Hands-on with Sony's £950 high-resolution audio Walkman

07 Jan 2015
Katie Collins

Sony showed off a new high-resolution audio Walkman at CES this week. Costing £949, the ZX2 will be the flagship device of Sony's long-running Walkman range, reinventing the brand as the go-to place for serious audiophiles.

The Walkman boasts a long list of audio credentials. DSEE HX processing recreates crucial high-frequency musical information otherwise lost in compressed sound files. Sony's S-Master HX full digital amplifier processes massive amounts of wide-bandwidth audio data while minimising noise and distortion.

The Walkman is also the first device that supports a Sony technology called LDAC codec, which allows you to play high-resolution audio via Bluetooth. And then of course there's upscaling tech, which converts regular CDs and MP3s to near high-resolution quality.

Can it really justify that very steep price tag though?

WIRED.co.uk went hands-on with the device in Las Vegas to try and work out exactly that.

Katie Collins

Before we even get to the audio, let's talk about the striking look of the thing. The Walkman goes totally against the grain in terms of design trends for portable devices. Instead of being as small as possible, it's large and it has significant heft to it.

The best way to describe how it feels when you hold it is expensive. The leather back against the palm of your hand and the smooth, curved aluminium edges contribute to this, but so does its weight. There's no way you could put it in your jacket pocket and not know it was there.

It's great to have the physical controls running down one side of the rim, as especially in terms of playing, pausing and adjusting the volume. It's unnecessarily fiddly to have to do on a touchscreen when you're on the go. No doubt as a user you'd quickly become accustomed to the size and placement of the buttons, so you wouldn't necessarily even have to take the device out of your pocket to skip track.

The only slight disappointment is that the screen doesn't seem like it's the sharpest. You might argue that screen resolution doesn't matter on an audio device in the same way it does on a smartphone, but we'd argue that at this price is does.

Katie Collins

Inside the Walkman is a long list of components specifically chosen to enhance audio quality. These include an electric double-layer capacitor to smooth out voltage drops and two digital clock sources with dedicated crystal oscillators. There is 128GB of storage, which can be doubled with a microSD card, leaving space for 1,700 high-resolution songs. Battery life is apparently 60 hours on a single charge.

Listening to the Walkman, we flicked back and forth between normal and high-res to compare, and there was a tangible difference. Reports claiming that most people can't tell the difference when it comes to audio quality are made irrelevant by the fact that this device isn't aimed at most people. If you know what you're listening for, then you will appreciate the quality of the audio on this device.

Katie Collins

There's no two ways about it -- this is a luxury product for a niche market who care deeply about music quality and will see the Walkman as something of a status symbol that proves it. It's unlikely any brand but Sony could have pulled this off, but such is the general fondness and nostalgia towards Walkman-branded devices that it might just work.

The Walkman, as we mentioned above, costs a whopping £949, and will go on sale in Europe this spring.