Sony responds to inflation with $3,700 gold-plated 'Walkman' What's old is new again with reboots of classic devices for gaming and music coming out all the time. But that kitsch value comes at a cost, even if the tech is from the current era. Audiophiles want digital music players that leave out cellular components in favor of sound-quality-maximizing gadgets – or at least that's what …
"What Sony is hoping to accomplish with a nearly $4,000 Android Wi-Fi-only phone is less clear."
I know what it is. By adding so much unnecessary crap to this, they're hoping to eliminate any customer who has a clue from their set, thus identifying the set of gullible people with tons of cash. I don't know exactly what they'll do with that set later, but it never hurts to know those people. Other companies will make devices for audiophiles who are less enamored of nonfunctional cosmetic parts and only want the nonfunctional electronic parts.
If the content is even remotely close to a 'watch/listen again' I will always buy the physical media(*). I have seen too much content magically 'disappear' from the on-line streamers. I simply don't trust them.
Not a new issue. Look up Orwell's 1984 and Amazon: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html
* Basically any content better than 'Netflix Originals'.
I don't think that anybody who buys this is interested in music. Whats the next product to get the gold treatment? A solid gold discman - literally a chunk of gold cast and polished into the shape of a discman - just to let everyone know that you are a super rich dick suffering from 80s nostalgia?
... just to let everyone know that you are a super rich dick suffering from 80s nostalgia?
No.
This is for people (?) who desperately need to let others know that they are absolute assholes and have way too much money in their pockets.
The things we see these days.
We are doomed, the gods have evidently forsaken us.
O.
> just to let everyone know that you are a super rich dick suffering from 80s nostalgia?
Close. Well, 80's nostalgia is hip, so there is clearly money to be made around it, even if this contraption doesn't look anywhere like a Sony Walkman™ to me (I had several). But then the hip kids of 2022 have probably never seen one, so that's not a problem.
The thing is, the super rich don't cover themselves in gaudy gold, the only ones who do are clueless nouveau riche, rappers, and generally poor people who want to look rich and influential, but have no clue whatsoever about the codes of the rich and influential.
So this is clearly targeted at the demographic which puts their iPhone in a fake-diamonds-studded case: The tasteless and uneducated show-offs with just enough money to cover themselves in some showy brand, thinking this makes them look "cool" and important.
(See icon.)
I have a feeling somebody has built a cassette player with an MP3 player bolted on. This is exactly the kind of product certain small Chinese companies appear to really love making. I'm often surprised by the strange set of features some designers cobble together, but also I occasionally decide that it's actually useful.
Having made this claim, it was my duty to try a few searches on AliExpress, and I think I have found it after all. Of course with the long and not always correctly translated product descriptions I can't be entirely sure, but it looks like someone has made such a frankenplayer and it can be yours for less than 1% of what this would cost, but probably without gold plating.
No, not this gold-plated excess but a bog standard player.
I don’t want the following on my music player, ever:
- Incoming calls
- Complicated controls
- Reminders
- Adverts
- Unexpected updates
- More adverts
My old iPod (SD) fits the bill perfectly.
It all went so well, and then you had to say "no adverts"... Come on, this is the 21st century, you can't expect your music not to be interrupted every 10 minutes for a short (3-4 minutes) ad break. You have to move with the times.
In the 20th century you were born to be wild, in the 21st you are born to be monetized.
Bad tech claim alert : the case could be made from cardboard, and it would make no difference whatsoever to the sound quality, seeing as it's the D/A converter and other chip-based functions in a digital audio device that determine this, along with the headphones used.
In honour of the sort of people they are trying to sell this to, they should have called it "The Beckham".
I agree that in this case the case material probably doesn't contribute anything to the audio quality.
But presumably there is an amp/preamp stage where the audio, having been converted into the signal for the headphones, is boosted. In which case, you might possibly make a case for enclosure material screening and preventing RF and other sources creating noise in the signal path. Of course you could use internal screening though.
In the year 2000, I was doing product support for Sony 'murica up in canadaland. I got in trouble for helping customers too much.
Imagine my (now emotionless lack of) surprise to find a note buried in their manuals to the tune of 'we are fully aware our CD non-skip functionality is completely useless'.
I wouldn't hold my breath hoping they give a turkey about quality over quantity of money.
I know they recently killed off the iPod brand with the discontinuation of the Touch (i.e. the last remaining model).
But that had more in common with the iPhone, of which it was really just a cut-down model. In truth, the iPod has already been dead in all but name for several years (i.e. since they discontinued the remaining non-Touch models).
Mind you, the Touch was still cheaper than the cheapest iPhone. Only thing was the spec was pretty dated and the base model only came with 32 GB. You don't have to spend £1500 to get an iPhone, but the cheapest SE is still over £400.
For some reason Sony's audio division is much less down to earth than their other departments. They are always releasing products at outrageous prices, making extremely dubious claims about their audio quality. I remember a while back I wanted their car stereo for my Miata, because it was the only one I could find that didn't look like a transformer combined with a storm trooper. I think they wanted 2 grand or something insane? And even if it somehow had performance exceeding audible transparency...it was going to be in a car...
Side note, the gold-plating is dumb. Either you carry it in a case and can't see it, or you don't use a case and the gold plating wears off. Good job guys.
Hey, the gramophiles aren't too bad!
I for one am continually surprised with how good vinyl can reproduce dynamic range when mastered correctly.
It won't ever beat high bitrate high frequency lossless codecs for reproduction, but it's impressive for the time.
And sometimes there's a therapeutic value to literally shuffling through the stack of records, setting down, and vegetating to some Foreigner.
I have and do use a separate device for music on the go.
First, I'm not running down my phone battery, for the now and time it must be replaced due to a distinctly finite lifespan.
Second, even if wifi were available everywhere I like MY music without having to search and find it's not on this subscription, I need another. Or it's not popular enough to be anywhere, or an audio book I own, etc.
Third if I have lossless I want to hear it all, not what is broadcast or current wifi speed allows.
Fourth, I can use whatever headphones I please without adapters or bluetooth, (ef you Apple and now Samsung).
What Sony has built is technically known as a litigation generator. Claiming that the case material has any effect on the sound quality of a digital music player is such an obvious fraud that they should attract plaintiff attorneys like bugs to a porch light.
"Vinyl, which accounted for more than half of music purchases, only accounts for 4.7 percent when including streaming."
Or in other words, physical sales are miniscule (but they'd been in free fall since the 1970s anyway), essentially filling a "novelty" or "nostalgia" category - which is exactly what the Ikea "turntable" is
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