At the Hong Kong High-End Audio Visual Show last week, Sony unveiled the newest additions to its Signature Series: a pair of snazzy looking in-ear headphones for more than $1,700, and a digital music player worth a whopping $7,882 to go along with it.
For that money, the DMP-Z1 digital music player supports all hi-res music formats, includes an “audiophile-grade” headphone amp and even a gold-plated volume dial “to ensure absolute sonic purity.” This thing even has gold in its solder “to enhance the signal flow.”
It’s decked out with numerous top-of-the-line features and offers a “vinyl processor” that restores some warmth to digital music. Sony’s DSEE HX processor can supposedly rebuild whatever audio — from instrumentation to human voices — is lost during digital compression. For storage, the DMP-Z1 has 256GB of internal storage and two separate microSD slots to ensure there’s room for all of the music you want to pack in.
The music player can connect to your computer over USB-C, and its battery is good for up to 10 hours of low-res music on the go or nine hours if you’re listening at high resolution. Would anyone not listen at hi-res after spending almost $8,000 on an audio player?
Right now, Sony’s music player and equally ostentatious earbuds are both on sale exclusively in Sony’s East Asian markets. If you really want to get into the nitty gritty, there’s already a 12-page thread on the DMP-Z1 over at Head-Fi.