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The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago
- Daub 7y agoThe complete genius of the Walkman was that it featured two headphone jacks. Such a simple design decision, with such large ramifications. In total, the Walkman is a classic example of a disruptive industry: creating new industries and killing (or at least mortally wounding) old ones. I remember how terminally moribund the industry-controlled pop charts had become before mix tapes became a thing.
- JKCalhoun 7y agoI guess I never took advantage of that. For me it was: 1) Headphones — I was used to listening to music from speakers. Even familiar music was new sounding with headphones. I had listened through headphones before, but infrequently. The Walkman only had headphones — checkmate. 2) Walking around (rocking around) with my music. Sure, "transistor radios" had been around for decades, but this was a compact, stereo, cassette player. …I'm reminded of Frank Black's "I Heard Ramona Sing" — a tribute to both the Ramones and the Walkman.
- Zelphyr 7y agoAnd like the white iPod ear buds that came twenty years later, those orange foam headphones were a status symbol. Simply walking around with them hanging around your neck made you cool e.g.; Marty McFly at the beginning of Back To The Future I find it amusing that we went from relatively small Walkman headphones, to tiny little Apple earbuds, to giant Beats headphones as the status symbol.
- astrodust 7y agoRemember the old ridiculously huge cans from the 1970s with a quarter-inch jack? They're back!
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- Zelphyr 7y agoThat was my exact thought the first time I saw Beats headphones.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoIt's hard to consume conspicuously when everything is miniaturized.
- helloworld 7y agoThe article links to a very funny video of today's kids trying to figure out a Walkman: https://www.stereogum.com/1675629/watch-kids-try-to-use-a-walkman-for-the-first-time/video/ https://www.stereogum.com/1675629/watch-kids-try-to-use-a-wa... It's surprising to see how challenging the Walkman UI is to a complete novice.
- dingaling 7y agoNot many UIs are intuitive. I once tried to use a clickwheel iPod whilst my collleague was in a shop. I had to give up and revert to the car stereo for music. The majority of UX enlightenment comes from demonstration.
- galonk 7y agoMy first walkman was a WM-22, not that much smaller than the first model. My last was a WM-150, which was just a few mm larger than the actual tape in each direction. It felt amazingly elegant. (Took me a while to find out the model numbers by looking at image searches... Sony always had the worst product "names".)
- 13of40 7y agoI don't know if this is apocryphal or not, but several years ago I read that the original was a little bigger than pocket sized, so Sony had shirts with slightly bigger pockets made to demo it.
- astrodust 7y agoIt was the 1980s. Everyone had huge hair, huge shoulder pads and huge pockets.
- astrodust 7y agoSomehow Sony made a cassette player that was barely bigger than a typical cassette case. You rarely see engineering like that. Today electronics can be made smaller, thinner and so on, but this was a complex, intrinsically mechanical device. That's the amazing part. That player is like a well-made watch. It was probably an off-shoot of their camcorder miniaturization efforts. Those got incredibly tiny considering they had to act like a VCR, helical head and all. The sad thing is that as soon as Sony perfected the cassette player the CD was the popular medium and they had to do it all over again. When they perfected that MP3 showed up. It's like how they made a perfect CRT and then flat panels hit hard.
- xeromal 7y agoAny idea what the hotline feature was like?
- throwaway2048 7y agoThere was a lot of concern inside Sony that the Walkman would be perceived as anti-social, that's why it came with two headphone jacks, and the hotline feature which let others talk to you, via microphone, over the music. Both were essentially gimmicks and never really worked well, and were soon dropped.
- piqufoh 7y agoI was wondering this too - google found this > a "hotline" button which activated a small built-in microphone, partially overriding the sound from the cassette, and allowing one user to talk to the other over the music. and as the other poster remarks > When the follow-up model, "Walkman II" came out, the "hotline" button was phased out. Was there ever an actual use case for this, or is it pure gimmick?
- timcederman 7y agoPure gimmick. My Bose QC-20s have this feature and every time I've tried to use it, it's been useless.
