Sony's Walkman Makes Comeback

[mjzee]

TOKYO—Thirty five years after its debut, Sony Corp.'s Walkman is enjoying a little comeback.

But while the original cassette player of 1979 heralded the age of mass-market, portable music, the new $700 Walkman is aimed at premium buyers, as technological advances help more audio-on-the go users head upscale.

The ZX1, as Sony's gadget is called, is in many ways the antithesis of Apple Inc.'s slender iPod, and the Walkman's own svelte predecessors. It has a heavy, bulky body that houses 128 gigabytes of storage for ultra-high-quality music files. Sony says each ZX1 is manually carved from a block of expensive aluminum, which helps reduce noise.

"The message for our designers and engineers was: please create a good product without worrying about the cost," said Kenji Nakada, Sony's sound product planner.

More here:

WSJ

(or Google the article's title "Sony's Walkman Makes Comeback")

[bogdan101]

I'm sure cheap aluminum would sound much worse than expensive aluminum.

[Paradiddle]

Since the circuitry for "ultra-high quality music files" is already in place and it's already "bulky" how about they add an audio input to accept a mic or outboard mic pre so we can really justify the price and make this truly useful across the buying public. So many people have taken to shooting videos on their phones, how about we introduce them to the joys of recording live music? At least as an option. Combine the Sony HD portable recorder with this new-fangled Walkman. Hell, I've still got one of these "Walkman's" lying about:

[7/4]

I haven't turned my datman on in years!

[Paradiddle]

  On 7/21/2014 at 4:20 PM, 7/4 said:

I haven't turned my datman on in years!

Does it fire up? My last version was the PCM-M1. Made some decent recordings with that little box.

Edited July 21, 2014 by Paradiddle

[Scott Dolan]