Sony's Walkman Makes Comeback

The Sony NWZ-A17: a great answer to a question no one is asking.

 

I will not do DSD downloads, not that my not being in will keep anyone up a t night. all night for an album download. I don't think so. My snail-like AT&T download speed will keep me on the side lines. I find 2496 more than acceptable for me.

 

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A 19 year old college student who thinks the price is not an issue. I guess that makes me a very poor college student when I was 19. I didn't even have a stereo to take to college the first time. A child of privilege for sure.

 

No stereo in my college dormroom either, Jim -- I hung out with the guys next door, who did have some beat-up Sears Silvertone or something. Nowadays, I'd have a phalanx of iPods and headphones!

 

The Walkman always did Hi-Rez, well mine does when I play a cassette its all analog (I can't read the article any more info ??)

 

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When my roommate and I started broadcasting our college football games for our University and later the town station for money!, I did the color as an old, injured player, he had an old flipup GE TT stereo in a portable cabinet. His parents sent him a Sony stereo tuner and we wired it into the preamp stage so we could hear replays of our work for critical assessment. Of course while it is on the TT is spinning around getting worn out. Pretty sad, actually. No $700 portable player for us. We were so high tech. NOT.

 

Hold on.. are you saying SME didn't really pan out?

 

What's interesting is that although Sony initially overpaid for Columbia Pictures, within 10 years the studio was making much more money than the electronics division. So ultimately, it was a wise move by Morita... it just took a long time to happen. Columbia Records was definitely a good purchase for the time and that worked out well for 20 years. It's only when the music industry started falling apart around 2002-2003 that things went bad. In particular, Sony's foray into music downloads was a huge disaster.

Sony had made 100 incredible missteps over the years. I think they tried to get into the personal computer business at least three or four times, each with proprietary operating systems, and those were a disaster. They eventually had to throw in the towel and just make MS-DOS/Windows PCs like everybody else. And the debacles with MiniDisc, DAT, Elcaset... there's a long list of Sony disasters even when Morita was alive. I think it went much worse after Morita had his stroke and had to step down.

BTW, note that Betamax was not a failure from a financial point of view, despite the popular misconception. They made hundreds of millions of dollars on Betamax throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and rode that gravy train all the way to about 1988 or so. Even after that, when they began making VHS machines, they quickly became one of the top 5 VHS manufacturers in the world, which made them a lot of dough.

What's really crushed Sony lately has been the rise of Korean manufacturers like LG and Samsung, which has really affected the TV set business. Nobody's making any money there any more, not when they're forced to sell flat screen TVs at $10/inch. It's very common to see 50" LCD screens for $500 these days, which was unheard of even 2 years ago.

 

Actually, getting into the movie and music business was a colossal mistake. That's the reason why Sony was slow to exploit the digital revolution. They should have put out the first "iPod", several years before Apple. But the label side of the house wouldn't allow it. No rip, mix and burn for them.

And while the movie business eventually kinda-sorta panned out, it was an enormous capital sink and an immense distraction. There's a great opportunity cost in trying to run so many diverse lines of business. They ended up doing exactly what most of these diverse outfits do - everything, poorly.

Because they were a non-entity in the digital music game, they also didn't have the experience they needed to build something like the iPhone, which has left Sony completely shut out of the mobile device revolution.

And the synergies they were supposed to realize from owning both the hardware and the content never, ever materialized.

They did alright for awhile in that space, until Jobs came back at Apple and began making sexier hardware. Sony's hardware in contrast got less and less sexy as time went on. Of course once the PC became just a commodity it was game over for most of them.

Those were minor bumps, though. MiniDisc was at least "big in Japan", and DAT like Betamax became a defacto professional format.

The reality is if Sony had stayed out of the content business they'd probably be Apple and Apple would be on its last legs, if they were even still around.

 

I agree with your premises, but not your conclusions. I think the whole Sony story is much more complicated, and most likely we'll have to wait until somebody writes a vast, detailed book about it to know really what went on. I based what I know on two published biographies of Morita, plus Walter Yetnikoff's autobiography Howling at the Moon, and John Nathan's Sony: A Private Life. I also wrote extensively about Sony when I worked for Video Review and Consumers Digest magazines, and I had several contacts within the company who regularly fed us information on what was going on. The battles between Sony Consumer Electronics and Sony Music are legendary, and we heard about that first hand from some top execs involved with MiniDisc, DAT, and SACD.

The big picture is a pretty interesting story. The biggest flaw with Sony buying Columbia Pictures -- which I again say made them many, many billions of dollars -- is that they underestimated the importance of owning TV stations and networks. Because Sony is a foreign corporation, they're prevented by law from owning an American TV station or network, which has hurt them on some levels. It's surprising that Sony Pictures TV turned out to be a huge, huge moneymaker, and now the corporation is putting more emphasis on TV than movies. They've had some disastrous films in the last two years.

