The question that comes to me about these expensive audio devices is: "How much of the price comes from building the device itself, and how much comes from a person deciding to set a price that will match perceptions of quality?" If Sony can make a ZX2 for $200, does setting the price closer to $1K attract or deter buyers? If someone said "I can sell you an audio player for $100 that will beat the performance of the Sony!" would I buy it, or distrust the ads?
How much of the Veyron's price is for engineering, and how much for marketing cachet? What is good sound worth to me? By current standards the money I invested in stereo gear is middle-of-the-road but by many people's standards I paid way too much... or way too little. Take your pick.
All I really want is a good product that's reliable and sounds good. I used Sony Discman units for years, and they only quit working after too many hours. I'm attracted to the ZX2, but put off by its need for the Android OS and special software on the host computer.
I disagree in the sense that it should not matter how much of the price comes from what. The price is the price--Sony is free to set it at whatever, and consumers can choose to buy it or not regardless. It's the free market at work. I never understood the "complaining" of too high a price on anything. Pricing and value is relative. If someone can't hear the difference between the ZX2 or a Sansa, what does it matter how much difference the costs are? And if they did, who am I to tell them whether it's worth the difference to them or not?
Sony does NOT need to justify it's asking price. The product's success or failure in the marketplace will no doubt shape their future ventures. And make no mistake, Sony's motivation is the bottom line--after all, it is a for-profit company the last I checked.
They aren't doing this for some benevolent reason.
My ZX2 arrived yesterday. It feels solid, the build looks beautiful and IMO, it's worth the asking price. And I'm not seeing the requirement for "special software on the host computer?" All I did was plug it into my Windows 7 machine, copy music to the Sony's drive, and it's been playing music in an endless loop since. And it also works quite well streaming from a Kodi/XBMC/OpenELEC DLNA server over WiFi.
Sure, I too have niggles about it not detecting "cover.jpg" or "folder.jpg" as cover art or not recognizing ";" separators in the tags. My Squeezeserver library is really organized this way, and it's going to be a pain to embed artwork in every file and also remove all multi-tagged fields.
And yes--it sounds really good OOTB on a set of AD-H5000. Can't wait till I can get some 200+ burn-in hours on it.
