Though smartphones can be used to listen to music, they can't compete with high-end music players. Toward the top of that list is Sony's NW-ZX707 Walkman.
It’s rampant click bait. I try not to reward the behavior with clicks, but sometimes I’m genuinely interested in the topic. This is not one of those times.
as far as carrying a standalone audio player goes I’m reminded of my Toshiba gigabeat with rock box installed as the alternative firmware. I loved that thing. I guess I wouldn’t use such a thing now, though, since my phone is pretty good and powerful. But I am still missing a high quality, stand-alone, offline music player for iOS.
Lots of audiophile bullshit pseudoscience words in this- at the end of the day, can I really hear a difference? If so, it’s probably worth it- but if this is just a version of the famous $1000 Denon Ethernet cable, then fuck off right?
There really IS a perceivable difference. When given the right hardware and audio, it is a whole nother world when it comes to clarity, definition, and everything in between.
However, it doesn’t have to be nearly this expensive. I don’t see any real reason for a lot of it to be the price it is just because it has “quality components”
Don’t get me wrong, with analog, the quality of the components are far more important than digital, but it is a logarithmic curve. You can only improve so much before the gains become diminished.
Just to be clear- it very well might be mind blowingly good I’m not passing judgement, I’m just saying that bilking “audiophiles” out of dollars for silly stuff happens every day. Gold plated hdmi cables filled with argon? Come on.
Having not used one of these walkmen yet I can’t say, I was just mentioning that the article had all the buzzwords of a $1000 1 foot gold Ethernet cable, that’s all!
You have a point with HDMI because that’s a digital cable.
Ethernet is also a digital cable.
Cable quality when it comes to digital doesn’t matter, but with analog it is far more sensitive to the quality of the materials used.
The walkmans are fine, I actually have an NW-A306 ($350). To be 100% clear, the other walkmans are PRETTY MUCH the same, you are mostly paying for a better build than anything. It’s a quality device but it isn’t like you really need anything better.
Your money is better spent on speakers or headphones over anything else. You can have the fastest car in the world but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have tires that can handle it.
A digital cable that meets spec can’t be made better by gold plating or other bling. But a sub spec cable or a cable with some aspect degraded by damage or wear or contamination will introduce errors that will force the system to use whatever error correction is built in(such as with tcpip) that will hinder data speed. So, you can have a digital cable that works slower than spec but still “works”. Especially when you are running any sort of significant distance or there is noise such as fromn ac power.
My point is that even with digital connections a better cable can make a difference. Just on the low end not the high end.
Oh yes most definitely. Thank you for clarifying and I 100% agree with that. I have had to deal with that first hand as I work as a network administrator and have had cheap “Cat6” cabling come and be wired right, but used aluminum which not only hindered the speeds but actually made the cable run HOT (probably fine in air but a fire hazard in a wall, this was plenum too).
Bad cable quality is for sure going to hinder performance, but yes, a $1000 gold HDMI cable (scam to begin with because gold wiring isn’t even that expensive) is silly. Funny because that cable is actually worse than standard HDMI cables now because of the current spec (think that $1000 cable was like 1.4 or something)
Yeah excellent points! I also dont have any problem with buying quality because you like quality- that’s a perfectly valid reason. It grinds my gears when companies make up stuff to trick people into thinking something is quality when it’s just marketing buzz and bs. Like plastic sunglasses for $300.
The Walkman looks sexy as hell, and I’d be all over it if that was my thing!
It DOES look pretty sexy, but honestly the vanity of it isn’t even my concern. For the specs it has, $350 is pretty reasonable. My biggest thing about it is the ability to drive higher resistance headphones and also having a separate device to listen to music on!
Sony is definitely one of those brands that has hype from brand name, but the NW-A306 is definitely a good value for the buy. That being said however, a smartphone with an external DAC would suit most people’s needs perfectly fine.
Interesting read. Honestly it sounds cool with all the specs underneath the shell. But obviously it’s just not worth unless you have the ear for it. In other words, you’d have to be a sound engineer to really get the most out of something like this.
I have hard time believing that anybody can hear difference with this and good quality phone.
