio purity - never mind that we're talking nanoseconds here) - even though using it lets you have lower output impedances. And that high output impedance means EQ up the hell.

And let's not say about the claim from Ayre themselves saying it's 80-90% as good as their $20,000 amp. That's just wrong on so many levels - are you saying that the amp is overpriced? Or to go the extra mile costs an extra $19,600?

Hell, I'm surprised they stuck with 3.5mm jacks given all the design work - 3.5mm jacks while convenient, do have limitations w.r.t. cross talk and other parameters.

And the hardware's kinda crappy - underpowered SoC running Android AOSP 2.2. yes, 2.2. it's sluggish all around.

I've actually never wanted to back out of a kickstarter as much as I have with Pono.

Re:Pono Player?

[freeze128]

The Pono is a weird physical design. If you put it in your front pants pocket, and then trip and fall down, you will have a triangle bruise on your leg. Sure, its shape might be good for putting at the top of your drafting table and keeping it from rolling down, but otherwise, it's just too weird. The new Sony Walkman is shaped just like a cellphone. Everyone can deal with that.

Don't!!!

[messymerry]

I have two Sony digital Walkmen. An 8GB NWZ-S544 and a 16GB NWZ-S545 which I use in my fitness classes. The hardware is high quality and has stood up really well to being banged around. The software on the other hand SUCKS!!! I cannot even delete files off the player. Furthermore, Sony cut some evil deal with M$ to use some non-standard playlist format which is only reasonably editable in windows OS. I have to keep a windows machine available just to generate playlists for these players. Sony completely abandoned me. No firmware updates to fix these glaring problems. I was brutally orphaned and Sony arrogantly ignored my requests to be heard. $1200.00 indeed! After my experience with the NWZ familyof players, I wouldn't give one of their players to Kim Jong...

Re:MP3 is pants

[loonycyborg]

MIDI encodes music in terms of instruments. All other mainstream sound formats encode sound waves, but there's no good way to detect instruments in sound waves. Only MIDI can be actually practical if you want something instrument-aware.

Re:Cunning strategy

[router]

And the resident audiophile idiots start to chime in.

As far as speaker wire goes, neither Monster, nor cables costing thousands of dollars more are superior to 30 cent/ft. lamp Wire available at your local Radio Shack.

Jesu, logged in just to say this. Thank you.

No headphones?

[erp_consultant]

I followed the link above and it shows a pretty impressive device. But it doesn't appear to come with any headphones. Now I would expect that on a $1200 music device you would not want to use crappy ear buds like the ones you get with an iPhone or Android phone. That would defeat the purpose of having a high end music player in the first place.

For $1200 I would expect it to come with a pair of high end, over the ear headphones. Something that might retail in the $300-400 range. That would better justify the price.

One more thing...how long will it be before we hear about someone getting robbed or shot over one of these things?

Sensationalist nonsense

[senzen]

Nothing like non news from a misinformed anonymous. There already is a $700 USD Walkman with similar characteristics which a lot of people seem to be enjoying; while there are many risks (my older android Walkman has a clunky interface) if you actually enjoy music once you try these there's no going back to no iWhatnot. It might be overpriced but if it happens to say drive bigger headphones and thus avoids the $1,000 portable amplifier, it would actually be a decent deal. And there already are much more expensive players out there.

Re:Cunning strategy

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I'm not an audiophile. I would spend maybe few bucks on something nicer than lamp wire if nothing more than to have nicer insulation that looks nice when ran against the wall and in the cracks of the baseboard.

I'm just suggesting I don't think that True Believing Audiophiles would use Monster products. They're too cheap for their tastes.

Xoom

[ganjadude]

These days I like using a Xoom H2N for live recordings. I can plug it directly into the PA, and/or use the dual directional mics. Ive had great luck with this 200$ product. http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bn...

What data format?

[Opportunist]

We're talking Sony here. So the usual questions apply:

Do I get my music out of that thing again?
Do I have to do the stupid "check in/check out" dance a la MiniDisc just so I can continue listening to music I legally have?
If it takes any kind of stuff I can plug in at all, will it be some sort of standard or the usual proprietary Sony bullshit akin to memory sticks?

In a nutshell, just how locked down is it going to be, will it be crippled beyond usefulness as they usually do with their stuff or is it actually usable?

Re:If only...

[Opportunist]

Knowing Sony, you could probably record digitally but not transfer that digital record out of the machine.

Re:Sony is smart and capitalizing on niche markets

[Opportunist]

What niche market? The stupid ones with heaps of money to burn?

That sure is one small niche.

Re:MP3 is pants

[Blaskowicz]

But it will be fine with a very high bitrate like the proverbial 320 Kbps. Video analogy : the MPEG2 codec is antiquated but it looks fine on a DVD movie, with so many bytes thrown at it.

