Technology

It's rampant click bait. I try not to reward the behavior with clicks, but sometimes I'm genuinely interested in the topic. This is not one of those times.

Then do like I do and downvote posts that have such shit titles

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.

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.

It will sound better than streaming directly from your phone but it's not worth it to most people. The cable conversation is a whole other subject. There are still audiophiles that claim that cables costing upwards of $1000 are worth it and sound better. It blows my mind.

I would just wait for techmoan or crinacle to test it and explain what is what, probably some sort of a cash grab is the correct answer but.. maybe?

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’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.

Hell, even the ability to connect multiples. Instant silent rave box

720 x 1280 pixels. The device runs Android 12 and also gets 64 GB of onboard storage

😂😂😂😂

Wait until people hear about Astell&Kern’s ~$4000 ear buds.

Not for the faint of heart.

MHz refers to the samples per second, not the pitch. CD audio for example is 16-bit/44.1kHz. What that means is there are 16-bits of sampling (audio) taken 44,100 times per second. DSD on the other hand is 1-bit samples taken 11.2 million times per second, this is referred to as DSD256. What that translates to is a digital wave that looks a lot closer to an analog wave than a CD does. It has nothing to do with the frequency of listening in this case.

If you'd like to learn more, check this out.

Yeah the entire article smells like gold plated HDMI cables from Monster, as if that somehow improves the quality of digital signals.

Sony has judiciously used gold across the internals of the NW-ZX707, including its solder and reflow solder elements, to further improve sound localization.

Gold has a higher resistivity than copper. Resistance adds noise. It's probably just for corrosion resistance.

Another reason audiophiles have come to appreciate the NW-ZX707 is something called the vinyl processor that lends the unmistakable character of vinyl discs back to their digital tracks.

So they further distort the sound to replicate lower quality equipment? They're definitely not making it sound more like the original by introducing vinyl artifacts.

This is some serious hobbyist pricing bait, but I can't judge since I've got my own dumb expensive hobbies.

This feature ensures the NW-ZX707 can transform standard MP3 or PCM audio to the ultra-high frequency 11.2 Mhz DSD audio stream.

I think the article is just incorrect. Sony probably means it can just decide .dsf files. And you are confusing 1 bit DSD with 16 bit PCM. The most common DSD format is DSD64 2.8Mhz which is equivalent to 16 bit /176khz, 24 bit/117khz, or 32 bit/ 88.2khz. And the microphones and instruments do work at these high frequencies.

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.

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.

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.

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 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/

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.

They made Walkman CD and MP3 players before this, it's their branch of portable music players.