Correlating Walkman and high-quality audio sounds foolish in an era dominated by music streaming services. Digital music has its own merits over tapes in the Walkman, but if you are a hard-core audiophile, you know the compressed music files shared on streaming services lack the acoustic quality the original tracks offer.
To the rescue comes Sony Walkman MW-A306, which intends to play high-quality digital music, in dynamic range, original records guarantee. The Walkman is meant to upscale compressed music files from steaming services in real-time, to deliver CD-like audio playback that users can enjoy through headphones or wireless earbuds.
Designer: Sony
Sony’s NW-A306 comes packed with Edge-AI and DSEE Ultimate (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine) technology features, which help the Walkman upscaled compressed digital music files with great accuracy, in real-time. The music playback is richer and more dynamic, which would purposely enhance the user experience on the streaming service of their choice.
All this interesting audio capability is stuffed within a smartphone-sized form factor, to ensure users don’t have to struggle with the Walkman’s portability. The NW-A306 is made from a single piece of milled aluminum and weighs 113g. It features a 3.6-inch HD touchscreen and also has a few physical buttons on the side to interact with the device in an old school way.
Even though Sony has managed to offer 32 gigs of onboard storage, the Walkman has only 18GB available space to store your favorite tracks. If you have internet access to stream music on the go, you would not mind the low storage, but if you’d want to use the Walkman as a retro device with your entire music library stored at one place, Sony may just disappoint.
Nonetheless, in comparison to the other Walkman variants that have dropped off and on, Sony seems to have perfectly blended the good of retro and modern for this retro-modern Walkman that will set you back £350 (roughly $400). It will begin retailing in Europe in black and blue colors this month. There is no word on US availability at the time of writing.
