Sony's Signature Walkman and Headphones Are $5,500 of Ridiculous (theverge.com) 99
Vlad Savov, writing for The Verge: Like a grand old dinosaur that's being left behind by the evolution of the tech industry, Sony is in desperate recovery mode here at IFA. The company has new phones, a rather nice pair of noise-canceling headphones, the imminent PS VR, and... a truly outlandish combo of music player and headphones that costs a mighty $5,499.98. I guess there had to be some outlet for Sony's classic wild-eyed grandeur. Sony's new Signature audio series consists of the gold-plated NW-WM1Z Walkman, which weighs in at 455g (1lb) and $3,200, the $2,300 MDR-Z1R closed-back headphones, and a desktop headphone amp whose price I haven't even dared to look up. First impressions? The portable media player barely qualifies to be called portable. This new 256GB Walkman glints beautifully under IFA's bright lights, and its hefty case is machined to a perfect finish, but its weight is overwhelming. I simultaneously love it for its looks and hate it for its impracticality. Typical Sony, then!
You're not supposed to buy this (Score:5, Insightful)
You're supposed to marvel and stare in awe while you buy the 200-dollar-value setup for 500 bucks and consider it cheap, for you have seen the one that costs 5000.
Plutonomy, remember that? (Score:2)
http://politicalgates.blogspot... [blogspot.com.br]
Is happening.
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And it's breaking our economy's back.
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Read the GP's post again. There IS no $500 setup. ;)
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Or rather, there is no $500-value setup.
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No, it's not for normal people, people who care about audio quality, or tech people. Sony merely created a player to cater to the audiophools with more money than sense.
I mean, Apple could've done that with their iPods and iPhones (and indeed, there are companies blinging up said devices and selling them for 5 figures, too).
And you can buy the same for less from many other companies...
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I mean, Apple could've done that with their iPods and iPhones
How iQuaint, they did it with the iWatch because they're iProgressive. Wasn't it like 10k a pop and basically exactly the same as the others but shinier?
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Is that including or excluding the magic rubble [machinadynamica.com]?
At that price.... (Score:2)
... it better have tubes and the internal wiring better be from the people who make Monster cables look cheap [most-expensive.com].
Either Sony is an idiot or this is the "top of the line steak they never plan to sell" that makes the "real" most-expensive item look affordable [jeremysaid.com].
Efficiency argument (Score:1)
I've seen a lot of arguments from audiophiles that amount to "I like the sound of tubes and neither solid-state analog nor digital can give me what I want."
This is of course mathematically bogus, so I assume they mean either that their ears are so good that good-enough solid-state equipment is either too expensive or not is not commercially available.
I think yours is the first time I've seen someone advocate for tubes based on electrical efficiency. It's an interesting argument, but with electricity runnin
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What's that? You don't have space for the 600 pound 4 foot wide cabinets that are required for that kind of efficiency?
Too bad.
Not very efficient in terms of space and storage then is it?
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Tubes are linear amplifiers over their operating range, transistors are not.
When you understand why that matters, we can start the discussion. Hint: Start with the word heterodyne.
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Which matters for things like radio transmitters, where you need big power in the MHz range.
For audio amplifiers, transistors are king.
Re:Tubes? (Score:2)
Tubes are linear amplifiers over their operating range, transistors are not.
Pentodes and FETs (mostly mosfet, power JFets are seriously exotic, though they do exist) have very similar curves. Neither are linear in the slightest.
With solid state amps, you can get immense gains, which when you use them to close a feedback loop gives you very high linearity. See, for example, any vaguely modern OpAmp.
These days of course, you can make the entire signal chain digital right to the loudspeaker itself (or if you c
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Let me help you out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Note the linear part of the gain charts for all control grid voltages. That's where you run a tube to build a good audio amp.
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Let me help you out
Oh go on, this should be interesting. It's not like I ever do any analogue electronics or anything.
Note the linear part of the gain charts for all control grid voltages.
