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 : )
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.
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.
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 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.