Does Anyone Need a Walkman in 2023?

Alright, these are our first impressions of the new Walkman. We have the big name NW nwzx 707, let's call it 707. I think it's the last one. Oh, that's a good name. It's not top of the line, no, but it comes at a price. as one, it's definitely expensive, so what's up? We've unpacked it, we've put it away for five minutes, I think that's enough time for a first impression, it's a beefy, beefy guy, it's beefy, it's thick, I mean, I'm just using this as an Android device. I am quite disappointed by this which costs almost a thousand dollars.

The screen is not the most responsive. Yeah, just trying to open YouTube and scrolling through it was nervous. Yeah I think charging 900 for something that only has 64 gigabytes of internal storage

does

n't come with an SD card uh it has a choppy touch screen when we unpacked it there was no link on the USBC oh yeah it was like floating I found that to be like a really strange choice, honestly it was one of the saddest unboxing experiences I have ever experienced, yes it really was, there are so many questions to answer, should we, should we start googling, come on I love you. close your eyes and imagine 900 new Android devices launching in

2023

and think about all the other flagship Android devices that came out last year and what they bring to the table in terms of hardware performance and overall usability now open. them and hold on to that thought the Sony Walkman is not meant to replace your smartphone, right?

It

does

not have a SIM card. Support Trader e-sim doesn't even have built-in speakers, but for nine hundred dollars and especially from a company like Sony, known for making excellent hardware, you would expect a premium experience all around. Well, that's not what we have here and pretty much every facet of the experience outside of the audio capability. First of all, this Walkman is new, less than two months old. and runs Android 12. The older version, well, there are a few factors that could typically result in a new Android device shipping with an older version. It's a startup like no other that has a relatively smaller team that can't. working on software updates at the same pace as established brands or the Android variant in question is heavily modified and takes a while to optimize for new software.

Two, the device is launched about a month after the release of the new version of Android. The Walkman doesn't meet any of those criteria, and while it's not necessarily a deal-breaker that it doesn't run Android 13, it's a bit confusing. The only notable audio-specific feature found with Android 13 is spatial audio and that would have been great. Try it here, but who knows when we'll be able to try it on the Walkman. I will say that the hardware on the Walkman is solid, it feels good in the hand with this soft touch material on the back and the physical buttons.

The sides are nice and tactile, but I'm not sure what big purpose they serve besides aesthetic flair. Personally, I've never used any of the media controls, literally, just the power button and the volume up and down buttons, and let's talk about them. Sony is known to have very capable displays on devices at this price; in fact, its entire current lineup of smartphones features HDR OLED panels. This Walkman uses a 720p TFT panel again, you won't buy it more for the screen than the audio. experience, but this has to be the worst screen on an Android device of this price I've come across and no one is asking for a 120 hertz 4K panel, but a 720p TFT screen feels like I'm using a Nexus 5. and I hate using that analogy because I actually love the Nexus 5 as a device in general, the

walkman

is powered by the Snapdragon 665 which is a CPU found in many low to mid-range smartphones such as the Moto G, budget Oppo devices, TCL phones .

Etc., and they certainly may feel like they're aware of this hidden feature in the developer settings of all Android phones that allows them to make the phone feel a little faster by shortening all the animations they'll probably want to do. That's with the Walkman, because this is certainly not the smoothest Android device I've ever tried, opening apps doesn't take long and I wouldn't describe the experience as slow, but it's definitely a little slow and I understand it like the 900. Paying for this is not It's to get the best Android experience possible, but for what it costs you should at least get a good one, but I think the worst thing about the Walkman experience as an Android device is definitely the battery life.

To try this for the first time and I played a bunch of 24-bit Hi-Res Audio Flack files that I loaded onto the SD card, so it was only streamed locally, no network required and I listened to about two and a half hours to the end . In the end I had about 20 battery life left after starting with a practically full battery, which is crazy. I was using two apps to test Power Amp streaming and the built-in Sony music player and read a little blurb online about how battery life can become 40 percent shorter with the high-resolution streaming option on setting enabled, which it was during the time I used it, but this is a hi-res audio streaming device, isn't it?

