Impressions: Sony Walkman

In my second year of high school I got 500 yuan of New Year’s money, and I wanted to spend it on something.

While poking around TomPDA I came across a Sony Walkman E505. Seller said it was an OEM pack, bare unit, just over 500.

50 hours of battery life, and it looked good enough. So I bought it without a second thought.

To be honest, at first I didn’t care much about the specs or the sound quality. I just thought it looked nice, and that 50-hour claim was tempting. I had an iPAQ Hx2410 at the time, but its battery life was a tragic 5 hours. This was 50 hours. Even with 320Kbps MP3s stuffed in it I could still get 20 hours. That meant I basically never had to think about the battery. One charge and I could mess around with it for a week. High school was miserable every day, so getting to listen to more music was heaven. To use a phrase people use now, it was a “massive happiness upgrade” kind of gadget.

That thing was an OEM pack, the serial number was all zeros, but somehow it never broke and stayed with me into college. Then one day in college a roommate took a liking to the perfume bottle, so I gave it to him.

With the perfume bottle gone I started looking for a replacement. Around then the new version of the perfume bottle came out, the legendary torpedo, the Walkman S703. I asked a few Taobao sellers, found one that was cheap, but it was only available in red. Thought about it and decided I didn’t mind, so I bought it.

Back then, using the torpedo, I still didn’t understand things like “driving power,” “resolution,” or “lossless.” I’d always listened to 320 Kbps or VBR files, and the best earbuds I had were a pair of Sennheiser CX200. A player was just a device that played music to me.

The torpedo stayed with me until graduation. After graduating I got a job, and after the job came a salary. Looking at that skinny torpedo, I got the urge to spend again.

My budget was usually around 1000, and my only choice was Sony’s Walkman. Not for any other reason than that it always claimed 20+ hours of battery life, and even if that was inflated it couldn’t be that far off. I’d tried other players here and there, including an iPod Mini I bought early on, but it never sounded right, so I sold it.

So this time I bought the S753, though this time I upgraded the earbuds to an Audio-Technica CKM55.

The rest you can guess. After I changed jobs to the hospital I bought the F805, then got the TF10, and after that it all snowballed, leading to the ZX1 I have now.

And so the other day, the Walkman ZX1 finally went in for repair. The reason: I kept hearing huge background noise when listening to music, and the funny part is the noise grew as the battery drained. By 20% it had completely taken over.

I took it to the service center. The guy listened for a moment and immediately said:

“How the hell do you tolerate this noise?”

So I signed the repair form again, repair time unknown. I just hope it’s not three months like last time.

With the ZX1 gone, I can’t exactly carry a D100 to go running every day. I sold the iPod to a local audiophile a few days ago. I originally wanted to buy a Chinese DAP to hold me over, like a FiiO X3K or an AP100, but after handling the actual units I kept putting it off.

After much deliberation, I went with the Walkman A15.

The A15 is a new low-end model in the Walkman line, but it’s missing nothing. It supports FLAC, HiRes, miniSD cards, Bluetooth, and more importantly, it claims 50 hours of battery life. Even playing FLAC the rated life is 30 hours.

I didn’t have high hopes for how this thing would sound, but it clearly beats expectations. Driving power is about the same as the old F805, resolution is average, the soundstage is narrow, but you can clearly tell it’s deliberately narrowing the soundstage, boosting midrange density, and reinforcing the bass at the cost of the highs.

Put plainly, it’s a pop tuning. For a player at this price that’s a completely normal choice. Audiophiles are a minority after all, and the people buying machines in this price range are mostly listening to pop songs.

Another thing worth noting: even if you’re not happy with the A15’s sound, it can be paired with a PHA-2 DAC. And when you do, the battery life is vastly better than the ZX1’s total collapse. Even without the external DAC, the A15’s noise floor is cleaner than the ZX1’s. Maybe Android really is a burden.

The A15’s battery life isn’t inflated. After two days of listening it was still full, whereas the ZX1 would already be at 50%. The ZX1’s battery life isn’t actually that bad either. It’s just that 90% of the power goes to Android standby.

The A15 does have its black marks. First, the build quality is average and it feels very plasticky, though that’s forgivable for a low-end model. Second is the idiotic Simplified Chinese interface: all the fonts are bitmap, which means mixed Chinese, Japanese, and English display looks ugly… switching to Japanese makes the problem disappear entirely. No idea why Sony won’t render Simplified Chinese with non-bitmap fonts.

What surprised me in the end is that although the A15 supports a card, it can search and store music on both the card and the built-in 16GB in a single database. From my experience with Chinese DAPs, that didn’t seem possible simultaneously. Definitely a plus.

People joke that I have faith in Sony, since I’ve always bought Walkman players. I thought about it and found it has nothing to do with faith. It’s just that after using this, everything else feels unsatisfying, whether it’s sound, controls, or battery life. I’ve adapted to this design philosophy, and when I use it to choose products, I find almost nothing besides Sony satisfies me.

Sometimes I console myself: “This isn’t some damn faith, it’s just that I have no choice besides this.”

But it seems it’s not that simple.

Sometimes it’s more a matter of course. I remember in 2004 I bought an iBook G4 with money from a part-time job and fell in love with Apple. By 2009 that love peaked and I even wanted to switch everything to Apple, but I had no money then, so I kept using Linux. Years later when I had money, I found Apple no longer satisfied me… Not that Apple got bad, but I’d gotten used to my current OS and could never go back.

Sometimes what people call faith can be summed up in one word: habit.

If I hadn’t bought that perfume bottle and fallen into this pit and formed the habit, things might look completely different now.

The shining faith so many people talk about may be nothing more than letting things take their natural course…