PONO Player vs. SONY Walkman NWZ-A15/17

Well, I'm not terribly upset. DSD is not essential to me, but it would have been nice to add it to the A17 via the HA-2. If I were Oppo, though, I'd be careful about dispensing erroneous information; the next customer might not be so forgiving.

 

From what I understand, the model numbers Sony uses aren't random. I remember reading a long time ago that they break down as follows (the following are what I remember, combined with more recent knowledge):

• NWZ - Indicates that it's a player for the United States (players for Japan start with NW)
• The first letter (A, B, E, S, X) after the dash indicates the general classification of the player, with "E" being the lowest and "A" being the highest (although I don't think that applies now).
• The letter and the next numbers indicates the general model family (example, the NWZ-A17 is part of the "A10" family as is the NWZ-A15).
• The last number indicates the capacity of the player. Due to the increasing capacities I don't think the numbers are in order by capacity because of the increases in capacity (I think my players have the following capacities: NWZ-A816 - 4GB, NWZ-A818 - 8GB, NWZ-E465 - 16GB, NWZ-X1051 - 16GB, and NWZ-A17 - 64GB).

I agree that Sony needs to do a better job of giving their players a better common name (what people actually call the player, rather than just the model number), a more catchy name that people will remember. As an example, previous Walkman DAPs looked a little like and were shaped like dominoes, so why not call them a Walkman Domino? While I like the last digit being an indication of the capacity of the player, Sony should simplify it in the future by making it a factor of 2 (a "1" indicates a capacity of 2GB, "2" indicates 4GB, "3" indicates 8GB, and so on).