It seems like hi fidelity music players are getting more and more popular this year. Ibasso and FiiO keeps on making great DAP's for the budget audiophiles. While Neil Young's Pono Player offers studio like sound quality for the mainstream market. Recently during the IFA, Sony revealed their Walkman A17 as a counterpart to those great sounding devices. Dubbed as the smallest hifi walkman, it is said to have better audio quality than most smartphones in the world right now.
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| Looking pretty sick! |
The Walkman has an aluminum like brushed metal case, a 2.25 inch, 320 x 240 pixel display and the navigational keys. It packs a 64GB internal storage which is expandable via micro SD up to 128GB of memory, Walkman A17 is designed to play lossless tracks 24-bit/192kHz seamlessly like FLAC, WAV, ALAC, and AIFF, while also supporting the compressed audio formats like MP3. A17 offers bluetooth function for file transfer as well. It is also said to last at least 30-50 hours which is really impressive!
However, the operating system isn't android based like ZX1 and doesn't have all easy navigation of android based music player. For audiophiles, lack of android is no big deal as long as it can play the music in high resolution in really high quality.
I wonder how will this perform against FiiO X1 and Pono Player plus what's the audio chip used in Walkman A17. We'll find out soon this November! :)
Specs
Specs
Available colors: Silver
Internal memory: 64GB
External memory: microSD (card not included)
Display size/resolution: 2.2-inch (5.6 cm)TFT color LCD QVGA (320×240)
Compatible media formats
Music: FLAC/Apple Lossless(ALAC)/MP3/AAC*1/HE-AAC/WMA*2/Linear PCM(WAV)/AIFF
*1: Copyright protected AAC-LC files cannot be played back.
*2: Copyright protected WMA files cannot be played back.
Movie: MPEG-4/AVC(H.264/AVC)/Windows Media Video 9
Sound effects/processing
S-Master HX/DSEE HX/Clear Audio+/Clear Bass/Equalizer/VPT(surround)/Dynamic Normalizer
Battery life
MP3 50 hrs*3
*3: MP3 128kbps (Bluetooth OFF)
Hi-Res Audio 30 hrs*4
*4: FLAC 192kHz/24bit (Bluetooth OFF)
Bluetooth
Communication system: Bluetooth® Ver. 2.1+EDR1
Compatible Bluetooth profiles: A2DP／AVRCP／OPP
Supported Codec: SBC/ aptX®
Weight
66g
Dimension (projecting parts not included)
43.6 x 109 x 8.7mm
FM Radio
76.0～108.0MHz*5
Source
http://liliputing.com/2014/09/sonys-smallest-hifi-walkman-is-coming-in-november-for-300.html
