Sony updates the Walkman as a $5,900 gold-plated MP3 player

Sony last week revived its famed Walkman brand of portable music players, with a trio of updated products that feature Android 16, touch screens, eye-popping prices, and dubious assertions of audiophile appeal. The Japanese giant named the new models the NW-WM1ZM3, NW-WM1AM3 and NW-ZX900. All can store and play many codecs, including MP3s, WMA, and FLAC files, plus others like Direct Stream Digital (DSD) and Apple Lossless, which use various tricks to avoid nasty artefacts accruing during the di