Wouldn't you want the highest audio quality possible when using your Walkman 900 that can't really do anything other than play high resolution audio I just don't get it but I do L battery life L software performance L Android experience variants on general, do you mean Dak because yes, miles from the Sony Walkman? It supports the Bluetooth ldac codec. Thanks for pointing it out. A big difference between the old days when you could just plug your headphones into your iPod Classic and today is the proliferation of Bluetooth headphones on the market, whereas you can just plug in a pair. of headphones on the Walkman, which Ellis will talk about later, there are so many people using wireless headphones now that Sony just couldn't ignore them, but how does audio work over Bluetooth?

This is where Bluetooth codecs come in. Bluetooth itself has a pretty limited data transmission capability, so you can't just send an entire file to your headphones from your source device; you have to do it little by little and we do it using a compression codex to make it more efficient, so it does it by removing information. which the codec considers unimportant generally at high levels, so you see bit rates written everywhere, for example 256 kilobits per second, the lower the kbps or kilobits per second, the more information has been removed from the archive. Does this mean it sounds worse, not necessarily, these codecs are quite intelligent and the information that is removed is barely perceptible to the human ear.

Now I say barely noticeable because some people say they can hear the difference, but I'll let everyone fight for that in the comments, there's even a quote from an Apple engineer saying that the bitrate of AAC, which is the Bluetooth codec that Apple devices use, it is not the limiting factor for sound quality on Bluetooth devices. That's why Apple devices like airpods and earpods Max still only use AAC. and a lot of people think they sound great because Apple does a lot of things behind the scenes with computational audio and all this stuff to make it sound good, but the Bluetooth AAC codec is what transfers the music from The Source device to the headphones, so As Miles mentioned, the Walkman is a new Android device and like most Android devices you can go to settings and find Bluetooth codecs that are compatible with it, but what exactly is a Bluetooth codec?

So I like to think of it as a language. So if you're trying to communicate with someone who doesn't speak the same language, you can probably get by and get information using hand gestures or your limited vocabulary knowledge, like where the bathroom is, but now imagine you speak the same language as that person. person you can now have full conversations you can talk all day talk about whatever you want that's how I like to think about the Bluetooth codex if your headphones and your source device in this case the Walkman have the same codec compatibility they can send data at faster speeds highs, so like all Bluetooth devices this Walkman has SBC compatibility which is the standard codec, it is lower quality but reliable, any pair of bluetooth headphones will work with this thanks to SBC, but the Walkman also has AAC aptx aptx HD. mqa codec and sony zone ldac I guess people who create codecs like acronyms, but all these differences in the codex are very small and with this particular Walkman it's not even a big deal because it has something called dsee ultimate that improves the level low. bitrate audio with AI, we did some super complex and totally unscientific ab tests with everyone here at the studio and spoiler alert, it's really hard to tell the difference in sound quality regardless of what codec you're using, so that the Sony Walkman has this Sony Walkman. two headphone jacks, it has a regular 3.5 millimeter mini-jack and also a 4.4 millimeter balanced jack, so using the Sony Walkman's wired headphones gives you access to some of the most advanced DSP features involving some digital signal processing, but before we can dive in.

The ones I want to talk about a little bit, like what high resolution audio is and how digital audio works, so let's start with a sound wave. We all know what a sound wave looks like, how would a computer record this wave? How would you store this wave in your computer's brain? The first thing you'll do is choose some type of time range for this example. Let's draw that interval with these kind of green dots at the bottom of the It does this by selecting a number and then aligning the y-axis 0 with that number, in this case let's use 15.

