The Olympics are in full swing in Beijing, but Sony wants you to know that you can bring home a little gold metal of your own in the form of the Walkman NW-WM1ZM2. You don’t have to train for years to get one, but you do need to shell out $3600.
It’s the latest addition to Sony’s High-Resolution Walkman line, which debuted back in 2014.
You could pick one up for about $300 back then. The good news is that you don’t have to shell out twelve times that much for the ostentatious gold WM1ZM2 if you want to immerse yourself in what Sony calls “sublime, nuanced sound.”
You can opt instead for the NW-WM1AM2. It’s priced at a much more reasonable $1300.
Sony says you won’t get quite the same audio experience, however. The WM1ZM2’s gold-plated copper chassis apparently makes the music sound even better than it does coming from the WM1AM2’s workmanlike aluminum body.
So what, exactly, are you getting when you shell out just a little bit more than you would for a pair of iPhone 13 Pro Max 1TB? A quarter of the storage in one of those iPhones, for starters — or 128GB in the case of the more pedestrian WM1AM2. You can, however, add more storage via a micro SD slot.
The top-end WM1ZM2 packs a Kimber Kable to transmit the best possible audio to the Walkman’s balanced headphone jack. Kimber, in case you’re not familiar, has been making ultra-high-end, handcrafted audio cables and components for more than 40 years. By high-end, we’re talking $470 3-foot 3.5mm male-to-male cables.
Both models feature 5-inch full HD touchscreen displays and batteries rated for 30 to 40 hours of FLAC listening. WiFi connectivity comes standard allowing you to stream your high-resolution tunes in addition to playing them back from the internal storage.
Sony may have had its fair share of trouble selling smartphones and laptops over the years, but the company always seems to find a group of consumers willing to line up for its high-end audio products.
via What Hi-Fi? and Input
Once I read Kimber Kable, I knew this was audiophoolery voodoo… AudioScienceReview should review one of these and rip it to shreds for the nonsense they are passing off.
The exploded views are clearly renders but they’ve taken the trouble to show that the -WM2 is milled (presumably from a solid block of copper) but the -AM2 is plain old injection moulded. Nice attention to detail!
But you’re still not getting my money.
“A fool and his money are soon parted.”
I didn’t realize that Sony still made phones.
Actually, other than the PlayStation, I’m not sure what they do still make.
They do make phones but what does that have to do with this article?
TVs, cameras, smartphone camera parts, headphones. Not as much as it once did but with 55% of the image sensor market it actually has more revenue now than it did anytime since 2005.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/SONY/sony/revenue
Sony still makes specialized industrial equipment, cameras, camera lenses, stereo equipment and televisions as well. Most of the Japanese companies have leased their name to Chinese companies to use on televisions while still making their other products themselves but Sony hasn’t done so (although they sold their computer division a few years ago).