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Walkman: Your headphones are about to go high fidelity

The Columbian
Published: January 18, 2015, 4:00pm

LAS VEGAS — There’s no doubt about it — high fidelity digital audio is going mainstream. Gone are the days of a rigid divide between obsessive hobbyists soldering together homemade amplifiers and hipsters commuting in brightly colored earbuds. Consumers want better quality audio files and the hardware to enjoy them, and brands are happy to oblige with a flurry of gear and services to make it all possible.

Of all the brands exploring “Hi-Res” audio, Sony is pushing harder than the rest. It’s hard to believe that in 2015 the Internet is going crazy over a Walkman, but the new NW-ZX2 is turning a lot of heads. It’s a dedicated music player, will set you back about $1,200, and looks nothing like your middle school cassette player. There’s also an in-console car system, a collection of wireless speakers, and headphones to go with the Walkman; it’s clear from the gold Hi-Res logos adorning most of its new audio products that Sony believes this is the way of the future.

Brands that have aways catered to the audio-obsessed and the recording industry are realizing that more mainstream consumers now speak their language, too.

“Looking back five years, I was a little bit scared that all that mattered was how a pair of headphones would look,” said Andreas Sennheiser, co-CEO of Sennheiser, at the brand’s booth at the consumer electronics show in Las Vegas. “But now we see that high quality, high fidelity headphones really matter again to a lot of customers. The hype of having just a high fashion headphone is gone.”

Sennheiser’s Momentum collection addresses precisely these sorts of customers, with the newest models adding stylish details like suede headbands and ear cups and conveniences like Bluetooth wireless connectivity and active noise canceling to Sennheiser’s well- regarded electronics.

But none of the fancy hardware matters at all if your audio source isn’t high quality from the beginning. For most of us, that means either keeping lossless files in our music libraries (forget MP3s entirely) or finding a suitable music stream. In October, Tidal launched as a high-res competitor to Spotify, at twice the subscription price ($19.99/month) and with a slightly more limited library. Even on cheap headphones, anyone can hear the difference – after just a few days of testing out Tidal, lower quality streams sound tinny and cheap, like listening to music through a soda can.

At this point you might be wondering what great new technological innovations are allowing us to enter a new age of high quality digital audio, and the answer is simple: none. This is not a matter of some new type of connectivity or a breakthrough in headphone transducers, it’s a matter of customers actually wanting more than 128 kb/s going into their ears. Bluetooth has always been able to carry more than enough information from your device to your wireless headphones and – data plan concerns aside – your phone is a perfectly good music player.

What’s still unclear is where the boundaries will settle for mainstream consumers. Sure, an extra $10 per month for a premium streaming service might be easy but is your Uncle Arthur really going to invest in, and actually carry around, a Walkman? Yeah, I didn’t think so. But it does look like the quality we’ve slowly ceded to convenience over the last decade or two is returning and it’s going to sound even better the second time around.

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