- mclehman 7y agoThe Sony WH-1000XM series (possibly the next segment down as well?) still has this feature and I've found it good enough to be useful. On planes it's simpler than pausing/removing the headphones to order a drink and the same in the office when you just need a quick yes/no from someone next to you. There's also a passive mode I use when I'm actually outside with the headphones on. You don't hear engine noise or planes overhead but you can still hear tire noise of nearby cars so you don't get run over. If it's quiet you even hear footsteps.
- dugditches 7y agoRemember the cool kid having a Dual Deck stereo to make mixtapes. Having a rats nest of tape when one failed. Then that evolving into whoever had good internet and a CD Burner. Eventually almost 'renting' music by returning a CD-RW with a new request list. Just how much Discmans would skip with Burnt CD's versus Legitimate ones. To spending $500 on a 128mb MP3 player. Compressing Mp3's into tiny WMA's.
- samplatt 7y agoFor an entity that's waged a multi-decade billion-dollar bloody and bitter war against music piracy, Sony certainly have been instrumental in its proliferation.
- tw04 7y agoThat's because the device group is a different entity than the media group. Unfortunately the media group made enough money to start dictating things to the device group which didn't single handedly ruin it, but definitely opened the door to the Korean rivals that weren't bending over backwards to stop consumers from using their devices.
- megablast 7y agoIt did ruin the minidisc, when Sony decided you couldn't get digital data from the disc.
- agumonkey 7y agothere's an alternate universe where MiniDisc replaced floppies in the early 90s and became the main storage format.
- kalleboo 7y ago90mm Magneto-Optical ("MO") was a lot closer to being that future - it was the same tech as MiniDisc, but openly licensed, and actually had really good traction in Japan (on par with Zip drives in the west). 600 MB on a disc the size of a floppy, with random-access read and write. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magneto-optical_drive
- keyle 7y agoWalking with music has completely changed my life. Can't imagine the amount of ideas I've had and steps I've taken listening to music. With music I can cross the entire city on foot and more. footnote: do you remember when your batteries were running low and the cassette would start slowing down the music? ;)
- eicossa 7y agoA moment to process the fact that the song has suddenly started playing sloooowly too :)
- Gunvig 7y ago>>With music I can cross the entire city on foot and more. I'll play Devil's Advocate here and say that the Walkman marked the beginning of the end for people having spatial awareness and social skills in public places. You've only got to look at all the people meandering through our city streets today; ears plugged with headphones, faces glued to screens –often walking along with other people but yet completely detached from them, barely conscious of the world around them– to see what the Walkman's legacy is. Personally I prefer to listen to my music on headphones when I'm alone and at a fixed location, rather than bimbling around, getting in other people's way and with my safety compromised by having my senses plugged up. I've actually seen cyclists riding in traffic with cycling helmets on [y'know, for the safety!] but also wearing headphones. Makes me cringe every time I pass one, knowing they've purposely cutting out the sounds of the traffic around them.
- W-Stool 7y agoDon't forget the MiniDisc format that Sony also released years later under the "Walkman" brand - for a while there it was an audio storage format and playback hardware that briefly seemed ahead of its time. Sony, if nothing else, were technical innovators during their best days. You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters.
- JKCalhoun 7y ago> You knew the gear wasn't imagined and designed by a bunch of bean counters. Hmmm.... Only later when they were marketing TV's? Hated Sony for selling essentially the same TV with the same guts but leaving out one chip (for example) so that "Picture in Picture" required you spend an extra $500 on the high end model. I always suspected it went something like this: • Engineers describe the feature set they can deliver for a new TV. • Bean counters determine it can be manufactured for $500. • Marketing decide there will be three models: the F, the FX, and the FX+. Determine pricing will be: $800, $1200, $1800. • Marketing aligns the FX+ model with the engineers feature set — cross off features to arrive at the FX — cross off even more to arrive at the F. • Profit. I shouldn't beat up on Sony though — all consumer electronics have been doing something like this since ... when ... the 1950's or so?
- forgotmypw3 7y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
- murat124 7y agoAlso this is how we saved batteries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8v9Ijp1So https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yk8v9Ijp1So
- johnpowell 7y agoIn high school I worked for Kodak in photo lab doing the processing for all the overnight photos in Oregon and Washington. The nice thing is all disposable cameras had AA batteries in them and we filled up a few 50 gallon garbage cans of disposable cameras a night. On my breaks I would just sit there ripping the batteries out of the cameras for Walkman batteries for my friends and I. I accidentally touched the capacitor for the flash once when taking out the batteries. Only made that mistake once.
