I got a Sony camera a while back. When I registered it I signed up to the Sony marketing emails.

This upcoming Walkman seems to have many Hi-Fi hot buttons for this forum. No denying it looks nice to me. But really?

https://www.sony.co.uk/electronics/walkman/nw-wm1zm2

Not a fan of all the jargon but there’s room in my life for a device which does music streaming and nothing else. It’s the last thing keeping me attached to a smartphone.

Give me a pocket size box with just Spotify and I’ll happily use a Nokia brick for calls and texts.

Does it work with Airpods?

There’s still a market for portable music players and other companies making similar products. Much more niche now we all have phones in our pocket but it’s there.

I almost certainly can’t afford it, but I would like one assuming it does radio as well. Would prefer more analogue buttons and less touchscreen though.

Despite oxygen-free copper (OFC) being notoriously difficult to machine process, the WM1ZM2 features a gold-plated OFC chassis – just like its predecessor. This time though, OFC purity has been upgraded to 99.99% (four nines), offering even greater benefits in terms of audio quality and high rigidity. Bass notes are clear and powerful, the atmosphere is more expansive, and mid to high range sounds linger beautifully

Wow Such bullshit.

apparently will cost £1300-£3350 depending on the model 🤣

…it won’t be in the Argos catalogue then! 🙂

I had one of these

and a weird purple / lilac Sony affair that I can only assume I stole from my sister.

You have to applaud Sony though. It’s a complete nonsense product with zero practical target market (99.99% of people already own a product that can do everything this can, almost as well), but wallies with too much money will see this and want/buy it so merely by announcing & releasing it they will be creating a market. Genius 😃

– storage to keep music offline – check
– links to a NAS for streaming – check (I think so anyway)
– plug for a normal headphone jack – check

I’d be in the market for one of those! Not for over 300quid though.

Love this: “Vinyl Processor –
Give the warmth and character of vinyl back to your digital tracks. Enjoy subtle reproduction of the low-frequency resonance, tone-arm resistance and surface noise to deliver an authentic listening experience.” haha, yeah best thing about vinyl is the surface noise. I so miss that 😆

– storage to keep music offline – check
– links to a NAS for streaming – check (I think so anyway)
– plug for a normal headphone jack – check

I’d be in the market for one of those! Not for over 300quid though.

pretty much any old smartphone would do that though – just run the Plex app, and run a Plex server on your NAS (or whatever).

Interesting but hardly a new product – Astell & Kern have been making high end portable players for a while. I’m not sure if they support DSD. If they don’t, and the Sony product does, that will be an interesting first. Although there is precious little natively recorded DSD music out there, even where the files are converted to DSD from a PCM recording process, the results are still significantly improved over standard PCM. Where files are recorded natively in DSD they are superlative.

Edit – the top A&K player supports native DSD512k and costs north of £3k so the Sony version is really a ‘catch up’ product. Even as an audiophille myself, I’ve never really got the point of these products. The DSP element is one thing but for it to be truly portable product you need to be able to plug your head phones into the unit, at which point the point is lost because the best headphones need a lot of current to work well and the only way to get that with a portable decide is via Class D, which sounds (to my ears) awful. Combining them with a portable headphone amp/DAC does make some sense but then you’re into a £7k system and I’d rather spend that on my home system.

As said above, very very limited appeal.

What would be preferable would be a classic ipod with 1tb drive and the ability to use Spotify

pretty much any old smartphone would do that though

I know – mine does (aside from the 256gb storage). Or should I say, mine do – I have 3 old phones dotted about the house. But it’d nice to have a dedicated “IPod” type thing (with added vinyl crackle 😛 ) For when the iPods do die. I have so many ipods.

Although there is precious little natively recorded DSD music out there, even where the files are converted to DSD from a PCM recording process, the results are still significantly improved over standard PCM. Where files are recorded natively in DSD they are superlative.

DSD files contain nothing but ultrasonic frequencies/introduced noise above 22000khz and as such they contain no worth at all, this has been proven in signal analysis.

The only reason for using DSD is as a pissing contest regarding sample rates.

