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Several sites have articles about Sony Electronics's forthcoming "Signature Series" of audio equipment. It is to consist of the MDR-Z1R headphones, the TA-ZH1ES headphone amplifier, and two Walkman portable audio players.
The NW-WM1A player will have an aluminium casing and a recommended selling price of $1,200. The NW-WM1Z will have a casing of gold-plated "oxygen-free" (according to the press release) copper and is to sell for $3,200 (according to the press release). They will weigh 267 grams and 454 grams (0.589 pounds and 1.00 pounds). They will be capable of playing Direct Stream Digital and pulse code modulated audio files. They will have touch screens, buttons and dual headphone jacks.
The headphones, at a suggested retail price of $2300, will have balanced cabling, a 4.4 mm connector, a titanium head band, and 120 kHz response.
The amplifier, at $2200, will have balanced and unbalanced outputs.
Links:
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:23AM
Eh, in the grand scheme of things, with 10s of thousands of dollar cables and what not, these are small potatoes in the realm of "boutique" audio gear.
The big question is how well will they perform compared to gear in a similar price range, and more importantly how well they compare to best buys in the mere mortal range of gear.
While the SAE (techmoan- that was an interesting piece) was really well conceived, technology marches forward and we have solid-state capacitors, carbon fiber drivers, and direct digital amplifiers.
The very best of the gear made now is a pretty big improvement from the gear made in the 80s (and probably as durable). The question is did Sony do the engineering to make these best of the best (they have the resources and engineering to make the very best in the world), or are they selling buzzwords to an unsuspecting public.
Wait and see.
(Score: 3, Informative) by tonyPick on Saturday September 03 2016, @10:20AM
Given from the TFA they're saying this has support for:
The obvious answer is clearly "buzzwords" - otherwise they wouldn't be touting literally imperceptible spec bulletpoints as an "advantage". Given the entire physical range of everyday hearing in adults can basically be covered in 16b/44.1kHz then this is like trying to sell an expensive television by advertising that it has a display output covering Infrared and X-Rays. That's before we get onto the fact that "only" 24bit resolution gives you a massive 144dB range.
At this point, if you're pushing rubbish like that then the signs are that they won't actually be any better than a standard higher end music player (but presumably they'll be the must have fashion accessory).
On a side note: The sad fact is that even the range just above 22K has become a dumping ground for electrical noise, from PC PSU's to Fluro tubes, it's a swamp of whistling crap up there. Forget music, anyone who is in the (teeny) tiny minority of people even *close* to being able to hear sounds up around the 20K mark is more likely to be spending time with earplugs in..
(And seriously, if you're claiming to hear a difference at 384kHz you're claiming to hear frequency components at up to 192kHz - that's the lower end of the *LF radio spectrum* FFS. You'd probably be distracted by the nationwide Low Frequency radio time signals, and those voices in your head might actually be shipping broadcasts.)
[And before anyone gets picky: Of course if you're actually producing music then for raw tracks then you might want to sample better than 16b/44k, to give yourself more range to work in when mixing tracks down, filtering and editing, which is why DAW/Mixers/blah support this. But in a walkman playing finished tracks? Nope.]
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Saturday September 03 2016, @10:41AM
It's not exactly that easy.
Higher sampling rates give digital filters more breathing room to operate, to where noise can be gently rolled instead of a hard cutoff. Bit density is a meh, but 24 bit is becoming the new norm for high end audio regardless of diminishing returns. You want your equipment to play the format of choice, especially not downsampling a 24 bit file.
Again, I'm willing to at least listen, but I'm not hold my breath that Sony is doing anything any better than what is currently available (and probably for far cheaper).
(Score: 2) by physicsmajor on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:10PM
In addition to this, because of how the Fourier transform operates, transient responses - step functions, discontinuities - require infinite frequency response to reproduce entirely correctly.
There are a lot of transients in music, from percussion to note attacks. We can't hear ultrasonic sine waves, but when our reproduction is band-limited it also means these transients aren't quite reproduced right. We can hear that.
That said, bit depth is worthless. Anything beyond 14 actual bits is entirely inaudible. That really is a bunch of snake oil.
(Score: 2) by tonyPick on Sunday September 04 2016, @08:29AM
Being picky - technically (almost) any Fourier decomposition of a continuous-time signal requires an infinitely long sequence to reproduce accurately - that's part of the definition (that it converges for an infinite series).
However, in case of audio, our *ears* are quite literally band limited to the frequency components under the 20K-ish mark (they actually work a lot like a set of stepped frequency filter banks), and so those are the only things we care about.
While it's true that some instruments can produce infrasonic or ultrasonic components, and these can mix into to the audio range, you get that shift down into the audio range during the mix/performance phase, not at playback. In fact ultrasonics at playback are a liability - introducing distortion in the amplifier stages. More details, and good coverage in general: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/demo/neil-young.html [xiph.org]
Also - I think you're overestimating the frequency components of these particular transients - A "sharp" percussion sound, say a snare drum, centres around 3K, with some higher end harmonics pushing up to (maybe) ~16K. Electronica/Chiptune style music probably does have the highest frequency content, but really see the Xiph link above for what we can perceive.
Not according to a bundle of double blind trials conducted over the past we can't - (http://www.aes.org/e-lib/browse.cfm?elib=14195, discussed in the Xiph link above for starters). We can *convince* ourselves we can hear it when we know the answer ahead of time, but it's not something anyone outside our heads can hear.
(There's also the particularly nasty tendency to master the "better" formats differently, which confuses things even further since there will be a difference there, but there's no reason why you couldn't get identical results from all the other formats, other than wanting to charge more for the premium product and having to invent a difference.)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 03 2016, @06:23PM
Even DJs that need to tempo and key match difference pieces only need 196 khz. I've never understood why more than 16 bits was needed. The loudness wars have already effectively made only 5 bits or so significant. What difference does 16 bit, 24 bit, or 32 bit make if we still only have 5 bits that are actually used?
For playback, anything over 48 khz is just stupid, but you and other poster are correct that a higher sample rate in the source recording(s) is/are necessary for certain operations such as FFT.