Tag Archives: Digital Music Player

Sony’s Gold-Plated Walkman: Cassette Nostalgia Without Tapes

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One of the things I wish I had been able to keep from “the olden days” is my cassette player, specifically my Sony Walkman. It probably wouldn’t get much use now, of course, but there are still cassette tapes around, and it’s a nostalgic bit that kids these days would get a kick out of seeing and experiencing. Most of the time, too, our music is played through our smartphones or laptops rather than dedicated music players. Well, Sony wants to say its golden piece about that.

Sony announced its latest premium Walkman lineup on October 15, 2026, and the flagship device is actually gold-plated, including some of its smallest parts. The catch, though, is that it doesn’t actually play cassette tapes. Instead, the NW-WM1ZM3 is built for playing digital music through your wireless or wired headphones of choice. It’s a device for those who prefer a separate audio player and want something that looks classy and elegant. Oh, and you need almost $6,000 to spare as well. Sony’s U.S. store lists it for preorder at $5,899.99.

Designer: Sony

The gold finish is only part of the story. Sony precision-mills the main chassis from 99.99% pure oxygen-free copper, while the rear chassis uses 99.96% pure copper. Both receive gold plating. According to Sony, this construction contributes to audio performance, making the enclosure part of its sound-engineering approach rather than simply a decorative shell. Whether those choices produce an audible improvement worth the asking price would require independent testing.

Even the gold-plated screws have an intended purpose beyond matching the exterior. Sony says their low resistance helps maintain a stable electrical ground connection between the chassis sections. Inside, dedicated capacitors for the digital and audio sections and a machined copper shielding block continue the effort to manage electrical noise. Much of this design work remains hidden once everything is assembled.

The exterior gives you more immediately noticeable details. Circular machined metal surrounds emphasize the headphone sockets, while a dark, leather-textured rear pad contrasts with the gold frame. That pad also keeps your hand from directly contacting the copper rear chassis. Visually, the dark surface gives the gold some breathing room, so the player doesn’t look like one uninterrupted block of precious metal.

Physical side buttons sit alongside the 5.5-inch touchscreen, providing dedicated playback and volume controls rather than making every interaction depend on a menu. In Sony’s images, the circular buttons have clearly marked symbols and sit within a recessed strip. That arrangement gives the side a recognizable control area, although how easily you can operate it by touch needs hands-on testing.

For those of us still attached to the cassette era, the interface offers a particularly nice nod. A cassette-style playback display and screensaver bring the old format onto the screen, with the cassette graphic changing according to the music’s codec. The volume interface also references analog equipment. You won’t be flipping a tape, but the visual connection is there.

There are practical reasons to keep a separate player, too. Its 256GB of storage, approximately 207GB of which is available, can house music without taking up space on your phone, and microSD expansion leaves room for more. Android and Wi-Fi support streaming alongside local files. Sony claims approximately 33 hours of 24-bit/96kHz FLAC playback in its music app under specified conditions, rather than promising the same endurance for every listening setup.

The material choices do come with a physical compromise. At approximately 670 grams, or almost 1.5 pounds, this Walkman is a substantial extra object to carry. For me, that makes its appeal easier to understand beside an armchair than tucked into a pocket on a daily commute.

I can appreciate the idea of giving music its own device again. I’m less convinced that nostalgia needs quite this much copper and gold. The physical controls and cassette interface are inviting, but the price and weight make this a very different proposition from replacing my old tape player.

The post Sony’s Gold-Plated Walkman: Cassette Nostalgia Without Tapes first appeared on Yanko Design.

Teenage Engineering meets iPod Shuffle: This music player puts the screen where your eyes actually are

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Sony killed the MiniDisc in 2006 with the MZ-RH1, a recorder so good that people still pay silly money for working ones on eBay. It did something unusual with its display, mounting the OLED on the front edge of the body rather than the top, so you could read it at an angle no other player offered. That edge-mounted screen is a small footnote in audio history, the kind of detail only a handful of collectors ever think about. Florent Porta has been staring at that screen for years, by his own admission, and the MAD-5 is what came out of the staring. It is a square aluminium player with a thin blue ticker running along its front lip, reading out format, sample rate, track number, timecode and song title.

The MZ-RH1 measured 83.8 by 84.4mm, which is to say almost perfectly square, and the MAD-5 lands on the same proportion. That is either a deliberate quote or a very good accident. What Porta has added is a clip, borrowed from the later iPod Shuffles, and the combination solves a problem Apple never bothered with. A clipped-on player shows you its edge, not its face. So put the words there.

Designer: Florent Porta

The third generation Shuffle in 2009 stripped every physical control off the body, leaving a bare power switch, and pushed volume and track changes onto a three-button remote wired into proprietary earbuds. Reviewers hated it, and Apple reversed course within a year, bringing the button ring back on a fourth generation that shrank into something nearly square. Porta borrows the fourth gen’s clip and skips the third gen’s whole premise, which is the correct call. Wrap a screen around the exposed edge of a clipped device and you get the information without a button, an earbud remote, or Apple’s old workaround, a talking menu called VoiceOver that was software standing in for a hardware idea nobody had built yet.

The jog disc on the face nods toward Teenage Engineering’s TP-7, the field recorder we covered when it landed in 2023, whose motorized tape reel actually spins under a brushed motor with ball bearings while you record or scrub through playback. Porta’s disc has no motor behind it, just concentric rings etched into aluminum with arrows for navigation, so the homage is visual rather than mechanical. That is a fair trade in a concept render, but it is worth naming, since a spinning reel earns its charm through motion and this one borrows the charm without it. The engraved spec plate leans aspirational too, and the 1337 mAh battery is the second time Porta has hidden that exact number in a product.

There is no Bluetooth listed anywhere on the body, no balanced output for the higher-end headphone crowd, and nothing marked for expandable storage, all of which current audiophile DAPs from Sony, FiiO and HiBy treat as standard at this level. The stronger idea might not be the ticker screen at all. It is the USB DAC mode, since anyone carrying a laptop already owns half the reason dongle DACs exist, and a player that folds into an audio interface the moment you plug it in solves a real annoyance rather than a cosmetic one. Porta says a desktop dock is next, meant to unlock more I/O once the MAD-5 is home, which quietly admits the ports on this version are thin. That is pretty self-aware for a concept render.

We covered Porta’s last swing at this category back in February, the DAP-1, a maximalist FLAC player built around an OLED touchscreen and a built-in speaker. The MAD-5 is the opposite instinct from the same person eight months later, stripped down to a disc, two buttons and a strip of text. Neither one exists as hardware yet, and a dock that is still just a thought puts no real timeline on anything. But the edge screen is worth remembering regardless of whether this specific object ever ships, because it solves something two decades of clip-on players walked straight past. Sony found the location by accident in 2006. Apple never looked. Porta just put both ideas in the same room.

The post Teenage Engineering meets iPod Shuffle: This music player puts the screen where your eyes actually are first appeared on Yanko Design.