It wouldn’t really be IFA without the launch of a new Sony Walkman. 2016 saw the arrival of the gold-plated NW-WM1Z and although this year’s arrival forgoes any bling, the NW-ZX300 still looks like a serious portable music player.
The player uses Sony’s S-Master HX digital amplifier and supports all flavours of high-res audio from native 11.2MHz DSD to 32-bit/384kHz PCM files. There’s also MQA support, should you require it. Streaming wirelessly to a pair of suitable Bluetooth headphones and you’ll get the added benefit of aptX HD support too.
The Walkman features a balanced output with fully-discrete left and right channels – it can also be used it as a desktop DAC if you’ve got files stored on a PC or Mac.
Design features include an aluminium chassis, special wiring and carefully chosen capacitors and resistors “for more transparent vocals and solid bass notes.”
A matte finish and matte glass screen complete the package – Sony claims “you don’t have to worry about annoying fingerprints obscuring your screen,” which is good news, we think you’ll agree.
Battery life clocks in at around 30 hours and the Sony NW-ZX300 has 64GB of memory, expandable via microSD card.
