Portable music player £3299
We just happened to be reading a Steve Jobs biography the other day. Among all the interesting insights and anecdotes, we came across a story about the original Apple iPod. It is said that, throughout the development of this landmark music player, Jobs feared that Sony would get to market first with this type of product.
It is easy to understand his logic. The Japanese brand had obvious expertise in audio and computing, and what is a personal music player if not a portable computer dedicated to sound; but crucially it was also a music company. Factor in the allure of the hugely successful Walkman sub-brand, and Sony, perhaps uniquely of all the electronics giants, already possessed everything it needed to produce a machine to rival the iPod and develop the ecosystem needed to make it work.
History shows that Sony didn’t join those dots, and never managed to transfer its success with the cassette Walkman into the digital age. The iPod? Well, everyone knows what happened to that. Still, Sony did go on (much later) to make a decent fist of digital music players; but, for us at least, it is the company’s more premium models that have shone the brightest. Despite having some issues, the impressive new NW-WM1ZM2 on test here is a fine example of what happens when Sony aims for the stars.
The Sony NW-WM1ZM2’s price (£3299) puts it at the top end of the market as far as portable music players are concerned. Take a close look and it doesn’t take long to see where the money has been spent. While the gold plating on the casework grabs the headlines, this interests us less than the high-purity oxygen-free copper chassis it adorns. Sony’s engineers experimented with copper of different purities and found that the 99.99 per cent variant sounded best, citing better digital grounding and improved rigidity as the benefits.
Let us hope that the copper chassis brings big sonic improvements, as it accounts for a large part of the NWWM1ZM2’s hefty price. The step-down model in the range, the aluminium alloy-cased NW-WM1AM2, shares most of the specifications and engineering of this range-topper but costs only a third as much. Sure, the cheaper model has only half the internal storage capacity – 128GB vs 256GB – but the shared ability to accept a microSD card nullifies that advantage. The pricier model also uses more exotic cable to connect its amplifier module to the 4.4mm balanced headphone output.
Build quality, as far as the hardware goes, is impeccable. The NW-WM1ZM2 is superbly made and feels reassuringly solid in the hand. Every control works with absolu
