Sony's bringing back its iconic 'Walkman' with a $3,200 price tag

Sony's 2022 NW-WM1ZM2 Walkman music player. — Sony

Sony is releasing two new versions of its iconic music player, the Walkman.
The new players start at $1,600, and can cost as much as $3,200 for a gold-plated model.
Rather than appealing to mainstream consumers, Sony's Walkman has become a niche device in recent years.

The latest models in Sony's iconic Walkman line come with wildly high price tags: $1,600 to start and up to $3,200 for a gold-plated model.

That's a pretty big change from the Walkman's heyday in the 1980s and '90s when it sold for $100 to $200, but there's a good reason for that: Sony's iconic music player has evolved quite a bit since its heyday when it primarily served as a means of playing mixtapes full of songs recorded from live radio.

Nowadays, the Walkman line of dedicated music players is aimed at the comparatively niche market of audiophiles looking to listen to higher-quality "lossless" audio formats.

To that end, the most recent models in the Walkman line feature high-end components intended to "help you get the most out of your music," and the Walkman devices support a variety of so-called "lossless" audio formats — the same music, but with far more data.

Given the larger footprint of lossless audio files, the new Walkman models support extra storage via SD card slots. The $1,600 model comes with 128 GB of internal storage, and the $3,200 model comes with 256 GB; both are expected to launch this April.

Check out a video introduction of the latest Walkman right here:

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