I would love to get this but that price is a bit too steep
I am very upset that I can’t find good midrange players. Either cheap crap or hyper-expensive things like this. My last one broke and I don’t buy the replacement parts solely because I still have hope of finding an appropriate one. For now, I use a perma-offline, degoogled smartphone for this (because I heavily prefer not to use a smartphone in daily life normally), but using a relatively big and heavy brick for a player is VERY inconvenient if you’re used to a small lightweight device.
Am thinking phones are meant to fit that range. DACs they have are usually better than cheap garbage but far from “hi tech stuff”. You can also get a good USB-C DAC and improve the experience.
There are dozens and dozens of options for a music player in all price ranges. Look at the list below for a start.
https://www.head-fi.org/threads/hi-res-portable-daps-comparison-chart-2022.961903/
I feel like the author is pretty clueless when it comes to audiophile grade digital audio players. They’re remarking about the $900 price tag like it’s some kind of high water mark for a device when there are Astell & Kern and iBasso units that cost 2-3x that.
The Sony Walkman devices are consistently well-rated. This is going to be a good player for those looking for a dedicated music device.
Yeah “Costs more than you think” no I think it costs about what I expected for a lossless player. DACs are a feature these days.
There are also used units like the Pioneer XDP-100 which is still good, but the Android bit is slow.
I look forward to Techmoan blowing his money on one of these to do a video.
If we had lemmy money I’d bet against that. I can’t see him bying that.
Get that clickbait title out of here!
It’s basically in the same category as Sony’s robot dog - an electronic device no one will pay for unless they have more money than they know what to do with.
Audiophiles will pay for it. There’s a market out there you’re just not a part of, and this device is very much on the cheaper end of the scale.
How come it’s called Walkman when it doesn’t play cassettes?
The Walkman brand has been attached to lots of over devices by Sony over the years, it just means portable music player, not specifically tape.
Thanks for the explanation, it was just a joke.
They made Walkman CD and MP3 players before this, it’s their branch of portable music players.
When it walk the man the manwalk when the when
I think they would have been a lot better off if they had included a fully functional phone. Who wants to carry around TWO bricks for slightly better audio?
I think the real missed opportunity is that they didn’t create a super hi-fi wireless headphone protocol and absolutely best-ever wireless headphones sell them together with the walkman.
720 x 1280 pixels. The device runs Android 12 and also gets 64 GB of onboard storage
😂😂😂😂
They did. It’s called LDAC. Many would also agree that they make the best headphones and earbuds, I swear by their WH1000s and WF1000s
I made the awful decision to go with Bowers & Wilkins over the Sonys. They sound okay, but the design is absolute garbage. Next time it’s Sony.
I swear by their WH1000s and WF1000s
Its a good thing lots of people do, cause they make my Xperia purchases $250 cheaper. The freebie buds go right to eBay.
Because I imagine it’s for old people sitting around their house
Hell, even the ability to connect multiples. Instant silent rave box
Why is this not more of a thing? I should be able to connect 3 headphones to my iPhone. Is it a limitation of Bluetooth somehow?
Yes
BT is generally a 1:1 secure connection. Very inaccurate description but serves our purpose. BT was originally designed waaay before smartphones as a way of maintaining low power wireless connectivity to stuff like keyboards and mouses.
It’s increased in ability since then, but a lot of the focus has understandably been on increasing the capacity of the ‘host’ of the party rather than the guests. More people can join the party (devices connected to your phone/pc), but they’re doing different activities at different times.
The challenge with audio is they all have to receive the exact same data at the exact same time otherwise humans notice - which the protocol wasn’t really designed for. There’s been some inroads, but it’s a bit of a protocol limit. This is why most BT headsets are a single unit - one receiver (guest), receiving the data then disseminating to its family group. Airpods get around this by having one that actually connects to your phone, then the second one syncs to the first pod. (Someone at the party chatting with a friend elsewhere on the phone, to stretch the analogy)
When you start mixing multiple guests of varying hardware wanting the same thing at the same time with varying latencies from the one host, it can get real messy, and we’re really good at picking up audio discrepancies
I’m the audience for this. I’ve bought previous android portable standalone players and it being a phone is actually a negative.
