Best-quality music at a stroll

A Walkman player for your MP3 and MP4 tunes with outstanding audio quality, Sony’s new NWZ-ZX1 packs a tremendous 128 gigabytes of storage space – good for around 800 songs in high-resolution format (at a rough calculation of 150 megabytes per song).

The rigid aluminium chassis helps stabilise the sound output and the stout, gold-coloured headphone jack and black-leather back cover adds to the sleekness.

This is actually more than just a music player because you have a four-inch Triluminos touch screen of 854x480-pixel resolution. The Android 4.1 operating system makes the ZX1 a compact “tablet” for watching videos and viewing photos. You can’t make a phone call, of course, but once connected to Wi-Fi, you can browse the Web, and more apps can be installed to boost the fun factor.

An S-Master HX digital amplifier boosts the audio quality for the headphones, reducing distortion and outside noise through a wide frequency range.

Bluetooth headphones can be connected. The built-in one-touch NFC (near field communication) technology makes it easy to pair up the ZX1 with NFC-enabled headphones.

Among the high-resolution audio formats you can play is 192kHz/24bit, which is the sampling rate of an original analogue audio source. CD audio, which used to amaze us, has the sampling rate of 44.1kHz/16bit. Due to the amount of data in hi-res audio files, the recording has to be compressed in a way that doesn’t sacrifice music quality.

The 192kHz/24bit audio files use FLAC (Free Lossless Audio Codec) or ALAC (Apple Lossless Audio Codec), both of which the ZX1 supports. And it’s also good for DSD (Direct Stream Digital) used in Super Audio CD format.

So, to make most of the ZX1, you need 192kHz/24bit FLAC or ALAC or DSD music files. They’re available online at iTunes and speciality sites like HD Tracks, ITrax.com, HDTT, Blue Coast Records, Pristine Classical, LINN Records, Gimell and e-onkyo.

UK-based LINN Records, for example, has a broad selection of classical recordings and songs by well-known artists including the Rolling Stones, Mark Knopfler and Jean-Michel Jarre. You’ll pay around 18 pounds (Bt1,000) for a hi-res album in the required format.

That’s a lot of money, right? But fortunately you can still enjoy your ZX1 by using a feature called DSEE HX (Digital Sound Enhancement Engine). It restores the high-range sound lost during compression, so you get a boost in quality to match that of a store-bought CD.

Switch on DSEE HX and any MP3, AAC, WMA or other compressed file is “upscaled” to the 176.4kHz/24-bit sampling rate.

The other thing you’re going to need is a pair of hi-res-audio headphones. I did my testing with Sony’s new Bluetooth MDR-1RBT MK2 headphones, and the music quality was great. Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” was such a delight that my eyes brimmed with tears. 

The 1RBT MK2 can be connected to the player with a provided stereo cable, apart from the Bluetooth connection. I enjoyed using it with the cable to make most of S-Master HX amplifier of the ZX1.

The bass was solid and details of music instrument were clear, giving me the feelings of standing in front of a live band. The album uses a lot of ambient sound effects to enhance the songs’ meanings and I could clearly hear the effects. For example, on the song “The Happiest Days of Our Lives”, I could hear children play in the background while a helicopter flies around.

I enjoyed the solid and powerful bass of the songs. The sounds of the guitars and hi-hats were also clearly audible and enjoyable.

I also enjoyed listening to the Scorpions’ “Gold Ballads”, which was encoded in 96kHz/24bit format. The lead guitar sounded sweet and beautiful, the bass and drum were solid and powerful, as well as the vocals.

Sony Thai also provided several high-resolution audio songs for the test. Lara Ruggles’ “Snowflake” sounded very beautiful, clear and with a lot of fine detail. The vocal was sweet and powerful and I could hear a harmonica faintly in the background.

I also tried a sample DSD file in 64bit format – a classical track featuring a duel between cello and piano. It was very enjoyable because the instruments sounded very real.

The Sony NWZ-ZX1 retails for Bt21,990.

 

KEY SPECS

 

Memory: 128GB

Display: 4-inch, FWVGA(854 x 480 pixels), TFT colour display

Input/output terminals – USB 2.0, Stereo mini-jack, WM-PORT (multiple connecting terminal): 22 pins

Platform: Android Version 4.1

Bluetooth: Version 3.0

Wireless LAN: IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n

Power source: Built-in Rechargeable lithium-ion Battery USB power

Recharging: USB-based

Recharge time: Three hours

MP3 audio: Bit rate 32 to 320kbps (supports variable bit rate), sampling frequency 32, 44.1, 48kHz

WMA audio: Bit rate 5 to 384kbps (supports variable bit rate), sampling frequency 8 to 48kHz

FLAC audio: Bit depth 16 to 24, Sampling frequency 8, 11.025, 12, 16, 22.05, 24, 32, 44.1, 48, 88.2, 96, 176.4, 192kHz

Specs also available for .wav, .mp4, .m4a, .3gp, .aif, .aiff, .afc, .aifc, .m4v, .wmv

Dimensions: 59.7x122.3x13.5mm

Weight: 139g