Sony has bolstered its high-end music player arsenal with the striking NWZ-ZX1, though with a price of $700 and a rather bulky frame, it’s hard to see at first glance where its appeal lies. It’s official – Sony is once again back in the Walkman game and delivering the goods like it always did. It’s […]
Sony has bolstered its high-end music player arsenal with the striking NWZ-ZX1, though with a price of $700 and a rather bulky frame, it’s hard to see at first glance where its appeal lies.
It’s official – Sony is once again back in the Walkman game and delivering the goods like it always did. It’s been almost forty years since the first Sony Walkman totally revolutionized the way we look at music on the move, going on to become the defining gadget of the 80s and becoming an iconic status symbol in its own right.
Fast forward a few decades and we’re once again being given something of a taste of the past with the new Sony NWZ-ZX1. Not nearly as catchy title-wise, but it’s every inch a Walkman for the 21st century.
The only difference being that it doesn’t play cassettes…and it costs a painful $700 to buy.
What’s the appeal of the new Walkman? Well, it’s hard to put your finger on at first as it’s too expensive, too bulky, too heavy and generally too niche to be any kind of rival for the iPod. Nonetheless, it’s chalked up some pretty good sales in its native Japan and has also whet the whistles of a fair few others across Europe – it hasn’t seen the light of day in the US yet and we’re not sure if it ever will.
So just to reiterate, it’s more expensive than the iPod by hundreds of dollars, it’s way bigger and it’s much heavier too, so what’s the point?
Simple really – it’s one of the most advanced and capable dedicated audio players of its kind ever launched. It supports 24-bit, 192kHz Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC) audio files, which is pretty much the gold standard for digital audio. It also has a full 128GB of storage space, which towers over most rival devices of its kind. And according to Sony, the case of the thing is hand-carved from a single lump of aluminum and delivers unprecedented noise-cancelling.
It’s hard not to be a little disappointed by the touchscreen however – the 4-inch panel delivers no more than 854 x 480 pixels. As such, videos and photographs don’t exactly look mind-blowing, but at the same time they’re not what the NWZ-ZX1 was built for.
So the long story short is that if you take your music VERY seriously, you’ll totally get the idea of the NWZ-ZX1.
Otherwise, you’ll wonder where the hell your $700 went.