128gb isn't that much FLAC...

[neminem]

So that's sort of silly. If they came out with an mp3 player that actually had a decent storage capacity... ok, I still wouldn't pay $1200 for it, that'd be crazy. I'd be happy to pay like 500, though. I paid that much for my current mp3 player for exactly that reason (500gb hard drive) - which is running, incidentally, no joke, Android 1 point freaking 6. That mp3 player is no longer available for purchase, and nobody's come out with any replacement. :(

Thats one high price toy

[lapm]

1200$ ? That damn thing better have all goodies i can ask for. Wifi, 4G, several micro SD card slots, run on Linux, usb transfer and recharge, Solar charge, etc.....

FLAC on a PMP

[LRayZor]

FLAC support on a portable music player has existed for years - The S9 from iAudio supported loads of formats, and the sound quality was superb.

Re:FLAC on a PMP

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

I use this:

http://www.ibasso.com/products...

paired with this:

http://chordelectronics.co.uk/...

but then I'm crazy. Sure does play flac files though :-).

Im sure a pro sports person will

[Stan92057]

Im sure a pro sports person will. I sure as hell wouldn't, that's way over my play thing budget but as they say to each there own.

BINGO! I WIN!

[willworkforbeer]

Thanks, I only needed "Tipping Point" for my Buzzword Bingo card.

I already had:
"paradigm shift"
"arena"
"consumer-grade"
"on-device"

I kid, I kid, it's the meds, seriously. :)

Only "mostly"?

[Chirs]

"Hi-res" only makes sense when recording/mixing audio. For a final product that is intended just for listening it makes no sense at all.

Re:Only "mostly"?

[Lunix Nutcase]

I say "mostly" only because in some cases the "hi-res" version can have better mixes with better dynamic range. But none of that is down to the bit depth or sampling rate. Those specs are the fluff.

Pi

[BlackHawk-666]

No thanks, I have a Raspberry Pi thank will play all that for free.

Oh dear

[Mr_Silver]

At some point, my iPod Classic is going to bite the dust and I'd love something that is a similar size that can store my large music (and video) collection and have a decent battery life.

This could have been it, but with an old version of Android and a stupid price point, I think I'll pass. Hopefully they'll come up with something that is less audiophile and more useful for the masses.

MP3 versus FLAC

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

So far, I have seen no convincing double-blind tests showing that anyone can distinguish between high-quality MP3 compression and lossless.

Audio has an awful lot of pseudoscience in it. Almost all the differences in the quality of sound is made:

1) During the recording process.
2) By the drivers that play back the sound.

Unless you're still listening to 128 kbs MP3's encoded using old algorithms, lossless is likely not doing much if anything beyond the placebo effect.

If you can tell the difference between a high quality, 256+ vbr MP3 and a SACD, you are probably a Cylon.

Re:MP3 versus FLAC

[DigiShaman]

It's madness in the pursuit of perfection. The whole point is to minimize any disturbance of the audio from source directly to your ears; with the idea that anything in-between cumulatively adds up. Hypothetically, there is a harmonic difference between MP3 and FLAC. In reality however, original source material or a head-cold will be the biggest impact on audio listening experience. Fact is, the human ear is horrible. The real panacea in audiophile technology would be to transmit the sound as electrical impulses directly to the brain itself.

I'd glad pay $1200... IF

[mindmaster064]

If they used pro-audio grade components... A portable device using those isn't available... I prefer listening on my studio monitors to most things because I can actually hear them. The lack of "actuation" in the weaker components is drastic and noticeable. I'd pay for a crystal clear strong headphone amp with a player... I realize these components are pretty cheap on a larger form-factor. But, getting them in a small box would be marvelous -- it hasn't really been done. Most of these devices are consumer rather than prosumer oriented and the quality suffers as a result. I guarantee until you listen to your music through a true amp/studio speaker setup you have no clue what you've been missing from your tunes (like entire parts of them..).

Show me the actual double-blind studies.

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

Most of the quality of your music is determined by how it is recorded and mastered.

Most of the rest is determined by the drivers you use.

Different DACs and amps have different audio characteristics, but it is doubtful that, among similar ones that are not weird outliers, audiophiles can actually tell the difference or prefer one to the other when thy are properly balanced against each other in a double blind test.

I doubt that

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

The drivers (headphones) probably represent about 95% of the difference in playback quality that is detectable to a human. Headphones are what actually create the sound, not the amp and not the DAC. You'll get a lot more bang for your buck on a headphone upgrade than on upgrading your DAC or amp.

I would like to see double-blinded studies that show otherwise.

Even an audiophile...

