Sony has revealed a brand new addition to its Walkman range at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas – and despite boasting the highest quality in ear-pleasing sound the price tag is a rather eye-watering!
Weighing in at £949, the latest in Sony’s longstanding portable audio range – the Walkman ZX2 – offers 128GB of storage for thousands of music files with Micro SD expansion available (as if you’d really need it!) and a wide selection of file formats are compatible including video, with playback up to 33 hours of high quality or 60 hours of MP3 playback from fully charged. Long gone are the days of flipping the tape and changing those double As.
Quality is the key with this Walkman and Sony’s intention is to deliver playback which is as close to the original recording as possible with 24-Bit Hi-Res Audio promising ‘music as the artist intended’.
The ZX2 is actually able to take your crackly old MP3 collection and make it sound glorious thanks to its DSEE HX technology which upgrades the audio to crystal clarity. The internal mechanics, cabling and gold plated chassis inside the Walkman are also engineered for the listener to experience the clearest sound without any interference – the device is literally wired for sound, and promises to be the best sound you’ll hear from portable player. Even the Bluetooth streaming offers enhanced wireless listening experience with 3x the data transmitted.
The Walkman ZX2 comes loaded with Android 4.2 and plenty of sound and software customisation features and includes a 4-inch 854 x 480 touchscreen which dominates most of the front surface with physical function buttons positioned handily along the side of the device. A stylish aluminium finish is not compromised by a useful rubber grip – because of course you wouldn’t want £949 of tech slipping out of your hand and crashing into concrete while you’re strutting to studio quality jams.
Sounds beautiful on paper – but does all this focus on quality justify the cost? Sadly on our budget we guess we’ll never truly know..