Leak reveals two Sony Walkman flagships, including $4,000 top model with copper chassis

After the slightly cheaper Sony Walkman NW-ZX900 had already leaked, The Walkman Blog also published images and details of the Sony Walkman NW-WM1ZM3 and Sony Walkman NW-WM1AM3. As with their direct predecessors, the two variants are practically identical, apart from the casing.
While the cheaper AM3 features an aluminum casing weighing 425 grams, the ZM3's 670-gram housing is made of gold-plated low-oxygen copper. This is supposed to improve the sound, but also has a drastic impact on the price. The NW-WM1AM3 reportedly costs around ¥345,000 yen ($1,290), while the NW-WM1ZM3 costs ¥650,000 ($4,120).
The music players are expected to deliver even better sound than their predecessors thanks to a range of improvements to the electronics and passive cooling system. Details on the performance of the improved S-Master HX digital amplifier are not yet available. In any case, Sony includes a Bluetooth chip that also supports Qualcomm aptX Adaptive and LC3, alongside a 3.5 mm and a balanced 4.4 mm headphone jack.
Although the new music players are larger, thicker and heavier than their direct predecessors, battery life drops from 40 to 35 hours when playing locally stored music, or to 31 hours when streaming music. The display grows from 5 to 5.5 inches, while the resolution increases from 720p to 1080p. Sony is expected to offer variants with 128 GB and 256 GB of storage, though this will likely be expandable via a microSD card as usual.














