Dedicated Music Device
NW-A306 Walkman by Sony. (image: Fabian Frinzel).
Even if you’ve never used a Walkman, you know them. There are enough movies expounding their exuberant teenage thrill: Faye Dolan gleefully shrieking down the street, one ear tethered to her boyfriend’s radio debut in That Thing You Do!; Ren McCormack and Willard bopping in single file, umbilically linked to a Walkman in Footloose; or Marty McFly in double denim, cassette player provocatively hitched to hip.
It’s less common, however, to see Walkmans playing a defining cultural role today. In recent decades, technology companies have striven to consolidate hardware and its roles into the single omnipotent smartphone. What’s it like, then, to return to the Walkman in 2023? I put this to Mariko Watanabe at Sony’s Creative Center when researching the latest Sony Walkman, the NW-A306.
Watanabe acknowledges over email that multi-functional devices are convenient, but adds that “there are people who want to purely enjoy music. It can be considered a very minimalistic act.” Sony aims to provide this uncoupling through a device that “offers high sound quality that cannot be achieved with smartphones”. The NW-A306 retails at €399; its more premium sibling, the NW-ZX700, is double this.
These new Walkmans are minimalist insofar as they seek to reduce the clutter of information and data proffered by something like a smartphone. Yet the device is also a maximalist move – the luxury of buying an additional expensive (and resource-heavy) gadget. Luxury and purity, then, appear to be the philosophies that underpin the 2023 Walkman. Sony’s focus on sound, for example, has acquired a digital dimension in the new iterations of the Walkman. The company’s R&D team has used deep neural-network algorithms within the NW-A306’s software to improve the sound quality of compressed audio files offered by streaming platforms or downloaded music.
The device’s aesthetic choices also echo these ideals. The NW-A306 is a small, sleek black box, all flat touchscreen surface with discreet black-on-black play, pause, rewind and fast-forward buttons on the spine. The detailing is monastically restrained, with the most noticeable physical element being “a wave-shaped knurling to improve the rigidity of the body,” says Wanatabe, adding that “the materials chosen for the housing and the body [were] designed to suppress resonance from the circuit board,” which in turn improves sound quality.
This, then, is a grown-up Walkman for a grown-up user. Whilst the name Walkman carries a certain amount of nostalgia, the NW-A306 is intended for that intersection on the Venn diagram of collectors who covet hardware and earnest sound aficionados. This is a device for people who yearn after headphone jacks because they’ve invested in really good headphones – and will tell you about it. Less Marty McFly, more Patrick Bateman.
Words Evi Hall
Photographs Fabian Frinzel
This article was originally published in Disegno #35. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.