The Sony Walkman NWZ-A17 (yes, the Walkman brand is still alive) is the first music player available on the market that plays high-resolution audio files, like WAV, AAC and FLAC. It has effectively beat its closest rival, the Pono player, to the punch.
The player comes with 64 GB of storage (and every one of those gigabytes will be needed; more on that later) with a Micro SD slot for cards with 64 GB or higher storage. It supports the aforementioned music file types in addition to AIFF and ALAC and lower-quality files like MP3 and WMA. It additionally supports video, podcasts and radio stations.
In short, this player is meant for the audiophile. Compression is what makes MP3 files small in file size but takes away sharper and crisper sound.
I got my hands on an NWZ-A17, and the one major advantage it has against the Pono player right off the bat is its shape and weight. It’s very thin and lightweight; it’s much easier to slip into your pocket than the strange, triangular Pono. Its user interface is easy to navigate. Press any button to turn it on, use the arrow buttons to navigate, and the play button doubles as an okay button. It claims to have a 30-hour battery life, and I’ll assume this is true since I didn’t use the player enough to give the battery a stress-test.
Now for the actual audio difference: with the right headphones, you’ll definitely appreciate the quality of, say, a FLAC file than an MP3. As a test, I listened to the latest Bahamas album, Bahamas is Afie, and I immediately felt immersed in his deep voice and his orchestral arrangements. Rarely until now has such a rich sound been so accessible. I downloaded the music from Pro Studio Masters but there are several other places you can look as well.
When plugging the Walkman into your computer, it provides software for a music-management program that will allow you to add songs to your player as well as convert low-end files to FLAC and AAC. I couldn’t sense a huge sound difference in these up-converted files, so downloading files in higher-resolution formats is key here. It will also take a bit of time for the program to “warm up” depending on your computer speed. The longer you spend with it, the faster the program will convert files and add them to your Walkman.
Of course, with high-resolution audio comes higher files sizes — much higher. My up-converted albums usually hit around 200-250 MB, around four times larger than a typical album. Bahamas is Afie, in its native FLAC format, was more than 800 MB. So someone with a vast music collection will not have enough space on the player on its own. For those users, I’d recommend investing in a Micro SD card — maybe even more than one.
The player does work with Bluetooth but not Wi-Fi, so you won’t be able to stream music from the device, however you can stream music from Bluetooth-enabled speakers. If you’re a big music fan, you’ll likely already have plenty of music anyway.
While the future of the Pono is uncertain, the A17 (priced at $300, a full $100 less than the Pono’s proposed price point) is a lot more accessible, both in layout and shape. Recommended for the major music fan.
