Sony reveals new hi-res audio range in an explosion of colour
It wants to be your go-to source for ear-pleasing tunes
Three new Xperia Z5 devices aren’t the only new bits of kit that Sony has unveiled here at IFA 2015.
The Japanese tech giant also made a point to praise the hi-res audio movement, before announcing a new range of colourful headphones to match a shiny new hi-res audio player.
The flagship for the awkwardly-named h.ear range is the over-ear headphones, which look stylish and eye-catching enough to bring the fight straight to the doors of Apple’s Beats. The cans feature 40mm driver units and a titanium-coated diaphragm to reduce unwanted vibrations and maintain crisp, clear sound.
Music fans looking to preserve their immaculately-sculpted hair have the in-ear h.ear headphone option too, which boasts 16 hours of active noise-cancelling tech to battle annoying environmental sounds.
Sony’s decision to call all these “Hi-Res headphones” is a bit dodgy and disingenuous, mind you. There’s no such thing as high- or low-res headphones, merely headphones that are good and headphones that are bad. A great pair of 40 year-old cans, on sale before digital music was even “a thing”, will let you listen to hi-res audio just fine if plugged into the right source.
And as for what Sony wants you to plug these new headphones into? That’d be the new Walkman players, wouldn’t it? There’s the NW-A25HN (on the left in the above picture), a compact player that comes packaged with noise-cancelling headphones and its own internal noise-cancelling tech; and the NW-ZX100HN, a higher-end player with the same noise-reducing tech but the battery life to play up to 45 hours of continuous 24-bit/192kHz hi-res audio. It’s also a bit more compact than Sony’s existing high-end Network Walkman models.
Pricing for all the above is yet to be confirmed, but we should know more soon.
For more IFA 2015 product news, check out our hub here.
Sam Kieldsen
Contributor 
