Sony updates the Walkman as a $5,900 gold-plated MP3 player

Sony last week revived its famed Walkman brand of portable music players, with a trio of updated products that feature Android 16, touch screens, eye-popping prices, and dubious assertions of audiophile appeal.

The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the digitization process.

Sony also says it has used “key components made from oxygen-free copper” because that apparently delivers “uncompromising sound quality.”

The machines also include “screws featuring a low-resistance gold-plated treatment … providing a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage and smooth, extended high frequencies.” Sony claims even the cabling it’s used in the devices “further reduces noise and preserves signal integrity for rich, detailed sound.”

They’re also housed in carefully-milled slabs of copper – gold-plated in the …