Sony launches new Walkman - but it'll cost you £949

When it comes to portable music, smartphones have taken over. But Sony refuses to give up the fight and hopes that its new Walkman will win people over with high-quality audio and a 60-hour battery life - it's just a shame about the price

     
                                           

The iPod took the world by storm in 2001 and cemented digital files as the future of music, pushing CDs into obsolescence. Between then and now smartphones - along with cameras - consumed MP3 players into their ever-growing range of features. Rather than carrying three sepearate devices we now have just one.

Sony never quite accepted this, and steadily released standalone music players which never sold in the huge numbers enjoyed by the big smartphone models. Last night, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, it released a high-definition audio player which it hopes will finally win the public over by offering something that smartphones don't - but it won't come cheap.

The original cassette Walkman was launched in 1979 and around 220m were sold before the brand was virtually phased out. The company's new device features the same Walkman branding but, typically for Sony, the NW-ZX2 doesn’t have a very catchy model name.

It will, however, offer much higher quality music than most of us have become used to listening to on our phones. Rather than lossy MP3s it will use the LDAC codec. This high quality audio will require far more storage space, with each song taking up 150MB. To accommodate this the Walkman will have 128GB of memory, upgradable to 256GB with an optional microSD card.

It will also have a battery life of 60 hours, so we won’t be stuck for something to listen to once our smartphones run out of juice.

The new Walkman NW-ZX2 will go on sale in Europe in the Spring and the company appears to be taking pre-orders for a staggering £949, which would tally with the announce US price of $1,199.99.

So what do you get for the money? A stiff gold-plated copper chassis as well as electronics designed to reduce unwanted noise, which are connected with special high-purity solder and low-resistance cables (the science of which we have touched on briefly before).

In terms of software you get Android 4.2, so you can also play videos and download games from the Google Play store.

Sony claims that It’s the “musical equivalent of having a veil removed from your ears” and recommends on its website that it be paired with a USB headphone amplifier for £719 and a set of MDR0Z7 headphones for £549, taking the total cost to £2,217.