They keep it pretty low-key that it’s ‘Android powered’, I suppose they don’t want too many customers making the perfectly reasonable conclusion it’s a 5″ Android with fancy materials for £1300.

How long as Android OS supported for? You’d expect a bit of old-school decade long longevity for that kind of money.

Check out Dankpods on YouTube for reviews of expensive headphones and these stand alone players. It seems there is a market for them if you seriously into your music. I’ve watchs loads of his reviews of stuff I’m actually not even remotely interested in or would ever consider buying. I expect to see one of these on his channel soon

He also does a fair few reviews ripping apart (sometimes literally) old 2000s era MP3 tat

DSD files contain nothing but ultrasonic frequencies/introduced noise above 22000khz and as such they contain no worth at all, this has been proven in signal analysis.

That is true for ‘converted’ media, i.e. media originally recorded in PCM at 24bit 44.1KHz; it’s not true for media recorded in DSD natively, but as I say, there’s very little content of this around for obvious reason.

However, even the PCM converted DSD sound better for reasons explained here:

EDIT – it may be that the reason DSD sounds so much better might not be for the reasons I stated above, it might be for other reasons and maybe there is indeed no ‘additional’ information in the signal.

However, it categorically DOES sound better and everyone I’ve demonstrated this to agree. If you won’t or can’t hear the difference that’s your problem not mine.

It seems there is a market for them if you seriously into your music hi-fidelity sound quality perception

However, even the PCM converted DSD sound better for reasons explained here

I had a watch to see what you thought the reason was. Have I got this right:

1) DSD sounds better because it’s easy to convert DSD to analogue audio.
2) PCM sounds bad because it’s a complex process to convert PCM to analogue audio.
3) PCM -> DSD -> Audio sounds better than PCM -> Audio because DSD -> Audio sounds better than PCM -> Audio.

The chap makes no mention of why it’s easier to convert PCM to DSD than to convert PCM to Audio, although to me that’s implied.

He also doesn’t explain why having the studio convert PCM -> DSD would be better than having your device (which I’m guessing is an expensive audiophile one) convert PCM -> DSD and then to audio.

pretty much any old smartphone would do that though – just run the Plex app, and run a Plex server on your NAS (or whatever).

You don’t even need to do that. My phone can “see” the network drive when on wifi and VLC will play anything that is on it.

It seems there is a market for them if you seriously into your music hi-fidelity sound quality perception you’re a halfwit.

I haven’t read so much psuedoscientific bollocks since that Hi-Fi comparison of hard disks.

However, even the PCM converted DSD sound better for reasons explained here:

A Paul McGown video attempting to describe the conversions between PCM to DSD is nothing but audiophoo for the poorly informed, much like his many hifi products and numerous tweeks available for a small fortune on his website.

I admit he has a degree of knowledge that he unfortunately extrapolates into infomercials shilling his products, but when faced down/questioned by studio engineers/producers who have vastly more experience he bans them from his website/forum.

PCM/DSD analysis here, clearly zero benefit for audio reproduction.

I love listening to music and really would jump on something that gave me an extra few % of enjoyment/resolution but its snake oil, much like the majority of audiophile utter nonsense. Ive got £3k of acoustic treatment in my living room tuned by an Acoustic engineer using REW and measurement mics, Parametric EQ set up through my £3k of Dynaudio LYD 48 Studio monitors/Dynaudio 18s Subwoofer from my Cambridge Audio CXN v2 source and 2tb of files, I use Roon/Tidal/Qoboz/Apple Music for streaming and anything other than cd quality is nothing more than audiophiles engaging in a circle jerk for oneupmanship over how good their hearing is.

CD quality gives 96db of range, which is more than the range of human hearing.

Where’s that gods damned Like Button?

I’ve got a NW-A55L which with a big SD card has 500+ FLAC albums, which is good for where there’s no available data for streaming. It works really well except for the typically Sony interface which has quirks.

CD quality gives 96db of range, which is more than the range of human hearing.

That’s in theory – just based on number of bits.