So this wave is going to have a height value in any given sample somewhere between 0 and 15. so let's line up our points with our wave and what happens when we draw a new curve that connects them well, we get something that looks like the original wave but is not exactly precise, so how could we make this more precise? Well, we could increase the intervolic time that we are sampling with or we could increase the number of steps where we have options to sample, doing both will give us a wave that is much more accurate than our original wave and that is the essence of doing that the audio has a higher resolution, so now that we know what high resolution audio is and how it works, how it sounds really good, so I decided to put together some evidence, these are not scientific evidence, they are not benchmarks, but you know, we wanted to create as objective a listening environment as possible so that studio members could subjectively decide if they liked the way this high-resolution audio sounds, so I'm going to start doing some testing and see what happens when I record DSD remastered audio of this thing and this thing and I'll see if you know there's any detectable difference worth noticing or if 192 is not even high resolution is enough, we have to try a lot of things to make sure this works, so that when the tests were really blatant just when we were comparing a high resolution file coming out of the beautiful preamps inside the Sony Walkman remastered in a DSD format and we'll get to all that verbiage later compared to an iPod Classic playing an AAC file of 256 kilobytes per second coming from micro preamps from 15 years ago, you know, the difference is pretty clear, practically the entire studio was able to identify which version the Walkman was and they said conclusively that they liked that one better version they said had more depth you could hear the feeling of all the musicians playing and with instruments as symbols it made a big difference in the level of clarity when we tried a song like Helena by My Chemical Romance, which is super dense, there is a lot of distortion, There's not much dynamics in the mix, people couldn't really tell the difference between a high resolution version. of the Walkman versus a hi-res version coming from an iPhone, specifically my iPhone 12 mini with the lightning to headphone adapter attached, one of the coolest features built into the Walkman is something called dsee ultimate, which is supposed to be like a improvement. engine that takes low resolution audio and converts it to high resolution audio.

I did a lot of research on this feature and had a lot of trouble figuring out how it actually works, which is why a lot of Sony's documentation feels like a black box which is nice. just like the sound, theAI makes the sound louder. The first thing we tried was an old Jacob Collier arrangement of Pure Imagination. Most people couldn't tell the difference between the enhanced version of this and the non-enhanced version of this. Personally, I heard a touch more dynamic uniformity and clarity at around 500 Hertz compared to the upgraded version, but that's like a really subtle difference that I don't think changes the nature of listening to it and is something that I think is just like a unconditional audio. the professional would even notice, let alone have a subjective opinion on what was said, although I couldn't say that this is clearly exclusive or clearly low resolution, they just sounded a little different and, last but not least, the test ldac again. like half the studio could actually hear the difference, we used the sacrifice of the weekend for this one and for me the biggest difference was things like the snare, those mid frequencies, you know, between 900 and 1500 Hertz, they really picked up a lot of distortion when they were using a standard Bluetooth connection which I don't think was the case with the ldac DSD is a very cool feature that has been in the audio technology world for I think over 10 years but hasn't really done a great entry into the consumer market.

Basically the way it works is that instead of sampling audio using many bits tens of thousands of times per second, you're actually sampling one bit millions of times per second, it's almost like converting audio into this hyper-fast Morse code, some people I think DSD has more punch and is more dynamic, but I personally found it to be the feature that has the least impact on the sound of anything built into the Walkman if you're a mastering engineer for a major label and it's part of your job to be personally responsible. for every piece of a recording or file you send to a client and get paid millions of dollars to do it, then this device makes sense if you're someone else.

I don't know, man, I just don't know. Can. I don't see myself recommending this to

anyone

, it's very expensive, all the features in it, you know, you can get on an see this. my air pods and my iphone and apple music call me a bad audio file, call me an apple shill, do what you want, but that's my opinion, as someone who really loves music and listens to music all the time I just don't see this really improving my listening, other than being kind of a fun novelty for a bit of baby Walkman. I want to like you, you sound great, your voice is beautiful, but there's a lot of extra baggage, you know?

I just don't see myself saying yes, um. If it's up to me, you won't go to the Hollywood Walkman. You have unique talents. There are things about you that make me feel like you're trying, but frankly, you suck. My life as music. An enthusiast wouldn't change in the slightest if he never saw you again, and although I wish you the best, for me it will be a no. Walkman, you sound great, I mean you have some features that no one else really has, like mqa and DSE ultimate. but at the end of the day we booted into Old Nexus 5 and it had a lot of the same audio codecs so as far as wireless goes I don't think you have what it takes, it'll be a no for me dog.

There you go hey you're not going to Hollywood bro but for everyone watching leave a comment below what you like or don't like about the Sony Walkman and why it should or shouldn't have come to Hollywood if you enjoyed this video please subscribe . For future content like this, give it a like if you liked it and we'll talk to you next time, bye.