- niftich 7y agoThe UX of cassettes was very useful for sharing and swapping music or speech, and for resuming where one left off. Because of the linear tape, the cassette's "playback cursor" was stateful and independent from whether the medium was read-only or not. Playback resumed at (nearly) the same spot as it was last stopped, even if moved to a different player. Successor formats didn't have this property. Interestingly, Sony emulated the auto-resume feature in some Discman CD players, and later it became common in car CD players, but there was no way to maintain playback position after swapping players. Later, MP3 players maintained their own playback state, but getting tracks on or off the device's built-in or removable storage was with file-based interfaces that connected to computers. This stateful cursor functionality is only returning these days with URLs to media-hosting sites that accept timecode parameters.
- sho 7y agoI love how you conceptualise things based upon what seems to be your familiarity with DB cursors, stateful interfaces and other CS concepts. You're absolutely right, of course - it's just an interesting choice of conceptual frameworks to position your analogy within. I'm sure a non-programmer could also identify this property of cassettes as a medium, but they wouldn't be anywhere near as precise, nor use anything like that terminology... I'm reminded of a character called Randy in a book called Cryptonomicon: > To translate it into UNIX system administration terms (Randy's fundamental metaphor for just about everything) I had a smile of recognition reading that, just like I had a smile of recognition reading yours. Stateful indeed. You might even term it a continuation.
- Timothycquinn 7y agoI recall my brother coming back from a trip to Japan with a top end Walkman in the early 90's. It was seemed to be all metal and so small. Was a mechanical work of art.
- StringyBob 7y agoAlthough The Walkman was released 40 years ago, Sony had actually made something that will look familiar another 10 years earlier and was used on Apollo moon missions: https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/5254hjpg https://airandspace.si.edu/multimedia-gallery/5254hjpg https://www.sony.net/Fun/design/history/product/1960/tc-50.html https://www.sony.net/Fun/design/history/product/1960/tc-50.h... Incidentally, I only discovered this recently after hearing the Apollo 11 astronauts use one to play a prank on mission control while on the way back to earth. You can hear this at the amazing https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/ (definitely works best on desktop not mobile)
- ignoramous 7y agoThe Walkman is a classic case of how an entrenched competitor with deep pockets couldn't really stand in the way of an innovative product. I point this out because, whenever you come across an idea for a startup, you'd inadvertently find one or more businesses already built around the idea, sometimes with ginormous funding or income. Remember how iPod beat Walkman, Firefox gazumped IE, Zoom sped past WebX, stripe pocketed payments: Find the key pain points and try to solve them. Don't turn a blind eye [0] no matter how difficult they might be to solve, you wouldn't know it until you try. To quote mittermayr from a recent thread [1]: > Don't throw away an idea because someone else has already made it. People completely underestimate the amount of money you can make as a runner-up, or even as a 5th or 10th-place service in some markets. Most of the products I'm involved with have made me quite substantial amounts over the years compared to the minimal time required to upkeep them. There's at least ten companies I can name at an instant that do almost exactly the same, yet I still make money doing the very same thing. > Appreciate the invaluable advantage a market-proven idea brings and focus on whatever its target audience lacks or loves most about the most-popular offering. It doesn't mean you have to copy something (where's the fun in that), but consider this if you start working on something and then come across someone who's done the exact same thing with good success. Don't give up, use it. [0] http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164873 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19164873
- niftich 7y agoFWIW the iPod didn't really beat deep-pocket Sony's cassette Walkman or MiniDisc per se, it beat the uneven and dizzyingly wide field of onboard-storage digital audio players, from thumbdrive-looking sticks that only held a couple songs, to full-blown Creative and iRiver HDD players on which you could conceivably carry your entire collection, but whose device UX, song-copying computer-side UX, and resilience were bested by Apple. It also came at a time when portable CD players that could play a CD-R full of MP3s or WMAs were widely available, and were a popular incremental upgrade for those who were already used to burning their own CDs. With suddenly dozens of ways to enjoy portable audio, Sony was hurt by the fall of the MiniDisc. Less so in the world of CD players, but in the the world of digital audio players, they were just another poorly-differentiated manufacturer. Songs were decoupled from their original hardcopy and became files one could manage on a computer, and the UX of moving these tracks onto portable playback devices was starting to matter. Actors like Real, Microsoft, Apple, MusicMatch, and NullSoft were in this space, and their interests didn't necessarily align with the interests of audio player makers. Apple initially partnered with MusicMatch when the iPod launched to have a file management story on Windows, before they shipped iTunes.
