What’s inside Sony’s $5,900 Walkman for obsessive audiophiles?

As Sony’s line of portable audio devices has evolved over the years, it has been geared toward more discerning listeners. It just launched its most expensive Walkman yet: the $5,900 NW-WM1ZM3.

That’s almost double the price of the other model that launched just one rung below, the $3,000 NW-WM1AM3. Its 2023 predecessor, the ZM2, sold for about $3,700.

What is the reason for the crazy price? Chalk this up to premium materials and components to deliver pristine, noise-free sound from lossless digital media.

By premium, I mean the chassis is painstakingly machined from 99.99% oxygen-free (OFC) gold-plated copper. That helps with digital grounding and rigidity, resulting in better sound quality than conventional metals. Sony says you can expect “powerful bass, an expansive soundstage, and smooth, extended high frequencies.”

There are many more bits in this flagship model that help deliver top-notch sound:

• Kimber Kable’s thick wiring from the base of the amplifier to the 4.4mm balanced headphone jack reduces noise.
• Dual large solid high polymer capacitors in the power supply architecture provide the amplifier with stable power.
• A large copper coil with flat wire in the inductor-capacitor filter reduces switching noise and distortion.
• The low dropout regulator that converts battery voltage to a constant supply is specifically designed to avoid adding noise.
• The front and rear sections of the chassis are secured by low-resistance gold-plated screws for stable grounding.

In case it wasn’t clear, great effort has been made to eliminate almost imperceptible noise before the music reaches your eardrums. Between these and all the high quality resistors and capacitors, the ZM3 is designed to deliver exceptional sound.

They are aided by Sony’s S-Master HX digital amplifier technology that amplifies the signal from your audio source without any transmission loss and optimizes quantization noise for clear sound. There’s also an updated DSD remastering engine, which converts downloaded or streamed music files in popular formats to an 11.2 MHz DSD stream for characterful analog playback.

It all comes together in an elegant design with a 5.5-inch screen and physical buttons on the side. It runs on Android 16, so you can use apps from your favorite streaming services and easily queue lossless files from the 256GB built-in storage and microSD card.

A 4.5-hour charge gives you up to 33 hours of high-resolution playback. It’s much thicker than any phone at 21mm (0.8in) and weighs more than two iPhone 18 Pros combined at 490g (17.3oz).

I imagine that even experienced audiophiles will find it difficult to tell the difference in sound quality between the ZM2 and ZM3, since the predecessor also used an OFC chassis. So yeah, don’t bother buying one of these unless you’ve gotten to this grade of kit.

If you’re set on buying a Walkman but find it too rich for your blood, Sony also has the $3,000 NW-WM1AM3 and the $2,659 NW-ZX900. They look similar to the flagship model, but feature an aluminum alloy main chassis with a gold-plated OFC rear chassis.

Find the ZM3 on Sony’s site, along with the AM3 and ZX900.

Source: Sony via PR Newswire