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Sony's Signature Walkman and Headphones Are $5,500 of Ridiculous (theverge.com)
Vlad Savov, writing for The Verge: Like a grand old dinosaur that's being left behind by the evolution of the tech industry, Sony is in desperate recovery mode here at IFA. The company has new phones, a rather nice pair of noise-canceling headphones, the imminent PS VR, and... a truly outlandish combo of music player and headphones that costs a mighty $5,499.98. I guess there had to be some outlet for Sony's classic wild-eyed grandeur. Sony's new Signature audio series consists of the gold-plated NW-WM1Z Walkman, which weighs in at 455g (1lb) and $3,200, the $2,300 MDR-Z1R closed-back headphones, and a desktop headphone amp whose price I haven't even dared to look up. First impressions? The portable media player barely qualifies to be called portable. This new 256GB Walkman glints beautifully under IFA's bright lights, and its hefty case is machined to a perfect finish, but its weight is overwhelming. I simultaneously love it for its looks and hate it for its impracticality. Typical Sony, then!
You're supposed to marvel and stare in awe while you buy the 200-dollar-value setup for 500 bucks and consider it cheap, for you have seen the one that costs 5000.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... it better have tubes and the internal wiring better be from the people who make Monster cables look cheap.
Either Sony is an idiot or this is the "top of the line steak they never plan to sell" that makes the "real" most-expensive item look affordable.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Sony can go fuck themselves.
like massively outselling the competition in the console wars, while preparing to launch the cheapest and most accessible dedicated VR headset on the market.
(Not a sony shill, just hate the verge)
Take this reviewer's commentary with a grain of salt. As with all "audiophiles", he bases his opinion on just plain subjective emotion associated with product brands, individual tastes, and nationalistic biases, not any type of fact. He doesn't like the $5,500 Sony headphones? Then why did he like the Sennheiser $55,000 headphones (yes, that's right, $55K headphones) or the Focal $3,999 headphones? And I really hate to bring this up because it's ugly, but maybe his review comes down to simple nationalism? The reviewer (Vlad Savov) is based in Europe, and Sennheiser is from Germany and Focal is from France. And Sony is (duh) from Japan.
the reviewer (Vlad Savov) is based in Europe, and Sennheiser is from Germany and Focal is from France. And Sony is (duh) from Japan.
Or maybe the Japanese still haven't figured out to make speakers and headphones that actually sound good?
They are being out-innovated. This is proof!
weigh the same model walkman without the gold plating, then weigh the one with the gold plating, and check the difference, are you getting at least that much in value in gold for the added extra cost? No? i would not buy it either, its just for rich fanboys that dont mind blowing money on expensive flashy gadgets
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
https://www.audeze.com/products/lcd-collection/lcd-x
Beats needa up dey game, yo! Ain' nobody gonna buy that ghetto Beats shit when dey gots dem Sonys doh.
True playas gonna listen to dat Sony. Betas is fo broke-ass little bitches.
They are status symbols/fashion accessories. They're a way of advertising to the world that you paid $5,500 for $500 worth of material (if you're lucky). Why? Because you can. I live in Manhattan and regularly see idiots driving Ferrari's, Lamborghini's and McLaren's around town. NYC now has a 25 mph speed limit, NYC traffic generally makes 25mph seem like a day dream, NYC potholes can make a Humvee cringe in fear and a parking spot for a luxury car like that starts at $1000/month. It's almost cheaper to keep the car and Europe and fly out so you can drive it on the Autobahn or Nürburgring where you can actually enjoy the car. They don't, because they enjoy being seen in the car... not driving it. That's why you buy a $5,500 1lbs mp3 player, or $10,000 handbag, etc.
The only status symbols I cave on are watches, they are works of functional precision art that will last for a 100+ years if properly taken care of. Everyone has their weaknesses, but at least I can pass it on to my son if I can every afford one.
