Sony has refreshed its Walkman lineup with three new high-end music players, and the flagship asks for a figure most people would associate with a used car. The NW-WM1ZM3 costs $5,899, and Sony is betting that a narrow slice of audiophiles will pay it for a device whose job is simply to play music.
The money goes largely into materials. The WM1ZM3’s chassis is built mostly from oxygen-free copper and finished in gold plating, down to gold-plated screws. Beneath it sits a 5.5-inch touchscreen running Android 16, which means streaming apps are available alongside local files, plus a headphone jack. Below it, the NW-WM1AM3 swaps to a mostly black aluminium body that keeps gold plating on the back, for $2,899. The NW-ZX900 starts the range at $1,899 with a smaller 5-inch display, and Sony says it shares many of the same audio features as its pricier siblings.
The engineering changes are mostly about power and signal. Sony says it has reworked the power circuitry to deliver cleaner, more stable current with less interference, and has fitted a larger high-purity copper coil in the filter stage that shapes the digital amplifier’s balanced output. According to the company, the coil’s flat wire lowers resistance and distortion and improves clarity. These are Sony’s claims, and whether listeners can hear the difference through their own headphones is exactly the kind of question that divides the hi-fi community.
All three players are rated for up to 31 hours of battery life and are due to ship in January. Sony has not confirmed pricing for the UAE, Saudi Arabia or Egypt, and buyers should not expect a straight currency conversion. Import duties, VAT and distributor margins usually push premium audio prices higher in the region, so the final numbers will only become clear once local retailers list them.
The bigger story is that Sony is still making Walkmans at all. The brand that defined portable music in 1979 now competes with the smartphone, which most people already carry and which handles streaming perfectly well. Sony’s answer, like that of rivals such as Astell&Kern and FiiO, is to retreat upmarket and sell dedicated players as luxury objects built around premium components.
That strategy makes commercial sense for a shrinking niche, yet it raises an awkward point. When a music player costs more than most foldable phones and runs the same streaming services, the gold plating starts to look like the main selling point, not the sound.
