Sony's new flagship Walkman costs $5,899, weighs 670 grams and runs Android 16

Sony's new flagship Walkman costs $5,899, weighs 670 grams and runs Android 16

Three new players, from $1,900 to $5,899

Sony refreshed its premium Walkman line on October 15 with three digital audio players. The flagship NW-WM1ZM3 is priced at $5,899, the mid-tier NW-WM1AM3 at $2,999.99 and the entry NW-ZX900 at $1,899.99. All three are open for pre-order on Sony's US store, B&H and Crutchfield. The Verge called the entry price "already absurd," while PCMag noted that $5,899 buys a good laptop plus a flagship pair of headphones.

Sony says gold-plated screws ground the sound

Sony's press release is unusually specific about metal. The flagship's main chassis is precision-machined from 99.99 percent (4N) oxygen-free copper; the rear chassis uses 99.96 percent OFC with direct gold plating, and even the screws get a low-resistance gold treatment Sony says is exclusive to this model. The company claims the result is "a stable ground connection that delivers powerful bass, an expansive soundstage, and smooth, extended high frequencies." The AM3 and ZX900 use aluminum main bodies with gold-plated OFC back panels. Inside the flagship: Kimber Kable wiring, dual solid high-polymer capacitors, hand-soldered copper wiring and a milled copper block over the digital section.

Bigger 1080p screens and an 11.2MHz upscaler

The two WM1 models carry 5.5-inch 1080p touchscreens, larger and sharper than their 2022 predecessors; the ZX900 moves to a 5-inch 1080p panel, up from 720p. All three run Android 16, a jump from Android 11 and 12 on the older models, although Android Authority pointed out in its headline that this still is not the newest version of the OS. Audio is handled by Sony's S-Master HX amplifier, with support for 11.2MHz/1-bit DSD and 384kHz/32-bit PCM, plus a DSD Remastering Engine that upsamples ordinary PCM files into an 11.2MHz DSD stream, which Sony says sounds warmer and more analog. This round the engine also works on music streamed over Wi-Fi. Storage is 256GB onboard, with a microSD slot.

Battery life: the cheapest model wins

The specs produce one counterintuitive result. According to figures compiled by tbreak and Gagadget, the WM1 pair is rated for about 35 hours of 128kbps MP3 playback through the balanced connection, dropping to 31 hours for streaming apps in offline mode. The entry-level ZX900 lasts longest: up to 40 hours of local playback and 35 hours of streaming.

Europe gets 1.1 mW, everyone else 250 mW

The same model sounds different depending on where you buy it. Notebookcheck and mezha.ua reported that European units, including Germany, are limited to 1.1 mW of output power, while in other regions the 4.4mm balanced jack delivers 250 mW per channel and the 3.5mm jack at least 60 mW. The outlets suggest importing from the US or Japan, since the capped version will struggle to drive demanding headphones. Sony has not explained the limitation, and it is unclear whether UK units are affected.

Gold plating is a decade-old Sony habit

This is not new territory. At IFA 2016 in Berlin, Sony launched a $3,200 gold-plated Signature Series Walkman, the NW-WM1Z, arguing the finish reduced "contact resistance and oxidation." The 2022 NW-WM1ZM2 was also gold-plated and also launched at $3,200 — so the new flagship costs roughly $2,700 more than the model it replaces. The Verge noted the older NW-WM1ZM2 is now on sale for $2,599.99, and IGN and Archyde found used 2022 units trading around $1,500 on eBay, a reminder that these players do not hold value.

Old stock ran out and users feared the end

There is a context to the launch. Nikkei Asia reported that with shipments of the previous models ending this summer, some users had begun to assume the Walkman was being discontinued; the new trio pushed that rumor aside. Bloomberg described the players as the first new hardware in several years to carry the Walkman name. The brand's lineage is long: the first TPS-L2 went on sale in Japan on July 1, 1979, at around 33,000 yen, and by October 2010, when Sony stopped selling cassette Walkmans in Japan, more than 220 million had been sold.

A 670-gram "portable" aimed at a narrow niche

Weight has become a talking point: the flagship is 670 grams, up 180 grams from the 490-gram NW-WM1ZM2 and roughly 1.6 times the aluminum AM3 at 425 grams. The site silicon snark joked that it is heavier than many tablets and "portable in the sense that a decorative brick is portable if your trousers have accepted a structural role." The real audience remains the audiophile willing to trade a phone's convenience for desktop-grade sound; for everyone else, $5,899 is hard to justify for a commute.

Shipping in January, £4,299 in the UK

Sony has not given detailed regional availability. Notebookcheck and Archyde put shipping in January 2027, and mezha.ua gives January 12. In the UK, What Hi-Fi reported the flagship at £4,299 and the AM3 at £2,099 — £949 and £799 more than their 2022 predecessors — with the ZX900 skipping the UK at launch. Sony has still not said whether Europe will get the players, or when.