Sony DMP-Z1 Signature Series

Sony's Tomoaki "Tomo" Sato gave me an inside look at his latest masterpiece, the DMP-Z1 digital music player. I've held, operated, heard, and even looked under the hood of the rock-solid Sony DMP-Z1 digital music player — and I'm still not quite sure how to classify it. It sports the look and feel of a high-performance desktop headphone amp/DAC . Yet it runs on rechargeable batteries and stores high-resolution digital audio files, so you can more easily take it from place to place. "It operates just like our Walkman® players ," Sony's Tomoaki "Tomo" Sato told me, "but it has almost six times the headphone output power as our next-largest player." Tomo has been in charge of Sony's Walkman division in Tokyo since 2013, and he was project manager for the DMP-Z1. I caught up with him before this year's CanJam event in New York City , and he gave me my first glimpse of this special player. "Due to its large size," Tomo said, as he unlatched the DMP-Z1 from the protective case, "we call it transportable instead ...