However, there is a whole world of complexity in the implementation of DACs and the actual Sprurious Free Dynamic Range (SFDR) they achieve varies quite a lot. Years ago my department did lots of work measuring this for Mobile Base Stations as SFDR is important in any DAC process (not just Hifi).

So your 16 bit DAC will achieve less than 96 dB as 96 dB is the theoretical limit and every imperfection (of which there are loads) will reduce that.

If you’re interested you can test DACs by generating 2 and 3 tone test signals and then looking for the mixer products (you basically know where the sprogs will be). If the DAC was perfectly linear they wouldn’t exist, but they’re always there – just a matter of how far down.

SFDR is a big problem for mobile base stations as all your carriers are evenly spaced which means the mixer products always sit in a known channel, so any non linearity in the DAC (or entire transmit chain) pollutes your own channels at source.

EVen if you implemented a perfectly linear DAC the clock source you drive it with, which determines the exact moment each bit is processed, won’t be noise free and the phase noise of the source clock effectively modulates its noise onto the DAC output.

When we measured a DAC we’d have a £10k Rubidium clock source driving the test kit (as you want the measurement error to be less than the device under test).

So no matter how much money you spend, the answer is always less than 96 dB.

I couldn’t read all of that without killing myself.  Going on about fancy ass caps and then having them lie on their side with the longest leads known to man

Anyway, was there not some triangular piece or overpriced nonsense about 8 years ago that tried to nail the same market and died, even with lots of high value names pushing it?

Have to scratch my head a bit on that

In reality, spending £000’s on fancy assed digital music devices and decent wired headphones – how much discernable difference would the average person be able to hear over, say my phone streaming Tidal HQ tracks to Sony WHXM3’s?

Oh cool.

Pretty sure my iRiver would cost less to get a couple of broken buttons sorted and an SD card (or 4) installed though. No touchscreen nonsense either.

Still, nice to see they’ve moved on from proprietary software nonsense at last.

Anyway, was there not some triangular piece or overpriced nonsense about 8 years ago that tried to nail the same market and died,

That’d be Neil Young and his “Pono” audio player, whilst it was a well intentioned approach to driving up the standard of audio reproduction unfortunately the execution of the engineering behind the device left a lot to be desired, I tend to consider it vanity project. Saying that, I do applaud the rise of higher quality audio recording and reproduction that is measurably beneficial, sadly there is also a glut of snake oil sellers (and hifi magazines/reviewers) out there who wilfully shun basic engineering principles and measurement standards whilst stating in flowery prose the sonic differences between such shiny trinkets.

I do applaud the rise of higher quality audio recording and reproduction that is measurably beneficial,

Got to agree.  I really do like listening to tracks on tidal even though I feel like I shouldn’t really be able to hear the difference.  Never got on so well with Spotify but Tidal is different

Sony Walkman? I still have one of these:

That’s an absolute gem of player/recorder, worth keeping hold of especially if it’s working and the heads are still in good condition but if not there’s a good network of folk who will service and test the deck to make sure it’s still in spec – one of the best tape decks available, my entry into decent hifi was back in 1987 as I spent all my Xmas and 15th birthday money to buy a Walkman DC2 and a pair of koss porta pros, absolutely loved that player and it’s probably responsible for my lifelong love of music.

Interesting but hardly a new product – Astell & Kern have been making high end portable players for a while.

As have Sony…this is just the latest model I assume

From what I can remember about DSD, what makes it special for mastering is that it’s 1 bit, making the conversion process to multiple sample rates/bit depths much easier?

I liked my Sony minidisc, loved the way 1 AA battery would last the whole week. Sold it to buy a RIO mp3 player. I should have kept the minidisc.

I had a tiny Aiwa player which was barely bigger than the cassette tape itself – had a tiny lead acid rechargeable battery. Amazing bit of engineering, but died on me and didn’t play anymore.

Just found it: AIWA HS-PX410

https://www.walkman-archive.com/gadgets/series_aiwa_px_line.html

I had one of these…

Had a rechargeable battery and you could clip an AA battery onto the end for extra play time. I loved it. Cost about £100 bitd.