- emptybits 7y agoFond memories of Sony and the Walkman era. I worked part time for Sony from the mid to late 1980s while I was a student, paying tuition bills. It was a dream job for a consumer electronics nerd and budding AV enthusiast, getting to demo and play with everything. Sony was still king of CRTs with XBR line of Trinitrons consistently on top. (Back breakers to move across a room, BTW.) Their ES family of audio amps and reference CD players were generally well respected. Meh for speakers. But back to Walkmans ... it was really eye-opening how multiple times per year they would release new variations in size and materials and features or just colours, and people would line up or pre-pay to get their hands on them. People who already had Walkmans, often. The brand loyalty was mostly deserved IMO, because Sony was really doing some original R&D. Personal faves ... compact models in the drop & waterproof Sports line, especially when issued in non-yellow. The solar model was weird, and not super effective, but damn Sony was trying.[1] The metal, and great-sounding Boodo Khan with supplied headphones was also pretty slick.[2] But from a materials and engineering POV there were some gorgeous delicate little metal-body units and at least one was actually the same size as a plastic cassette case itself.[3] (It would expand slightly when you inserted your media.) Long after I left Sony I tried to keep the brand faith with MiniDiscs for years. But the MD's time has also come and gone... [1] http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-f107 http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-f107 [2] http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/dd-100 http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/dd-100 [3] http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-10 http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-10
- spenczar5 7y agoThanks for sharing this stuff. It’s hard to resist thinking of iPhones when you talk about people lining up to buy the latest model, even when they already have a Walkman. It makes me daydream about Apple looking like Sony (a bit bloated, a bit of a faded giant) in 30 years.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoI'd say that Apple are already pretty much at that point, tbh.
- kh_hk 7y ago
- pjmlp 7y agoNow I feel old, remembering when they came into the scene. Never got to own one though, just clones.
- _pmf_ 7y agoRetrospectively, I'm very impressed by the mechanical quality. I remember the compartment latch failing on some (non-Sony devices), but never the actual core drive, an this is with thousands of hours of usage.
- King-Aaron 7y agoThe engineering inside a cassette player (both audio cassettes and video) always intrigued me. There's so much design and manufacturing involved for something that eventually scaled to meet a $50 price point. When I was younger I couldn't fathom how companies could afford to do it.
- Quequau 7y agoMan the early Walkman was a magical device. I got a latter one and mine was barely larger than an audio cassette case. The only access to music I had was from a friend whose older brother copied a seemingly random collection for us to have. Vangelis, The Violent Femmes, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Warren Zevon. I think I listened to the same eight cassettes for most of the following year.
- rob74 7y agodisclaimer: listening to music using headphones while bike riding, roller-skating or skiing is now strongly discouraged (still acceptable while taking a walk or unglamorously using public transportation however).
- bagels 7y agoBy who, for what reason?
- rob74 7y agoBy the authorities, for the reason of your own physical well-being. In some places, it's even illegal: https://www.quora.com/In-California-is-it-illegal-to-ride-a-bike-with-headphones-on https://www.quora.com/In-California-is-it-illegal-to-ride-a-...
- rags2riches 7y agoThe same people who demand you drive with your windows down lest you become a hazard to your surroundings when you can't hear them properly.
- agumonkey 7y agosadly I have to admit that riding a bike is not a mindless activity in most places. lack of attention can cause collisions
- ScottBurson 7y agoI have a D6C Walkman Pro -- bought in, I think, 1990 -- that still works (or did last I tried it, anyway, maybe a couple of years ago). Great little deck; with metal tape and Dolby C, did a fine job recording CDs.
- agumonkey 7y agoI found a Discman outside a store bin. It's partially failing but I'll attempt fixing it.