You know the saying:
Audiophiles don't listen to music - they listen to music equipment. If you want to piss off an audiophile, find one with a really high end audio system. You can usually identify them by the $1000/foot "directional" audio cables connecting the equipment together - then tell them this:
Show them the cheapest XLR cable you can find and tell them everything they are listening to, most likely, went through those cables first.
The trick is to pick the best speaker seeds. Plant them in luxurious gold sprinkled soil, Tenderly watch over then every day as you feed them love with direct disc music playing all around. The newly grown speaker drivers must be picked at exactly the right time to ensure proper impedance matching and optimum efficiency. Nah. The real cost is probably about $50 to $75 is just gouging people, I reviewed audiophile gear in the early 90's for two publications. A home made cable, using oxygen free copper that was a single crystal, sounded just about as clear and clean as silver cables. The hand made stuff was always sinfully expensive, while Parasound's made in Taiwan monoblock amps were a good value with near zero distortion. People mock audiophile listeners. The one thing that sets their gear apart from high priced Best Buy stereo equipment is lack of distortion in every component leading to an enjoyable listening session at any (reasonable) volume level.
Oxygen-free copper? Is that like gluten-free water?
Single crystal copper? Audiophiles are such dunderheads.
Like vacuum tubes?
I never got that. Guitar players go nuts over tube amps and then run the signal through so many effects that - what's the point? Brian Setzer is the only performer that I can give a benefit of the doubt but even he has stated that he's probably the only one who can tell.
I can't. And modern digital circuits can duplicate the tube sound these days - whatever it is. Gimme modern technology any day and it's cheaper too - to buy and operate. Tubes are energy pigs and hot.
You're talking about a country where the latest trend is for audiophiles to install their own utility poles with custom transformers to isolate their equipment from noise generated from neighboring houses. Yes it's obsessive pixie dust but the Japanese know good audio equipment. Sony and Audio-Technica studio monitors are regularly in the top 10 (excluding vendors who custom make their headphones out of ground up Stradivarius and non-oxidized gold sourced from Kepler meteorites).
They don't cost much, have great battery life and, oh my goodness, getting music on them is as simply as copying files to a USB stick.
https://www.amazon.com/Sony-NW...
Oh, I guess I got the "not practical" part. It's soo not practical to NOT have to install piece of crap like iTunes to do basic operations with your music player.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://politicalgates.blogspot...
Is happening.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I meant Kuiper not Kepler. The point still stands though ;-)
This product will be snapped up by those people who insist that magic Monster Cable dust comes out of headphone jacks that Bluetooth can't touch.
it's called a veblen good. It's something you buy to show people that you can. Apple does it too. They've had this stuff since at least the 70s. The difference is with the internet you hear about it, whereas before you had to be pretty well off to even know it existed.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's all well and good but rest assured that wealthy Japanese audiophiles might be using Japanese amps and cabling but they're almost guaranteed to be using American, Canadian or European speakers.
To truely appreciate this, you need $500 USB cables, AT A MINIMUM.
The gold plated cables with directional indicators will ensure the electrons flow properly and evenly to charge your battery.
The balanced USB ensures your 1's and 0's are at optimum levels for no degradation in sound quality.
I mean a $5 cable will also transfer your files, just not as fast, and the 1's and 0's will not be at optimal levels.
Also, the wooden holder ensures no interference, a bargain at only $250
it looks so bland, then
I go to /. to do the opposite of the wisdom. I don't believe in global warming, but I do believe the earth is 6000 years old. Why? because you told me I should not believe this. The collective smugness of this website could power the world for the next 100 years if it could only be harnessed. Gotta buy these headphones. Sure it does not make sense, but listening to anything espoused by the gospel of /. makes even less sense. /. never changes
How does the malware get on my computer from this walkman? Sony is known for viruses and hacking millions of computers. How does a walkman help further this image?
