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In 2003 I bought my first Sony product. It was a second-hand, barebones Discman with one special feature: "electronic skip protection". This meant I could pop it into a makeshift sock-and-belt combination — my own precursor to the phone-holding armbands of last decade — and take it running.
I loved that Discman and, like my other early technological love from another Japanese company, a Nintendo Game Boy (purchased in 1994, also second-hand), it still works today. Both devices use AA batteries, which has slowed their obsolescence compared to today’s phones, tablet computers, laptops and headphones with their user-irreplaceable and doomed-to-die lithium-ion fuel cells.
Last week Sony launched its latest consumer audio product in Tokyo. A pair of wireless earbuds in the same vein as Apple’s AirPods or Samsung’s Galaxy Buds (and more closely resembling the latter), the WF-1000XM3 earphones have one unique feature: active noise cancelling (NC). Of course, where Sony leads, others will follow, and soon.
The earphones were released at an auspicious moment for the Japanese electronics behemoth: the 40th anniversary of its iconic audio product, the Walkman. To celebrate, Sony put on a multilevel retrospective exhibition celebrating the Walkman in its eponymous park in Ginza, the Tokyo neighbourhood that houses luxury brands’ flagship Japanese outlets and serves as a consumerist playground for the third-wealthiest nation’s well-heeled.
From walkies to talkies
A key feature of the exhibition is the Walkman Wall, a 6m-long glass-encased display of key Walkman products since its launch in 1979. The display highlights how rapidly — and adventurously — Sony updated and toyed with the design of the device that made it a household name and democratised the enjoyment of music outside the home.
The exhibition is a reminder of the formats for mobile audio that were launched and then abandoned, either because they didn’t take off, or because they were rapidly made obsolete.
First there were tape cassettes. CDs followed five years later in 1984, and their smaller, hardier, readable-and-writeable, skip-proof descendants, MiniDiscs, arrived in 1992. (MDs, while popular for two decades in Japan, didn’t take off in the same way elsewhere.)
When the MP3 file format made digital music feasible, Sony partnered with Swedish company Ericsson to make co-branded mobile phones, leveraging the power of the Walkman brand.
The world’s first portable music format, the vinyl LP, doesn’t feature in Sony’s exhibition. It’s proved the most enduring of physical audio formats, but that’s down to its collectability rather than its portability.
Sony phone home
Despite lagging Samsung and Apple, particularly in terms of design, Sony’s phones are commonplace in Tokyo. They jostle for top spot with the iPhone, where in most Western markets it is Samsung doing the jostling.
Sony makes wholly respectable handsets — the cameras are excellent, the innards keep pace with the best of other brands, and it’s thanks to the Japanese company that phone waterproofing went from novel to de rigueur.
But in the global smartphone market the company hasn’t had the same sort of success it can rely on at home. Features like high-resolution 4K displays have failed to excite international buyers — no wonder, given it’s hard to distinguish 4K from 2K with the naked eye on a 6-inch or smaller display — and glacial-paced design updates mean the thick bezels of recent Sony phones make them look dated.
But in the personal audio space, Sony is the brand to beat. After losing ground at the top of the headphone market to Bose, Sennheiser and Bang & Olufsen, in 2018 Sony made the best over-ear headphones of the year.
Its WH-1000XM3 headphones have everything you want from a pair of R6,000 head-huggers: sleek design, class-leading active NC — exterior mics detect ambient sound and feed equal and opposite soundwaves into the headphones, effectively cancelling it out — a comfortable fit, and more than 30 hours of use to a charge (that’s a third more than the previous go-to, the Bose QC35 II).
I’m in-ears, dear
The new in-ear headphones aim to mimic the best of their over-ear predecessors. The NC is outstanding, as is the battery life and audio fidelity. The design is elegant, the fit comfortable and secure, and the precision engineering downright miraculous. They improve in every key way on the first generation of truly wireless buds Sony made.
But they are nonetheless imperfect. The sizeable case can’t charge wirelessly, the buds can’t connect to a phone and laptop simultaneously, and despite a touch-sensitive pad on each bud there’s no way to adjust their volume. Inexplicably, given that the likely target market includes commuters and the exercise-inclined, there’s no sweat-or waterproofing.
For now the WF-1000XM3s, as the only in-ears headphones with NC, will sell well to those who can afford them (pricing is expected to be around R5,000 when they launch in September). And Sony will almost certainly address all the niggles with the inevitable XM4s.
If its history has taught Sony anything, it’s that there’s no such thing as perfection, but that’s no reason not to keep striving for it.
• Wilson visited Tokyo as a guest of Sony
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