Apple was extremely hyperfocused on doing certain jobs extremely well, and I think that was one of the genius attributes of Steve Jobs. I dislike Jobs quite a bit as a person, but nobody can deny his impact on technology in the past 15 years. I've said before: "if one man was just responsible for Pixar alone, or just the iPod, or just the Macintosh by itself, or only the iPhone, or just the iPad, he'd be an amazing man. The fact that Steve Jobs did all of these things is fairly stunning." I don't think Sony could possibly have done these things because it was just too spread out, with hundreds of executives making conflicting decisions. You can make a good argument that a smaller Sony might actually be more successful, and I think that's what they're in the process of doing now: shutting down the businesses that aren't making any money.

I remember about five years ago when Sir Howard Stringer announced he was hinging all future Sony Electronics video products on 3D, and I shook my head and said, "this is going to be a total failure." And it was. It's kind of mind-numbing to reflect on decisions like that going on at the highest levels of the Sony Corporation. I haven't been back to Tokyo since the 1980s, but the Sony I saw there was drastically different, smarter, and better run than what they have today.

 

Well, I guess I'm kinda confused, because it sounds like you agree with my conclusions.

Like I said, if they didn't own the content businesses, their core electronics business would have been free to essentially become Apple. Now, they might not have done it, but I suspect they would have at least stumbled onto a working, hard-drive based Walkman and a decent, touchscreen smartphone before anybody else got there. Unfortunately, they had the content monkey on their backs...

Otherwise, I agree with everything you've said there 1000%. I also recall Stringer's 3D announcement and thinking at the time, these guys are morons.

Although it has to be said, there is one company that screwed itself even harder and even faster than Sony did over the past decade: Microsoft.

 

This was my first Walkman!



I loved the sound of it. It took 4 AA batteries and went very loud!

 

Look like the NWZ-A17SLV is starting to ship: http://www.crutchfield.com/p_158NWZA17S/Sony-NWZ-A17SLV-Hi-Res-Walkman.html?tp=242

I wonder how this compares to the Pono?

 

Not my first Personal Stereo but my first Walkman, it was so cool it attached a battery pack as well as have a removable chargeable battery, unlike today DAPs where the battery is built in

 

Yep, my A17 will be here tomorrow. Don't have the Pono so I won't be able to compare. I will be able to compare it with the Hifi Man HM 602 though.

 

What's the point if it doesn't play cassettes?

It's hardly a Walkman.

 

The new Walkman is on the cover of this month's Tone Audio. Jeff gives it a rave review: http://www.tonepublications.com/MAGPDF/TA_067.pdf

 

Agree. The Walkman will make a comeback if they make cassette playing models - and they sell. No cassette = not a Walkman, IMO!

 

Thanks, I think this will be coming home for Christmas as replacement for my dying iPod. I was waiting for the Pono but besides initial hiccups, the 8 hour battery life is deal breaker for me. The Sony is easier to carry and can last over 50 hours!

 

No use for a portable like that. I'm about to go on holiday. My 7¨ tablet is alreaded loaded with more music and movies than I will be willing to watch/listen (Senheiser CX-300 earbuds)

 

So who bought the NWZ-A17 and what do you think about it?

 

I bought one after the review. Sony wasn't handing out any reviewer discounts, but I bought it anyway. Sold my Astell & Kern. The A17 is really all I need, and for what it does, I'm very happy with it. Sounds better than an iPod, plays high res and has scaleable storage. It's not the perfect player for everyone, but it's just right for me. Love it.

 

Beta was a huge success on the commercial side, although pro Beta and consumer Beta were deliberately and unnecessarily incompatible. Sony also made U-Matic (we had one when I was a kid!) which was a better but heavy and expensive box that was also very successful in pro and educational markets, PLUS, they had an entirely different hi-res system the name of which I can't remember.

I think Sony's (non-Microsoft) computer systems were mostly for the Japanese market with supported Japanese characters, weren't they?

 

Jobs was not a nice person, but he had definite ideas as to what he wanted, and he got exactly that. You love them or hate them, but they are not designed by committee. They are not addled by feature bloat, and what has to work works very well. I doubt whether Apple has anyone today who has that ability to make decisions and enforce them.

Like GE, Sony is involved in way too many different businesses many of which are at cross purposes with each other. Sony has the advantage that it is the 500 pound gorilla in a few of those markets.

 

I have an A17. I like it a lot. The SQ is good and it pairs well line out to my ALO Continental. It actually drives my B&W C5 IEMs fine as well. Given it's size it's quite a marvel. The one thing I don't like about it is that it doesn't do digital out to a DAC, only line out and apt-X. I suppose the folks out Sony thought the DAC in the unit was good enough.