1. Audio and Hi/Fi got it's start in the America's and Europe. People go with what they know (and often with good reason). French wines are still king, so are Swiss watches, Canadian maple syrup
2. Japan got the every loving sh*t bombed out of them during WWII (I'm an American btw). Germany did as well, but there was still infrastructure in countries around Germany and it was built back up faster because of the US and Russia squaring off. Japan did get a lot of financial assistance from the US (lest they be driven into an economic depression that led to the Wiemar Republic and ultimately the Nazis) but they still had to restart with basically nothing. So while the US was turning out cool new stereos based off of technology invented during WWII, the Japanese were turning out cheap radios because that's the only thing they had the money or infrastructure to build out. But they did a good job of it, people bought them because the were good quality and the rest is history.
Yes, it's not completely applicable, but still classic and cathartic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I've seen a lot of arguments from audiophiles that amount to "I like the sound of tubes and neither solid-state analog nor digital can give me what I want."
This is of course mathematically bogus, so I assume they mean either that their ears are so good that good-enough solid-state equipment is either too expensive or not is not commercially available.
I think yours is the first time I've seen someone advocate for tubes based on electrical efficiency. It's an interesting argument, but with electricity running well under $0.20/kW-hour in much of the United States, it's not really a compelling economic argument. You may have an argument for issues related to heat-dissipation and the size of any backup batteries your sound system is connected to, but for most people in a home environment, neither will be a serious issue.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
According to the Specs it can hold 5 songs, and has no frequency response. I can play CATRS music files though (Compressed All To Rat Shit).
No output impedance, no power specifications, nothing of any use whatsoever.
Pure utter unadulterated garbage!
You misspelled "audiophools". Hope this helps!
I've used bose and other rands of noise cancelling headsets.
They are a pale shadow of the performance I get with a $27 full ear covering gun headset combined with inexpensive $17 earbuds. On airplanes the difference is night and day.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The trick is to pick the best speaker seeds. Plant them in luxurious gold sprinkled soil, Tenderly watch over then every day as you feed them love with direct disc music playing all around. The newly grown speaker drivers must be picked at exactly the right time to ensure proper impedance matching and optimum efficiency. Nah.
Ironically, I can imagine this industrial process in action with a layering of nano-coatings grown upon a graphene core, and film relaxation (the luv) applied in the end.
With Sony, $5500 is what you have to pay to get gear that will play back anything but their own proprietary formats. At that price they will even refrain from installing the rootkit (maybe).
Sony and AT studio monitors (as in speakers, not headphones)? Bitch, please.
In the studio monitor world, it's all about JBL, Dynaudio, Neumann, Yamaha, Adam Audio, Eve Audio, ATC, PMC, Focal, Opal and a bunch of other brands that Sony and AT can't even come close to touching on sound quality.
Eat the rich.
You're talking about a country where the latest trend is for audiophiles to install their own utility poles with custom transformers to isolate their equipment from noise generated from neighboring houses.
So a country full of retarded audiophiles who have no idea what they are doing, and have never heard of a AC->DC transformers that are in all electronics.
If they making decisions like this, they will go bankrupt inevitably....
A walkman with outrighteous weight and a headphone costing $5k. Oh yeah, Make like 100 limited edition of those... and there will be about 20 millionaires in world that would buy them... Leave the other 80 in stock and wait 60 years to turn them into antiques selling for 3 times the original price. I bet if Sony eventually goes bankrupt, the set may be worth 4 times the original price instead of 3....
You may recall that Sony put a rootkit on its audio CDs about 2001. That rootkit installed itself on your Windows computer if you played the CD on that computer. That rootkit disabled the ability to write CDs.
The FTC sued Sony. When negotiating the penalty Sony refused to say the would not do it again. In Canada Sony had to promise not to do it again, probably to avoid a very large monetary settlement payment to the Canadian government.
I have one Sony product left; it is a AM/FM receiver, ca 1990-something. I will NEVER own a Sony something ever again.