- robdachshund 7y agoThose go for some serious money these days.
- cannam 7y agoI have one too, and I agree it's an amazing device, but a while ago I discovered it had seized up and stopped working - the fast-forward and rewind had been dodgy for a while, but both of them had finally given up, and playback had also failed. I replaced the belts, which got playback working again (see picture here https://twitter.com/chris_cannam/status/1043961675114840070 https://twitter.com/chris_cannam/status/1043961675114840070) but ffwd/rwd appeared to be victims of a seized pivot which I couldn't get moving. So it plays beautifully once more, but still can't wind. Might be worth checking that yours is still going ok, in case lack of use is a factor.
- khazhou 7y agoI feel it's time for boomboxes to come back. Not purple medicine-pill bluetooth players, but big ol' boxes you can put on your shoulder and Fight the Power with 8" speakers. There was a whole movement around playing music out, now we just inject it into our ear canals. Nostalgia... or genius?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- KineticLensman 7y agoPersonally I'm happy for it to remain as nostalgia. I was at a campsite recently and the people in the tent next door had a playlist that was execrable. They weren't actually too loud and they adhered to the site's night-time noise cut-off rule, but their choice of music - massively different from mine - really degraded the pleasure of the camping experience that evening. YMMV. [Edit] Also, I am perhaps biased here because I am moderately deaf, and thus sensitized to noise pollution. Music makes it very hard to follow conversations, even with my hearing aids. This wasn't actually a problem at the campsite, but is a total conversation killer in enclosed spaces with hard surfaces (like many restaurants).
- nicky0 7y agoThey are back. At least, in my neighbourhood, the kids are walking around with giant bluetooth shoulder-size boomboxes.
- acheron 7y agoMy opinion on that is about the same as Kirk and Spock's: https://www.wired.com/2016/09/punk-star-trek-iv-vulcan-nerve-pinch/ https://www.wired.com/2016/09/punk-star-trek-iv-vulcan-nerve... edit: while searching for that, I discovered that Kirk Thatcher is reprising the role in a cameo in the new Spider-man movie: https://www.startrek.com/article/trek-ivs-punk-on-bus-returns-in-spider-man-homecoming https://www.startrek.com/article/trek-ivs-punk-on-bus-return...
- gumby 7y agoThough I remember its introduction well, what struck me was how much copy there was in that ad. I think of textful ads as having faded out in the 60s (just look at the long essays that were ads from the 40s or 20s!) but really: would you read an ad in a magazine with that wall of text?
- Dowwie 7y agoMy first cassette for my first Walkman was "License to Ill". That remained my favorite tape of all time. The Walkman was flawless, too.
- gopuseyuj 7y agoi earn $400 hourly on the internet. She has been with out artwork for five months however final month her charge emerge as $12747 really on foot on the internet for some hours. study greater on this net internet sit...www.prizebest.com
- superasn 7y agoThe amount of innovation that has happened in the space in 40 years is just amazing to me. From having to carry around boxes of cassette tapes that now fit in a small 2mm chip, to the wireless headphones with individual Bluetooth pairing that can recognize speech, to the live streaming of not just songs but music videos while on a moving train, makes me wonder how far we've progressed in such little time.
- zeristor 7y agoWhat is the current state of the art for music? DVD-Audio was barely a thing ten or so years ago. After buying a B&W Zeppelin Air I was signed me up for their Society of Sound with very high quality 5Gb audio files for an album. My Zeppelin has since died. Is audio quality still improving binaural tracks? The only time I’ve been really aware of audio quality was playing a Blu-Ray of an episode of Madmen.
- opencl 7y agoEverything since CD audio has been either the same quality or worse. Increasing the sampling rate does nothing but encode ultrasonics which are at best inaudible and at worst introduce additional harmonic distortion into the audible frequencies. 16 bit samples with dithering are well beyond the dynamic range limits of human hearing.
- kevin_thibedeau 7y agoSACD and DVD-A have more than two channels (or 4 if you could get a hold of a quad CD)
- janwijbrand 7y agoThere're many songs I still listen to, that I listened on my walkman-clone. In most of them I can still "hear" the moment where the cassette stopped and I had to turn it around for the remainder of the song.
