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Sony Thinks You'll Pay $1200 For a Digital Walkman
An anonymous reader writes: The Walkman is one of the most recognizable pieces of technology from the 1980s. Unfortunately for Sony, it didn't survive the switch to digital, and they discontinued it in 2010. Last year, they quietly reintroduced the Walkman brand as a "high-resolution audio player," supporting lossless codecs and better audio-related hardware. At $300, it seemed a bit pricey. But now, at the Consumer Electronics Show, Sony has loudly introduced its high-end digital Walkman, and somehow decided to price it at an astronomical $1,200.
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
What will all that money get you? 128GB of onboard storage and a microSD slot to go with it. There's a large touchscreen, and the device runs Android — but it uses version 4.2 Jelly Bean, which came out in 2012. It also supports Bluetooth and NFC. Sony claims the device has 33 hours of battery life when playing FLAC files, and 60 hours when playing MP3s. They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal."
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 : )
Sony was hacked. The hackers changed maliciously the selling price. It's actually $12,000.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
They appear to be targeting audiophiles — their press release includes phrasing about how pedestrian MP3 encoding will "compromise the purity of the original signal.
Well, does it have proper headphone amplifier? The audio output of typical mobile gadgets is poor for driving good chunky headphones: there is noise, there is not enough energy to deliver good bass, and the sound is just smudgy.
It does come with a microSD slot!
Summation 2
This is Sony's revenge. At that price no North Korean can afford it.
This posting is provided 'AS IS' without warranty of any kind, implied or otherwise.
Guess what the price of the MZ-1 was 22 years ago?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.minidisc.org/part_S...
Well, it was 1200$ 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
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.
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)
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.
Sony's smart-phones are actually pretty damn good nowadays, possibly because their brand-recognition is bad in that area.
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They could have gotten $3000 for it, if they could have found a way to wedge a couple of vacuum tubes into it.
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
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..
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.
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.
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