Sony’s new Walkman will cost you more than a MacBook Air

By Rob LeFebvre

This new Android-powered ZX2 Walkman is for serious audiophiles only. Sony’s pushing the device as a high-resolution sound machine, and it’s set a price to match.

$1,119.99 seems a bit much for a portable music player, but I really can’t seem to stop wanting one. The design is gorgeous, with a black matte finish and glorious actual buttons that just beg me to touch it.

The Walkman brand was the one to beat back in the 1980s, with a plethora of portable cassette players in Sony’s line-up, a dominance that only ended sometime in the late 1990s after the advent of the CD and mini disk as the better audio reproduction.

Now, at Las Vegas’ annual electronics trade show, CES, Sony has pulled back the curtain on this expensive beauty. It’s got Bluetooth for wireless headphones and speakers, 128 Gb of internal memory, a micro SD slot, and a battery life of up to 60 hours of playback. There’s a nice touchscreen interface

“The NW- ZX2 supports digital music files up to 192 kHz/24 bit and compatible file formats are MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, AIFF, WAV and ALAC including DSD,” writes Sony in a press release.

Hell, it even has Wi-Fi built in for some reason.

The entire device has been created with the audiophile in mind, says Sony, with gold-plated components, electric double layer capacitors, “thick-film copper-layer PCBs, OFC cables and high-purity lead-free solder. These enable the NW-ZX2 to achieve a higher sound resolution by reducing the impedance.”

You’ll of course need some fantastic headphones or speakers to take full advantage of this kind of sound reproduction, but Sony makes a few of those, as well.

The new Walkman ZX2 should be out this coming Spring, and I cannot wait to get my hot little hands on it, regardless of price.

Source: Sony