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 anyways 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.

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

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

Because I imagine it’s for old people sitting around their house

• Separate batteries. Using a device for music and a standard phone drains from the same battery. You could carry a power brick, but then you’re carrying two bricks for worse audio.
• No camera. Certain work assignments won’t allow me to bring a device with a camera into those zones. Or, if I do, the transition process is so intrusive that it’s not worth it.

Those are the only unique characteristics. You can compensate other differences on a phone like adding an additional DAC and/or amp.

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 also won’t matter once you take a step outside; slightest ambient noise is enough to kill most of the advantages a high-end source provides.

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.

If we had lemmy money I’d bet against that. I can’t see him bying that.

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. 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.

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.

the benefit of sampling above 20khz is that you can even out the signal over a period of time which will make it more accurate for frequencies up to 20khz. you will get a noisy signal but all the noise is in frequencies you can’t hear.

you also need to consider how the voltage is generated. in general there are limits regarding how quickly can voltage surge. e.g. you can’t reproduce a square wave properly in most cases after amplification. in the end this makes dsd much less relevant.

you also need to consider that the reproduction is not perfect and neither is the recording. e.g. a square wave will not be captured properly

edit: I forgot to mention that the slew rate limit has a parallel on the speaker/headphone membrane but it’s much worse than the amp since it’s a physical object with momentum.

Let me add that I don’t think that we are at the end-all-and-be-all of audio. I can hypothetically imagine things that might be done if one threw more money at audio playback that would create a better experience than one can get today.

• When you hear audio from a given point, some of how you detect the location of an audio source is due to the effect on it hitting your ears, which are of a distinct shape, which means that what’s actually hitting your inner ear is slightly unique to an individual person Currently, if you’re listening to a static audio file, it’s the same for everyone. One could hypothetically ship hardware which fits inside the ear of and can build an audio model for the ear of a given individual to make audio which reflects their specific ears. Then audio could be played back that sounds as if it’s actually coming from a given point in space relative to someone’s ears. That’s not a drop-in improvement for existing audio, because you’d need to have 3D location information available about the individual sources in the audio. But if audio companies wanted to sell a fancier experience for audio that does have that information, they could leverage that.

• For decades, audio playback devices have tried to produce visual effects that synchronize with music. They haven’t done a phenomenal job, at even basic stuff like beat detection, in my opinion, and so clubs and the like have people that have to rig up DMX512 gear with manually-created annotations to have effects happen at a given point. Audio tracks today don’t have a standard format for annotations; if I go buy an album, it doesn’t come with something like that. One could produce a standard for it and rig up various gear, like strobes or colored light or even do this in VR, to stimulate the other senses in time with the audio.

• I suspect that very few people listen to audio in an environment where they can hear absolutely zero detectable background sound when they don’t have their audio playing. You can get decent passive sound cancellation devices, but they only go so far; even good passive sound cancellation headphones are something that one can probably hear fairly quiet sound through. Right now, active sound cancellation devices are being worked on, but that doesn’t get one to the point of inaudibility either, and I haven’t seen anything that does both good active and passive cancellation, so using active noise cancellation means giving up good passive noise cancellation.

My point is that I don’t think that there are zero remaining areas for audio hardware companies to explore to try to create better experiences. I just don’t think that playing audio hundreds of times above the frequencies that humans can hear is really a fantastic area to be banging on.

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.

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.

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’s a business phone switch owned by many of our customers for which licenses for file-based music-on-hold are no longer available from the manufacturer. An old iPod / Nomad / Zune / etc. fits the bill to connect to its built-in, no-additional-license-required music-on-hold audio port perfectly. It even comes with its own built-in UPS.