[OldSport]

...would likely not touch this stuff. Generally I think I can tell the difference between lossless and high bitrate MP3, but I have to be listening on my home system, which is a very nice setup in a quiet listening environment. A Walkman is a portable device, no? As in, you listen to it while you're walking around, likely in environments with background noise? Not exactly an environment for critical listening.

When I want the audiophile experience I throw a minty LP on my turntable, crank the McIntosh, and settle in in front of my B&W Diamonds. When I'm out and about and just want to be able to access my entire collection (or a large chunk of it) at a reasonable level of quality, for which high bitrate MP3 is sufficient.

This isn't an audiophile product. It's a product for people who *think* they're audiophiles and that audiophile = expensive. I expect Sony to sell around a hundred of these, all to pretentious cunts.

Only at low bitrates

[Mr_Wisenheimer]

If you use high quality settings VBR with an average around 256 or higher, I doubt that anyone could tell the difference in a double blind test.

If you can actually tell the difference between a CD and mp3 (and not imagine it, as many people do), it is likely due to it not being encoded by the best standards allowed by the mp3 algorithm.

Audiophiles are convinced they can detect all sorts of differences that they probably cannot. It is the placebo effect. A lot of them rushed out to buy SACD's, recorded and played back at 24 bits and 192K samples per second, but double-blind tests show they cannot actually distinguish between a SACD or analog source played purely and one downsampled through a CD-quality DAC.

I suspect it is the same in distinguishing between high quality MP3s and CDs.

Re:Only at low bitrates

[X0563511]

Well, I said reasonable bitrates and not high quality - think 128kbps. Though you are right, using the fast encoder profile doesn't make it any better.

Re:BINGO! I WIN!

[TWX]

Congratulations! We invite you to sit-in on our strategizing session, we want to engage in the development of new market differentiation to leverage our corporate position to maximize ROI. Any insights or foreknowledge of the flowchart will enable us to better preplan for market forces and consumer-will to effectively drive our business model to achieve these results.

yeah but like...

[roc97007]

...flac is free (hence the name) and there's no additional cost to decoding it vs mp3, no licensing issues. Mass producing high quality audio components is a known thing. All you really need is a lot of storage (flac files tend to be large) and 128 Gbytes, although it sounds big compared to, oh, an ipod, it's not a lot of storage compared to commonly available storage devices these days For that price I'd expect at a minimum a terabyte SSD.

It sounds like Sony is trying for boutique pricing ala Apple. The problem with that is that Sony doesn't really have the mindshare to pull it off. They may be betting that the young over-entitled will buy it just *because* it's the most expensive music player currently available. But those same over-entitled individuals wouldn't be caught dead with something that says "Sony Walkman". I don't see the market.

Re:yeah but like...

[steveg]

Most expensive music player? Not even close....

Astell-Kern-AK240-Mastering-Quality

Apparently this is what iRiver has morphed into. I had an iRiver H340 back in the day, but they've apparently abandoned the mass market in a big way.

Re:yeah but like...

[Neil Boekend]

Yep, but I prefer paying $2500 to iRiver over paying $1200 to Sony.

Not that I would buy either. They are a tad out of my price range and I can't see Spotify support in the list.

Very nice Sony design

[MrDoh!]

Been missing seeing Sony design something that looks good. Make a phone in this formfactor, size and all (bigger battery, better camera sensor, better grip), and I'd be all over it. Bored of slivers of steel when you can get something like that.

Pretty sure they have at least 6000 customers

[WillAffleckUW]

Last I heard, North Korea said it had a well trained 6000 member cyber army, so maybe they will buy the $1200 digital walkmen?

Not that crazy

[endus]

That's not out of line with other high end portables, especially with 128gb internally. Lots of other players in that space and price range.

It does need to be GOOD...VERY good....though. The guys on Head-Fi are pretty picky!

I need a large capacity high end player, but I'm not willing to spend quite that much. Geekwave looks promising.

This is a hoax right?

[sentiblue]

nm.... I know it's not a hoax...

They must be out of their damn minds!!!

Insane

[msobkow]

I paid $700-odd dollars (Canadian) for a Lenovo laptop with HD Realtek chipset that does 192/24 output. It sounds great once configured correctly, and plays back HD media just fine.

I can not for the life of me fathom how Sony can think anyone will pay $1200 for less than $50 worth of parts. The Walkman and Sony names aren't worth shit any more. They're no longer "premium" products, and they never did have a good reputation in the audiophile markets.

MP3 players?

[Jiro]

I really wish I could find a decent MP3 player that is not a "purity of the original signal" type $1200 scam, and was not discontinued years ago.

The usual advice is "buy a cheap phone and don't use it as a phone". This fails because

• most of them have horrible battery life (the 33 hours for this sounds fairly decent, if only it wasn't $1200)
• there are so many models of phones out that it's hard to find a good selection of reviews for any specific one
• They tend to have random gotchas (for instance, there are phones which don't let you use the non-phone features until you activate it as a phone)

But does it come with a android rootkit?