- dr_dshiv 7y agoI loved the RadioShack tape recorder. I used it as a little portable boombox that could play in my backpack and create a little sound bubble that would accompany me and my friends.
- wazoox 7y agoMy colleague has one TPS-L2 on his desk... I have an Atari 2600 game cartridge on mine :)
- dangling20 7y agoBut did you question her on the other songs. That damn transsexual wreck might have spooled the tape to the beginning, and just heard that one song. And not the second one. Never trust a chick with a dick and a rewind button.
- aphextim 7y agoI remember after they came out with portable CD players, at first lacking any sort of skip protection it was pretty much unusable for any action sports. At the time I enjoyed snowboarding at a local ski hill and I used my Walkman well into the life cycle of CDs making remixes of all my favorites tracks off CD's onto one cassette to listen to for the snowboarding session. Best part, no skipping! (This was around 1997) Some of the later Anti-Skip that was like 45-60 seconds would be doable, unless you are going over some moguls but for cruising without much hopping/tricks I'm sure some Anti-Skip in the 30s range would have sufficed.
- ngcc_hk 7y agoWow. That is really a major milestone. It change the scene. And also our view on Japanese hardware innovate culture (seems not software sadly). I love mini-disc more though.
- bluedino 7y agoSony always seemed to be the premium or status brand when it came to consumer electronics, everything from portable music players to televisions and VCR's. They always had competition from brands like Sharp, Pioneer, RCA, Magnavox, but I think the big hit came when the really cheap brands started to flood the market. Sony had the Discman come down to $99 for $349, but buyers were still going for the $39 units from Craig, Koss, Sanyo and such.
- FabHK 7y agoOne super useful feature was "Auto Reverse", allowing you to listen to both sides of a tape without having to take the cassette out and flipping it. It came out 3 years later, eg in the Sony WM-7. One thing I learned while looking into this now is that Music Cassettes (MC) have the magnetic recording tape, and then at both ends a "leader", which is much stronger than the thin magnetic tape, so it doesn't break when the end is reached. Furthermore, the leader is transparent, unlike the magnetic tape, and so auto reverse could be triggered by an optical sensor (this website claims that the WM 7 had an optical sensor - I thought Walkmen (Walkmans?) triggered auto reverse from the mechanical pull when the tape reached the end.) http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-7 http://www.walkmancentral.com/products/wm-7 EDIT to add: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Tape_leaders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Tape_leaders
- slantyyz 7y agoI used to buy leaderless cassettes and I had no issue with auto reverse on my portable cassette players.
- thesmok 7y agoMy Walkman senses when the supply spool stops rotating, and then reverses.
- FabHK 7y agoThat's what I thought would happen. I really wonder whether the WM-7 actually has an optical sensor.
- tomhoward 7y agoA mid-80s Walkman is central to one of my earliest vivid memories. Among the gifts I received for my 9th birthday in 1986 were (1) An AM/FM radio Walkman (replete with the classic orange-padded on-ear headphones), and (2) a plastic kite with an eagle on it. The following day, I walked over to the park nearest our house, stood in the middle of an open sports field, tuned my Walkman to the relatively new Australian rock music station EON-FM, and launched my eagle kite. Fairly soon, as I stood there proudly flying my kite on what was a solidly windy day, the radio playlist transitioned into the intro to Money for Nothing by Dire Straits. To this day, I can still feel the visceral sensation of the buildup of that intro and the sound explosion of that opening guitar riff, and in that moment I knew what rock'n'roll music was all about. I sometimes think back to that just-turned-9-years-old kid in the middle of that field, flying that kite and having his mind blown by rock'n'roll blasted through his brand new Walkman, and think "you're doin OK kid."
- crikli 7y ago> There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well. ...and thanks to the Bluetooth speaker that era is back. Can't tell you how often I'm hiking or running in the mountains and some group's dreadful taste in music precedes them by a half mile.
- criddell 7y agoWhen I was in a record store a couple of months ago, three things occurred to me. The resurrection of vinyl and the health of that market makes sense to me. The death spiral of the CD worries me (my preferred format). The fact that people are still buying cassettes mystifies me. Poor sound quality, low res art, serial access only, and quick degradation?
