Gadgetory

it's been a long time since the name Waterman was used to describe a portable music player as a cattle but Sony has spent the last 15 years trying to revive it all Sony has tried competing against the iPod the new zxt is the first high-end player to hit us Shores that is going for smaller fry namely Astle and Kern and hi-fi man this is a luxuriously built and luxuriously priced Walkman at eleven hundred and ninety nine dollars and it builds on what Sony has learned from its budget players and its experience with the Android operating system the player holds 128 gigabytes of music with an additional microSD port and will playback most file types including Apple Lossless and DSD the build quality is what you're mostly buying here with a weighty feel in the hand and nice big thick buttons that are wisely indented to prevent being pushed in your pocket something the pono player could learn from this is not a phone there's no sim card but it does have Wi-Fi and so it's already a step above its competitors because it allows users to sample the future of music listening - ringing from services such as title if you've used an Android phone before the ZX team will be very familiar even if Sony has tried almost unsuccessfully to make it not look like a phone most apps will work though surprisingly third-party music players have been somehow deliberately or accidentally gimped to not play high-res files either way Sony wants you to use its own inbuilt player sound quality is the other part of the price equation and as you'd expect it sounds very good with bags of detail and bass weight plus it has a great sound stage for a portable it's a cut above cheap of devices like the pono player and Sony's own a 17 walkman is it worth 1,200 bucks though it certainly feels like an expensive device and the ability to load streaming apps is a great bonus battery life and it expected 33 hours of high-res playback beats the pono player by a factor of four if you're looking at a high end media player and want something more flexible than the audio only competitors at the price then the sony is definitely worth an audition this painter Pendlebury for cnet.com