I associate audiophiles for people that think they can hear difference when they pay extra but actually don’t when blind-tested. This seems to be perfect product for them.
Listen to a standard mp3, then listen to the same song as 32/96k FLAC. I bet most people can hear a difference. But no worries if you can’t, its not a big deal
Oh hunny…I didn’t say an mp3 is CD quality, you assumed that. I gave specs for the FLAC because “standard mp3” has specs; therefore you have two sets of specs to compare, silly goose. I can hear a difference, but that’s because any studio engineer that is worth their money is going to be both.
…None of this is new? Portable, standalone DACs have existed for years. Even DSD isn’t new. What Sony’s charging isn’t even out of line. Fiio charges (IIRC) $1200 for their Android-based player/DAC.
I think they would have been a lot better off if they had included a fully functional phone. Who wants to carry around TWO bricks for slightly better audio?
I think the real missed opportunity is that they didn’t create a super hi-fi wireless headphone protocol and absolutely best-ever wireless headphones sell them together with the walkman.
I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.
There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.
Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.
I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.
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I really hate this kind of headlines
Then do like I do and downvote posts that have such shit titles
It’s rampant click bait. I try not to reward the behavior with clicks, but sometimes I’m genuinely interested in the topic. This is not one of those times.
I look forward to Techmoan blowing his money on one of these to do a video.
If we had lemmy money I’d bet against that. I can’t see him bying that.
as far as carrying a standalone audio player goes I’m reminded of my Toshiba gigabeat with rock box installed as the alternative firmware. I loved that thing. I guess I wouldn’t use such a thing now, though, since my phone is pretty good and powerful. But I am still missing a high quality, stand-alone, offline music player for iOS.
Lots of audiophile bullshit pseudoscience words in this- at the end of the day, can I really hear a difference? If so, it’s probably worth it- but if this is just a version of the famous $1000 Denon Ethernet cable, then fuck off right?
Don’t get it twisted now
There really IS a perceivable difference. When given the right hardware and audio, it is a whole nother world when it comes to clarity, definition, and everything in between.
However, it doesn’t have to be nearly this expensive. I don’t see any real reason for a lot of it to be the price it is just because it has “quality components”
Don’t get me wrong, with analog, the quality of the components are far more important than digital, but it is a logarithmic curve. You can only improve so much before the gains become diminished.
Just to be clear- it very well might be mind blowingly good I’m not passing judgement, I’m just saying that bilking “audiophiles” out of dollars for silly stuff happens every day. Gold plated hdmi cables filled with argon? Come on.
Having not used one of these walkmen yet I can’t say, I was just mentioning that the article had all the buzzwords of a $1000 1 foot gold Ethernet cable, that’s all!
You have a point with HDMI because that’s a digital cable.
Ethernet is also a digital cable.
Cable quality when it comes to digital doesn’t matter, but with analog it is far more sensitive to the quality of the materials used.
The walkmans are fine, I actually have an NW-A306 ($350). To be 100% clear, the other walkmans are PRETTY MUCH the same, you are mostly paying for a better build than anything. It’s a quality device but it isn’t like you really need anything better.
Your money is better spent on speakers or headphones over anything else. You can have the fastest car in the world but it doesn’t mean anything if you don’t have tires that can handle it.
A digital cable that meets spec can’t be made better by gold plating or other bling. But a sub spec cable or a cable with some aspect degraded by damage or wear or contamination will introduce errors that will force the system to use whatever error correction is built in(such as with tcpip) that will hinder data speed. So, you can have a digital cable that works slower than spec but still “works”. Especially when you are running any sort of significant distance or there is noise such as fromn ac power.
My point is that even with digital connections a better cable can make a difference. Just on the low end not the high end.
Oh yes most definitely. Thank you for clarifying and I 100% agree with that. I have had to deal with that first hand as I work as a network administrator and have had cheap “Cat6” cabling come and be wired right, but used aluminum which not only hindered the speeds but actually made the cable run HOT (probably fine in air but a fire hazard in a wall, this was plenum too).