- KozmoNau7 7y agoThe vinyl resurrection is mostly due to hipster cred, and a whole mythology that has sprung up around the (imagined) sound quality benefits. The format also has a lot of drawbacks. The records are large and fragile, turntables are relatively large and the whole setup is not very portable. Records are also very much read-only. The compact cassette is small and rugged, tape players can be small enough that they are barely larger than a cassette tape, and most importantly it's trivially easy to record your own tapes, either as a mix tape from other sources, as a recording from radio or even with your friends in your small-time garage band. There is a damn good reason why the humble cassette tape stuck around in punk/DIY underground circles. For decades, recording to cassette tape and having them duplicated was the absolute cheapest way to get your music out to the world. My own appreciation for cassette tape comes from growing up in the late 80s/early 90s. I didn't have a CD player of my own, but I had a cheap boombox with a tape deck, and a whole bunch of tapes from my parents. Classics like Deep Purple and the Beatles, but also a whole bunch of stuff they'd recorded from the radio, and various other random things, I had a whole bunch of children's books on tape, as well. My parents eventually gave me a tape deck with a built-in microphone and a bunch of blank tapes, and let my friends and me play around with it. To me, the cassette tape (and the 3.5" floppy disk) was a cornerstone of my formative years, and I will always appreciate the versatility and possibilities the format has. Vinyl is/was mostly a format for people with disposable income, it's the Big Serious format. In contrast, cassette tape was the format for the common people, you can play around with it and experiment. As for the CD, it's just an obsolete physical format for digital audio, which is much easier to distribute online now, rather than stamping and shipping shiny plastic discs. There are quite a few distributers that offer CD-quality downloads.
- 7y ago
- wholoveshn6 7y agoWallmans remind me that I don't talk to enough six year old girls. Where talk is fuck indiscriminately
- wholoveshn6 7y agoWhy walk when you can fuck, as it is in the Morrowind world.
- totaldude87 7y agoThe problem with pioneers is that , they rarely move to next level, may be due to the thinking that "whatever" they have today just rocks and will "probably" rock tomorrow. Few Examples : Nokia missing the Android boat - thinking Symbian was great Windows missing the Mobile operating system boat - thinking Windows Phone OS was great Sony missing the iPod boat - thinking , hey we got Walkman , what else you need. And the list goes on. A truly remarkable product always sees the end , if the visionaries are not ready to foresee whats next.
- AstralStorm 7y agoApple with the end of the Mac and iPhone is next? ;) (What's ahead is not quite predictable. It might be VR, BCI or something entirely different from either.)
- totaldude87 7y agoIf they keep ignoring that usability trumps over thinness , then yeah, they could be next.
- rusticpenn 7y agoNokia never thought that Symbian was great. Meego was being developed for a long time ( I fondly remember my N900). Its very hard for a huge company like nokia to move (As most middle managers are invested in their direction or people might be let go).
- ipunchghosts 7y agoThis will probably get buried but does anyone remember having to flip the tape over and the experience associated with the album in doing that? For example, on Metallica's Black Album, it ends on the first side Don't tread on me and then starts on the second side wtih Through the Never. If you dont know about the tape flip, you dont appreciate the beggining of "through the never" IMHO.
- Grimm665 7y agoThe vinyl flip required for Dark Side of the Moon really highlights the fact that the album is kind of split in half. Tracks on the first half smoothly transition to each other, but then have a hard stop before Money on side B. It's a really interesting case of music being composed for the medium. I found a similar example in digital media only once so far, Pretty Lights Glowing in the Darkest Night. The first half of the EP sounds very distinct from the second, almost as if there is an invisible vinyl flip in the middle.
- Isamu 7y ago>It’s weird to think that, in the years before the Walkman, there was no way to listen to music privately while out in public. There were ways to bring music with you — on transistor radios, on boom boxes, on car stereos — but they forced you to subject everyone around you to that music, as well. No, the mono earpiece was a common thing with many transistor radios from the 60's. They didn't have stereo, no, so they didn't accomodate 2-ear pods or headphones.
- atoav 7y agoAnd I still have one that works. Big fat latching switches that you can activate blindly in the pocket of your jacket, a output that can actually drive headphones properly, ... Sometimes I have the feeling we didn’t really move forwards in terms of interface design.