There are already plenty of good smartphone dacs so there’s no need to make a super high end battery chugging, chunky phone for a niche audience, when most people are just going to use Bluetooth headsets anyway and have a good experience doing so.
Im not just carrying these things around like a phone because the types of headphones I’ve run with these devices are not the type that I would bring with me on a bus or to the store. Portability really doesn’t matter to the target audience of these.
I pull my standalone player out when I want to sit in front of my my garden and listen to an album all the way through. Getting a call or a notification would kill that for me.
have you considered not using a android device for your expensive equipment? FLAC cant even get close to a CD
How is that the case? Lossless is lossless. Not trying to be a smartass, genuinely curious here.
Maybe he’s referring to that even if the source is 44.1/16-bit flac or wave (cd) the entire chain maybe isn’t. Maybe the firmware (android in this case) uses a fixed 48kHz sample rate which to me makes it sound a lot more dull. Maybe the dac in whatever is playing the flac file is objectively or subjectively worse than the one in the cd player (this matters a lot). Maybe the firmware doesn’t allow for exclusive access to the dac to whatever software is playing the flac file. A cd players is comparably simpler to program software for since it’s only made to do one thing which is to play one format at one sample rate and bit rate. That’s it.
Lossless sources doesn’t mean a lossfree playback chain from the software to the dac.
FLAC is the same or better than CD, as long as the source format is supported. I checksummed a CD, then ripped it to FLAC, and burned it back to a new CD and the hashes matched…what more do you want?
FLAC is literally “Lossless” compression. That’s what the L stands for. If you rip data from a CD, compress it with FLAC and then uncompressed that FLAC file you would have a bit for bit exact replica of the CD.
- Separate batteries. Using a device for music and a standard phone drains from the same battery. You could carry a power brick, but then you’re carrying two bricks for worse audio.
- No camera. Certain work assignments won’t allow me to bring a device with a camera into those zones. Or, if I do, the transition process is so intrusive that it’s not worth it.
Those are the only unique characteristics. You can compensate other differences on a phone like adding an additional DAC and/or amp.
I own this.
I’m guessing the author doesn’t have this issue, but the model sold in the US has a volume
limiterlimit on them. My daily headphones aren’t easy to drive, so this was a concern I have that many other people might not care about.I ended up having to import mine to get a device that doesn’t have this enforced.
Edit: Sorry I was clumsy with my words. It’s a limit on volume, since it’s an option for high gain.
I had that problem with a A55 but luckily Mr Walkman has firmware that sorts it.
as far as carrying a standalone audio player goes I’m reminded of my Toshiba gigabeat with rock box installed as the alternative firmware. I loved that thing. I guess I wouldn’t use such a thing now, though, since my phone is pretty good and powerful. But I am still missing a high quality, stand-alone, offline music player for iOS.
Sony is taking advantage of audiophiles’ desire to compulsively spend more money on better measurements with imperceptible improvements. Nothing wrong with that - most audiophiles are self-aware and know that it’s really higher prices that make music sound better. It will be interesting to see what audiophiles say about these new Walkmans.
There are already similarly priced and cheaper alternatives, including a $350 option by Sony, and $800-$1500 options by Astell & Kern. Stand-alone music players aren’t extinct as this writer seems to think.
As an audiophile I would never spend this much because I also know that getting transparent audio is dirt cheap these days and these high end devices often don’t measure well in ways that do matter, for example their output impedance.
There’s a business phone switch owned by many of our customers for which licenses for file-based music-on-hold are no longer available from the manufacturer. An old iPod / Nomad / Zune / etc. fits the bill to connect to its built-in, no-additional-license-required music-on-hold audio port perfectly. It even comes with its own built-in UPS.
audiophiles i know don’t listen to their music while walking. None of them would spend a cent on any portable device.
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It’s very silly that this exists but it’s also cool that it does?
Well… it won’t matter once you listen to music on them with your shitty 20 USD headphones.
