Sony’s Walkman line of portable audio products have a long and wide history. It started with the original cassette player built in 1978, and was, for a while, a colloquial description for portable audio players (the same way tissues are called Kleenexes in the US). Sony continues the line with today’s announcement of new additions to two lines of portable media players, as well as dock speakers.

The new S series Walkman announced today are comparable to the A series Walkman with its digital noise canceling technology, which allows the user to choose from modes calibrated to his or her environment – ‘train/bus’, ‘airplane’, or ‘indoors’; as well as the Digital Sound Enhancement Engine, which recreates the high-frequency range of compressed audio files. The battery lasts fifty hours longer than previous comparable models – 40 with digital noise canceling on. The S series will go on sale on the 9th of October for an estimated price of between 14,000 and 20,000 JPY for storage sizes of 8 to 32 GB.