You realise that graph is almost identical to what a FET of either topology will give you, right? I see you completely ignored my comments about feedback e.g. in op-amps and of course the class D output stage.
Both of those will give you far, far higher linearity than what's easily achievable with valves.
So, tell me this,
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I didn't think anyone bought a valve (tube) amp for its linearity, but rather for how it distorts. At least my guitarist friends want valve amps for how they distort.
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Guitarists want a certain type of distortion. Some want tube, some want solid state.
But listeners of recorded music mostly want flat frequency response (leaving out the kids and their boom).
Tube amps are better.
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You're right, they don't. Tubes have a nice mode of distortion which is hard to replicate correctly. In terms of every measure of reproduction accuracy, modern semiconductor audio amps perform better.
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Yes, like vacuum tubes, and yes, I was poking fun at audiophiles who insist on tubes because they supposedly have a "sound" that solid-state can't perfectly emulate.
Even where they are *technically* correct, the fact is that I've never heard of anyone whose ear is good enough that a sufficiently-well-designed (and costly) solid-state system can't emulate the sound of a tube system well enough to fool them in a blind test.
Having said that, there's a lot of sound equipment out there - both digital and analog
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Some use a lot of effects, others actually use very few.
Modern digital circuits can approximate the tube sound, but it's actually fairly complex in the case of guitar. In a regular old amp, you can get by with having a huge headroom so the transistors never overload. In a guitar, overloading the amp is part of the sound. Transistors and tubes behave very differently under those conditions. It just happens that the overload characteristics of a tube is much more pleasing to the ear than the characteristics o
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Part of the reason why a 100W tube guitar amp can play louder than a 100W solid state guitar amp is that the power rating is the maximum clean power the amp can provide. But of course tube amps are regularly overloaded on purpose and the distortion sounds great, so you're getting a lot more power out of it. If you try to do that with a solid state amp, it sounds like shit. So you need to overprovision a solid state amp to get the same results as a tube amp, even though the output rating is the same, for cle
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Because nothing says dinosaur (Score:1)
like massively outselling the competition in the console wars, while preparing to launch the cheapest and most accessible dedicated VR headset on the market.
(Not a sony shill, just hate the verge)
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Assuming you're not a troll
http://www.hngn.com/articles/175002/20160201/ps4-outsells-xbox-one-89-ea-executive-reveals-sales-figures.htm
But he liked the other $4K and $55K headphones? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: But he liked the other $4K and $55K headphones (Score:1)
the reviewer (Vlad Savov) is based in Europe, and Sennheiser is from Germany and Focal is from France. And Sony is (duh) from Japan.
Or maybe the Japanese still haven't figured out to make speakers and headphones that actually sound good?
Re: But he liked the other $4K and $55K headphones (Score:5, Funny)
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Re: But he liked the other $4K and $55K headphone (Score:2)
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Sony and AT studio monitors (as in speakers, not headphones)? Bitch, please.
In the studio monitor world, it's all about JBL, Dynaudio, Neumann, Yamaha, Adam Audio, Eve Audio, ATC, PMC, Focal, Opal and a bunch of other brands that Sony and AT can't even come close to touching on sound quality.
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You're talking about a country where the latest trend is for audiophiles to install their own utility poles with custom transformers [gizmodo.com] to isolate their equipment from noise generated from neighboring houses.
So a country full of retarded audiophiles who have no idea what they are doing, and have never heard of a AC->DC transformers that are in all electronics.
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I completely agree about these ePenis reviews -- they are more about bragging how stupid they are about how much money the wasted then actual technical specs:
* Where is the double blind study?
* What's the SNR on them?
* The THD % ??
You know, the stuff that actually matters.
I like Headphone Reviews [headphonereviews.org] because you get a more realistic picture instead of some shill promoting a specific brand.
do a comparison (Score:2)
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Fry: Wouldn't a solid gold fiddle weigh hundreds of pounds and sound crummy?
Robot Devil: Well, it's mostly for show.
