Sony Insider Learns More About NW-S70* Series

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According to a confidential (and much admired) source close to Sony that has supplied us with reliable information before has observed some queries in the comment section of in our inital report regarding the NW-S70* series. The details are surprising, and further sets this product series apart from all the rest. Let us all hope that the forthcoming high capacity Walkman juggernaut in early 2007 will have such functionality.

• The earphones are the EX85′s, yet a noise cancelling derivative. The appearance of these earphones are similar to the MDR-NC22 ‘phones. Upon consideration, the 3.5mm jack is truely astounding to facilitate noise cancelling (a major development in contact design). Unfortunately, noise cancelling will only function with these phones connected (ATRACLife will seek further clarification on this statement).
• ATRAC Advanced Lossless and PCM is supported on the player; this further compliments Sony’s aspirations of this unit being regarded as a quality unit in the overall NW-S line.
• The jog dial does not spin 360°, but rather rotates like most common jog dials.
• OLED’s will be commonplace with Sony for quite a while, and the NW-S70* series takes the display standard once step further by including a screen with brightness twice that of previous offerings. GUI development within Sony’s engineering division has been rampant with the Walkman line, PSP and PS3 and it is very likely that the next generation of Sony portable music players will have a Cross Media Bar/XMB appearance. It’s all about convergance at Sony these days, and perhaps a unified GUI could truly bring the company further success.
• We’re getting reports of line-in encoding with this unit that may be possible with a proprietary plug. Settings available on the unit designate quality and is asynchronous with your library and supports Gracenote. Details are sparse, and it is not fully clear on details such as monitoring and the actual recording process. We will aggressively pursue our leads and see what we can dig up.