Yea, I have found by far the biggest effect for me (and I have to imagine most people) is the speakers / headphones, not the digital processing or even the audio converters.
headphones or speakers can’t add the detail that mp3 (or streaming in whatever format) eliminates. Compare a CD and mp3 of the same track with a decent headphone (or a speaker) and you will hear that compression changes sounds.
but it all depends on what kind of music you listen to. For some of today’s music even laptop speakers are enough 🤷
My point is just that most headphones that are cheap can’t reproduce MP3 quality, so until you get good enough headphones to hear the difference, getting a FLAC of the same song isn’t going to really be noticable.
agreed
Nah come on, bro. You and I both know laptop speakers are trash. Good headphones are a must. I’ve heard so many sounds I’ve never noticed before with good headphones.
yes 😁 yes, but this new vocoder popshit i’ve been hearing from bluetooth boxes in backpacks is good enough for laptop speakers
No no, I use the beats fit pro that are recommended in the article underneath. They actually suck hard, but the review seems to think they’re the second coming. So take all this with a grain of salt.
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It also won’t matter once you take a step outside; slightest ambient noise is enough to kill most of the advantages a high-end source provides.
That depends: proper Shure IEMs usually do a good job covering ambient noise. Somewhere north of 200 USD you usually get proper in ear monitors… but only if it’s from one of the regular professional equipment brands, otherwise you’ll probably pay for design or the name and little else.
Interesting read. Honestly it sounds cool with all the specs underneath the shell. But obviously it’s just not worth unless you have the ear for it. In other words, you’d have to be a sound engineer to really get the most out of something like this.
I have hard time believing that anybody can hear difference with this and good quality phone.
I associate audiophiles for people that think they can hear difference when they pay extra but actually don’t when blind-tested. This seems to be perfect product for them.
Audio engineer here, it’s a trainable skill that takes a long time with comparing audio side-by-side
At to some point you can but after CD-quality you cannot. Did you read the article?
As sound engineer you should know that you use high quality to record but it makes no extra sense after CD-quality to listen.
if listening to music from a “good quality phone” is enough for you, good for you. But why would you need to dis people who are craving for a better sound ?
I am not dissing. Just saying that you propably cannot hear difference in quality with that. The device has properties that do not make sense in listening quality.
They’re trolling on Lemmy, I guess? Haha I don’t feel dissed though, its just communication
Listen to a standard mp3, then listen to the same song as 32/96k FLAC. I bet most people can hear a difference. But no worries if you can’t, its not a big deal
Mp3 is not CD-quality. As sound engineer you should know the difference. MP3 is old lossy format and you are comparing it to loseless.
There is people that can hear those differences in certain corner cases.
Also you are not defining any specs for mp3 but you are giving specs for FLAC. Why?
Can you hear difference between CD-quality and 32/96k FLAC? If you think you can then you are audiophile and not sound engineer.
Oh hunny…I didn’t say an mp3 is CD quality, you assumed that. I gave specs for the FLAC because “standard mp3” has specs; therefore you have two sets of specs to compare, silly goose. I can hear a difference, but that’s because any studio engineer that is worth their money is going to be both.
Because I was talking CD-quality not mp3. Anybody can hear difference between bad mp3 and loseless format. That is not issues.
Mp3 has two differend standards using the same name and at least mpeg-2 supports several frequencies. So there is no ”one mp3”.
Talking about three decades old lossy standard in 2023 is really stupid. There is even better lossy standards around.
With you knowledge I have hard time believing you work as audio engineer.
oh boy everyone will argue about audio specifications again. For the record standard MP3 is fine and is perfectly representative of the recording it did within the bandwidth of human hearing
That depends on which MP3 though. Is it 128kbps? Because that’s dog shit. 192 will sound fine to most. I don’t go below 256 and that’s only if I can’t get 320.
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256 is solid but V0 is the best balance of size and quality for me. I also respect V2 for the smaller but still quality 192kbps VBR files
Anybody using a 30 year old encoder instead of opus really isn’t trying when it comes to lossy audio.
Well damn now I have to AB test some codecs
I should have specified CD-quality audio anyone that’s seen a deep fried jpeg should know why you don’t compress a mp3 too much
