It’s 2023 and Sony is launching a new Walkman. Does this device still make sense?

And that’s where Sony comes in. All in black. With the Walkman. No, not with the famous portable cassette player that made a splash in the 80s and 90s of the twentieth century, but with a modern digital audio player, which – according to the manufacturer himself – is to combine “high sound quality with an elegant design”.

The new Walkman from Sony. The company wants to win with sound quality

Let’s face it, the Sony player is not a device for everyone. This is a product aimed at narrow group of recipientswhich high sound quality is more important than the comfort of having one “device for everything”, and that’s what a smartphone has become in recent years.

Exactly that audio quality is to distinguish the Sony NW-A306 player on the background of smartphones. This device is equipped with S-Master HX digital amplifier and DSEE Ultimate (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine)which improves the quality of compressed music from digital audio files using AI algorithms.

walkman Sony

The application will also improve the sound quality reflow solder with an admixture of gold, two clocking circuits, a foil capacitor and a precision audio-grade resistor.

As you can guess, the new Walkman from Sony can easily cope with lossless audio files in FLAC44.1kHz format, and FLAC 96KHz. Full compatibility with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi and the Android system installed on the device will also allow us to play music from all popular streaming services.

When it comes to design, the Japanese focused on simplicity and minimalism. One can even get the impression that the new Walkman refers to the design of the iconic Sony players from several decades ago. The only “modern” element here is a touch screen with a diagonal of 3.6 inches.

Walkman Sony

The manufacturer emphasizes that the built-in battery on a single charge will allow us to listen to music in FLAC 44.1 kHz for 36 hours. In the case of FLAC 96 KHz, it will be 32 hours, and in the case of music from streaming services – 26 hours.

The NW-A306 player will debut on the Polish market in February. We do not know the price of the device yet.

Sony Walkman WM A602 photo: Pter de Wit/Wikimedia Commons/CC

The famous Walkman is over 40 years old

On July 1, 1979, the “Sony Walkman TPS-L2” hit the Japanese market. The device cost 39 thousand. yen, or about $150. Adjusting for inflation, that would be $500 today. Where did the idea for the name come from? It is a derivative of the “Pressman” – a portable voice recorder that Sony launched two years earlier.

Sam Akio Morita, then president of Sony, hated the name “Walkman”. He even asked for it to be changed. He only caved when one of the marketing department employees told him that the company had already launched an advertising campaign for the device, and a possible change of name would involve huge costs.

In the 1980s, the Sony device became a worldwide phenomenon. Everyone wanted him. It has become a symbol of modernity, rebellion and youth lifestyle. It was also thanks to him that in 1983 the sales of cassette tapes for the first time in history exceeded the sales of vinyl.

The Walkman has also become a sociological phenomenon. In 1984, Japanese professor Shuhei Hosokawa coined the term “The Walkman Effect”. In an article published in Popular Music, the scientist suggested that the Sony device cuts off listeners from the outside world, creating a safe comfort zone for them. Two years later, the term “Walkman” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary.

The era of the Walkman ended with the end of the era of cassette tapes. At the turn of the 1980s and 1990s, digital players began to enjoy increasing popularity. CDs pushed cassettes out of the market, just as cassettes pushed vinyl out of the market.