Slashdot Mirror
Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman
An anonymous reader writes: The Walkman is one of the most recognizable pieces of technology from the 1980s. Unfortunately for Sony, it didn't survive the switch to digital, and they discontinued it in 2010. Last year, they quietly reintroduced the Walkman brand as a "high-resolution audio player," supporting lossless codecs and better audio-related hardware. At $300, it seemed a bit pricey. But now, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony has loudly introduced its high-end digital Walkman, and somehow decided to price it at an astronomical $1,200.
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
Maybe they should talk to their friends in Sony Music about the Loudness War first before going on about music purity.
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.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
They have defective bullshit detectors, it''ll sell.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
...but there are a lot of stupid-ass rich people who will buy it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sony was hacked. The hackers changed maliciously the selling price. It's actually $12,000.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal.
Well, does it have proper headphone amplifier? The audio output of typical mobile gadgets is poor for driving good chunky headphones: there is noise, there is not enough energy to deliver good bass, and the sound is just smudgy.
It does come with a microSD slot!
Summation 2
The Pono player is the same thing, allegedly, and costs only 1/3 as much.
http://ponomusic.force.com/
This is Sony's revenge. At that price no North Korean can afford it.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Guess what the price of the MZ-1 was 22 years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.minidisc.org/part_S...
Well, it was 1200$ in Canada....
I was a Sony fanboi back then and having one of the first MZ-1s was like being a space alien. Just ejecting the disc on the Metro (subway) was a reason for complete strangers to ask what it is! Fun times.
Sony, like me, now appears to be a grumpy middle-aged man with graying hair denying that it's 2015...
Mostly random stuff.
They give you enough space to store $40k in legally purchased music... in comparison, $1200 is chump change.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
This highlights the one and only problem with Sony: It is always too expensive.
I think the product longevity issue that Sony has *might* be a slightly bigger problem. I don't have any real data other than my personal experience, but I have owned a slew of Sony products and with the exception of our two Sony CRT TVs growing up, they have all shat them selves within 18 months. The two TVs we had when I was growing up lasted for over 8 years each. I think the second one needed to have a transformer replaced at some point, but that was about $20 in the early 90's.
Other than those two products, my personal experience has been awful. I don't think I ever had a sony walkman that lasted more than 6 months due to stupid things like belt clips that were TOTALLY inadequate for doing anything other than standing still. My Sony amplifier shat itself the same month the warranty ran out. The display crapped out and was eventually repaired by re-soldering and bending the PCBs. My Sony car stereo crapped it's display about a year after I bought it. No amount of blowing, hitting, or poking around inside could fix it. The digitizer in m Sony Clie (late Palm Pilot clone) shat its self a few weeks after the rotary encoder at the base of the display filled with pocket lint and stopped working. After the Clie disaster, I have refused to buy a Sony electronic device. I'm not going to get burned again.
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
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.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
And of course don't forget the unskippable warnings and menu animations. That isn't unique to Sony though.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
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.
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.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
And they wonder why pirated versions are so popular...
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".
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
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.
Good people go to bed earlier.
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.
Love sees no species.
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...!
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
tried using an emergency mechanical ejection tool?
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Sony's smart-phones are actually pretty damn good nowadays, possibly because their brand-recognition is bad in that area.
Error: No error occurred
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).
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
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.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
They could have gotten $3000 for it, if they could have found a way to wedge a couple of vacuum tubes into it.
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.
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.
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.
If you think it's expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur. --Red Adair
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
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.
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
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..).
How large is the market for those people though?
Bear in mind I'm talking specifically about portable devices for audiophiles that want them despite the environment in which they're attempting to use them being subpar.
I don't think the market is big enough to justify the development of the device. I very well may be incorrect, but the difference between a $300-cash dedicated music player or a $600-cash multifunction smarthphone that plays music well enough versus a $1200 device that just plays music is a pretty steep curve to ask while the former options, with high-end headphones, are already available.
Look at another market that Sony played in, the Laserdisc market. Was for high-end customers, also played music from compact disc perfectly well, and was meant to be integrated into a home theatre system with multispeaker surround sound where the owner could control the environment. It was unlikely to be dropped or damaged or otherwise lost and didn't require the user to do anything more than load the media to play the content. Despite the relative ease-of-use the Laserdisc was not a runaway success, and Sony only made a handful of players before effectively yielding the entire market to Pioneer. It was not a particularly profitable market even when the premium content at the time was vastly superior to the next step down, the video tape. Jumping to now, we can look at the differences- On-device content is competing with on-demand streamed content, modern devices like smartphones run loadable software so new things like codecs can be added, and the sound-reproduction end-device, the headphones, isn't an integrated part of the device but a user-selectable module. All that remains in-question is the quality of the audio reproduction in the DSP in the smartphone itself, but since the advent of computer-based sound at 44KHz, 16-bit with the sound cards of the mid-nineties, the differences between low-end sound and high-end sound have been very, very hard to differentiate.
Given that the cell phone is so ubiquitous, I find it very unlikely that even most audiophiles will want to carry a dedicated device in addition to their phone, and throwing a steep price on top of it isn't going to help matters.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
> 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?
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.
My 50â sansa clip plus plays flac. And with an extra 64gb microSD card (another 50 bucks) it has 72 GB memory
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.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
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.
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
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.