[johncandale]

So it runs android apps hmm? Does it also delete your files deemed illegal and phone home your music tastes? I won't be surprised.

It is also way too big. It looks about the size of a smart phone. All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot. Lossless formats are not hard to decode, you don't need a lot of hardware.

Re:But does it come with a android rootkit?

[Baron_Yam]

> It looks about the size of a smart phone. All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.

If you have a smart phone... why would you need a music player? The modern smart phone is pretty much a portable general purpose computer, and one of the things it can do is store and play audio at or beyond the fidelity capability of headphones.

Re:But does it come with a android rootkit?

[Neil Boekend]

All you really need is something the size of a shuffle but with a microSD slot.

The Sansa Clip is similarly sized as the iPod Shuffle. It has a micro SD card slot and later firmware updates allow FLAC and OGG.
It is a great player that survived my abuse for years, with only a silicone skin over it.
I have no direct experience on the successor Sansa Clip + but I would assume that it is similarly awesome.

Re:MP3 is pants

[steveha]

Certain instruments just don't encode very well.

True.

I used to work for James D. Johnston ("JJ") who was the co-inventor of MP3 while he was at Bell Labs. He told me that MP3 has a particular problem with reproducing the sound of a glockenspiel.

He was never happy with MP3. My understanding is that the standards process forced him to compromise the design in ways he didn't like, and later when he did AAC it was more like what he had wanted MP3 to be all along.

http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2497684&cid=37865994

O2 Amp

[steveha]

You might be happier if you pair your Pono with an O2 amp. The O2 was designed to be portable.

http://nwavguy.blogspot.com/2011/08/o2-details.html

If you like to solder you can build your own; the plans are open-source.

I don't like to solder and bought one pre-made from JDS Labs. I didn't care about portability and I wanted to use it with a computer so I bought the O2+ODAC all in one.

http://www.jdslabs.com/products/48/o2-odac-combo/

You can spend more money, but you really can't beat the performance of an O2 and/or ODAC. You can spend less money but whatever you get won't be as good.

Inexpensive compared to Astell & Kern AK240 $2

[jmcbain]

If any of you are having a hard time believing the $1200 price tag of the new Sony NWZ-ZX2, then I recommend you check out the Astell and Kern AK240 priced at $2499.

Sony?

[DarthVain]

"They're assholes. They're anti-consumer. They're constantly trying to achieve vendor lock in. They treat the security of their consumers data as an afterthought."

You sure you're not talking about Apple?

Re:Sony?

[vettemph]

Both. I banned Apple from my house when they tried to lock down the itunes format with DRM and banned Sony when they did the root-kit / cd trojan thing. ..and Microsoft when the funded SCO (actually long before that).
  You can't just boycott until they change. These are permanent for me. There has been nothing in my house with these names for ten years or more.

Better Alternatives

[Committ]

I have a Fiio X 5 and while it's not a looker, is on the large side and has the obligatory clunky interface it sounds great, supports loads of formats and has two MicroSD slots. When I bought it these could take two 64G cards but I think it's gone up to two 128G or maybe even 256G. The firmware updates have actually made it considerably better IMO, though there's always people complaining they can't see the album art, who seriously cares that much about seeing it when they're out and about?! Anyway it's a fraction of the price and does the job nicely for me.

Re:Yes, but you'll likely have powered headphones

[greg1104]

He says he has damage to one ear, so it makes sense that to him Bose has great sound quality.

Re:Yes, but you'll likely have powered headphones

[ihtoit]

oh, bazing. :) No, really? You'd have to be tone deaf to call anything that comes out of Bose gear "decent".

Reintroduced?

[MikeBabcock]

My daughter bought a Walkman brand digital music player five years ago. They didn't reintroduce it last year.

At least Sony and Neil young..

[sansprivacy]

Are trying to do something about the stagnate portable audio player market. The DAC in the iPod line sucks. It's "good enough" for the average music listener to think it's a great sound. What about those people that care about the preserving original sound and having a lot of dynamic range? Should we join the tirade against Sony attempting to fill a gap in the market like 99% of the people commenting because we didn't like some cheap Sony earbuds we got that one time? Fanboi culture has made meaningful discussions on products a thing of the past ... a bunch of regurgitated rhetoric and buzz words.

Re:Khyber I just handed you your ass... apk

[Khyber]

You're totally stupid. There are literally hundreds of ways to bypass a HOSTs files.

Meanwhile, keep talking your smack with your useless HOSTs file. Camfrog bypassed it and showed your ass wrong. If you think you can beat it, go install Camfrog and defeat the ads.