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I looked at the page. Got half way down. Decided all of the "creators" look like total cunts. Not for me then.
I got as far as the beatles reference then decided I was out.
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Ah, boy. It never ends, here.
There is something to be said for directional cables, though they're not common: In some situations, using a shielded twisted pair between RCA jacks with the shield grounded at only one end can improve noise immunity.
Never had noise on an audio system? Well, good. If you had, you'd be looking for solutions.
That said, I've got a $8k CD player plugged into a $4k receiver in my living room. Does this mean that I listen to the equipment instead of the music? Naaah, it just mea
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I've got a $8k CD player plugged into a $4k receiver in my living room
Emphasis mine. Hence why he said it would make perfect financial sense to sell it.
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Sorry to say, but he didn't spend $12k.
I've got a $8k CD player plugged into a $4k receiver in my living room
Emphasis mine. Hence why he said it would make perfect financial sense to sell it.
Well as he hasn't he obviously either a) think it sounds better enough to keep around or b) doesn't need the $6-10k he might get. In either case he's got all the prerequisites for an audiophool as they've been calling them in this thread.
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Don't knock it: "oxygen-free copper" is a "thing" once you realise that as far as elements are concerned there's a bit of everything in everything (mum jokes aside). So it's perfectly possible to make a batch of copper with less oxygen than another batch, and there are purity grades that specifically address this. But the key point is whether oxygen in the copper changes the electrical characteristics in any meaningful way...and the general consensus [wikipedia.org] is that it doesn't.
---
NotAPK
Re:A solid block of oxygen-free copper (Score:2)
and the general consensus is that it doesn't.
My living room is hydrogen filled and pressurised to 250 Bar, so it matters to me!
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Sounds like the complete opposite of a living room. More like a crushing suffocation room.
Yes, quite. Oxygen free copper matters in such circumstances because the hydrogen diffuses in and strips oxygen from the copper oxide inclusions, forming steam which forces the crystals apart at the grain boundaries causing weakening, embrittlement and cracking. The highest grades of oxygen free copper have a minimum specified electrical conductivity slightly above that of standard grade copper, though in practice, sta
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Love it! My initial thought was that 250bar of H2 may start to stabilise copper hydride and the whole block would disintegrate. But I just thumbed through my copy of Barin [amazon.com] and note that CuH is not listed. The Wikipedia page [wikipedia.org] is actually pretty helpful, and I notice there that copper is stable in hydrogen all the way up to 50GPa, so absolutely no problems at 250bar.
Sony had MP3 Walkman's for quite a while (Score:1)
They don't cost much, have great battery life and, oh my goodness, getting music on them is as simply as copying files to a USB stick.
https://www.amazon.com/Sony-NW... [amazon.com]
Oh, I guess I got the "not practical" part. It's soo not practical to NOT have to install piece of crap like iTunes to do basic operations with your music player.
There's a proven market for these (Score:2)
This product will be snapped up by those people who insist that magic Monster Cable dust comes out of headphone jacks that Bluetooth can't touch.
Sony's always done this (Score:3)
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Some would argue that the Faberge Egg demonstrates your wealthyness more effectively, is pleasing to look at as a work of art, and can be converted back to money more efficiently than the headphones.
Obligatory The Onion clip (Score:3)
Yes, it's not completely applicable, but still classic and cathartic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
gun headsets much more effective than nc headsets (Score:1)
I've used bose and other rands of noise cancelling headsets.
They are a pale shadow of the performance I get with a $27 full ear covering gun headset combined with inexpensive $17 earbuds. On airplanes the difference is night and day.
hefty price for the "no crap" version (Score:2)
They never gonna be out of the woods.... (Score:1)
A walkman with outrighteous weight and a headphone costing $5k. Oh yeah, Make like 100 limited edition of those... and there will be about 20 millionaires in world that would buy them... Leave the other 80 in stock and wait 60 years to turn them into antiques selling for 3 times the original price. I bet if Sony eventually goes bankrupt, the set may be worth 4 times the original price instead of 3....