Before the Playstation, Sony’s jewel in the crown was the Walkman, the music player became ubiquitous in the early 90s spawning tape players, CD players and then mini discs before the tech giant killed off the brand in the face of stiff competition from Apple’s iPod.
Fast forward to five years ago and Sony brought back the brand again to help shift their Android mobile phones – and now at CES 2015, the Walkman is back and has been remodelled as a high-end, high-quality music player aimed at audiophiles.
The company’s NW-ZX2 plays something Sony is calling, Hi-Res Audio. It’s has a much higher quality than CD. Apparently a single track will weigh in at a whopping 150MB, which is a almost twice the size of a WAV and 15 times as big as a 320 mp3 – unfortunately were not aware of anywhere that actually sells music in that quality yet.
Sony also reckons the new player will also upscale normal mp3s into Hi-Res audio, which on paper sounds like a good idea, but in practice we’re not convinced just yet.
Elsewhere the player comes with a generous 128GB onboard memory and can be extended via SD card slot to 256GB. Battery-wise the new player comes with an impressive 60 hours playback between charges.
The new player is expected to launch in the spring 2015. No price has been officially given as yet but don’t expect it to be cheap.
- Superb Hi-Res sound from Walkman with S-Master HX and DSEE HX
- Upgraded signal path and power supply stages with premium components
- LDAC for high quality wireless listening via Bluetooth
- Long 60hr battery life and 128GB (expandable) capacity to store your Hi-Res music collection
- Luxurious design with body sculpted from solid aluminium