Bad cable quality is for sure going to hinder performance, but yes, a $1000 gold HDMI cable (scam to begin with because gold wiring isn’t even that expensive) is silly. Funny because that cable is actually worse than standard HDMI cables now because of the current spec (think that $1000 cable was like 1.4 or something)
A very informative video on Linus tech tips where they ran a cable tester on lots of different cables. Super interesting.
I always tell people to get the full solid copper core cat6, no stranded, no copper clad.
At least for the important projects.
Yeah excellent points! I also dont have any problem with buying quality because you like quality- that’s a perfectly valid reason. It grinds my gears when companies make up stuff to trick people into thinking something is quality when it’s just marketing buzz and bs. Like plastic sunglasses for $300.
The Walkman looks sexy as hell, and I’d be all over it if that was my thing!
It DOES look pretty sexy, but honestly the vanity of it isn’t even my concern. For the specs it has, $350 is pretty reasonable. My biggest thing about it is the ability to drive higher resistance headphones and also having a separate device to listen to music on!
Sony is definitely one of those brands that has hype from brand name, but the NW-A306 is definitely a good value for the buy. That being said however, a smartphone with an external DAC would suit most people’s needs perfectly fine.
Interesting read. Honestly it sounds cool with all the specs underneath the shell. But obviously it’s just not worth unless you have the ear for it. In other words, you’d have to be a sound engineer to really get the most out of something like this.
I have hard time believing that anybody can hear difference with this and good quality phone.
I associate audiophiles for people that think they can hear difference when they pay extra but actually don’t when blind-tested. This seems to be perfect product for them.
Audio engineer here, it’s a trainable skill that takes a long time with comparing audio side-by-side
At to some point you can but after CD-quality you cannot. Did you read the article?
As sound engineer you should know that you use high quality to record but it makes no extra sense after CD-quality to listen.
Listen to a standard mp3, then listen to the same song as 32/96k FLAC. I bet most people can hear a difference. But no worries if you can’t, its not a big deal
Mp3 is not CD-quality. As sound engineer you should know the difference. MP3 is old lossy format and you are comparing it to loseless.
There is people that can hear those differences in certain corner cases.
Also you are not defining any specs for mp3 but you are giving specs for FLAC. Why?
Can you hear difference between CD-quality and 32/96k FLAC? If you think you can then you are audiophile and not sound engineer.
Oh hunny…I didn’t say an mp3 is CD quality, you assumed that. I gave specs for the FLAC because “standard mp3” has specs; therefore you have two sets of specs to compare, silly goose. I can hear a difference, but that’s because any studio engineer that is worth their money is going to be both.
Because I was talking CD-quality not mp3. Anybody can hear difference between bad mp3 and loseless format. That is not issues.
Mp3 has two differend standards using the same name and at least mpeg-2 supports several frequencies. So there is no ”one mp3”.
Talking about three decades old lossy standard in 2023 is really stupid. There is even better lossy standards around.
With you knowledge I have hard time believing you work as audio engineer.
…None of this is new? Portable, standalone DACs have existed for years. Even DSD isn’t new. What Sony’s charging isn’t even out of line. Fiio charges (IIRC) $1200 for their Android-based player/DAC.
Wait until people hear about Astell&Kern’s ~$4000 ear buds.
Not for the faint of heart.
$4k and they’re not even custom fit‽‽
I’m sorry if I’m paying FOUR THOUSAND REAL DOLLARS they’d better not come with the fucking tips I get with $20 buds.
I think they would have been a lot better off if they had included a fully functional phone. Who wants to carry around TWO bricks for slightly better audio?
I think the real missed opportunity is that they didn’t create a super hi-fi wireless headphone protocol and absolutely best-ever wireless headphones sell them together with the walkman.
I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.
There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.
Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.
I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.
have you considered not using a android device for your expensive equipment? FLAC cant even get close to a CD
😂😂😂😂
Get that clickbait title out of here!
It’s very silly that this exists but it’s also cool that it does?
I would love to get this but that price is a bit too steep
How come it’s called Walkman when it doesn’t play cassettes?
When it walk the man the manwalk when the when