alt Hacker NewsModern Walkmans
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I love this site. Earlier this year I was working to revive my sister's old WM-EX170 and was able to find a service manual for it here.
It made me appreciate how these devices are like pieces of beautiful clockwork!
I only had to replace the belt so it wasn't a complicated repair. But, in comparison to the level of documentation manufacturers of any modern electronics offer today, looking at that service manual was a reminder of what we've lost.
Meanwhile, here is an actual Sony Walkman that is modern, i.e. in production: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/audio-components/hi-res-a...
I wonder why in every movie about Steve Jobs, he is somehow "inventing" the mp3 player / iPod as a better alternative to the walkman, only to find ourselves in 2025 wanting to buy a walkman and not even knowing what iPod is?
Same for vinyls and CDs btw. Maybe music is more than just a fancy animation of album arts.
All these suck so badly compared to the last Panasonic I had. Japanese portable cassette players were incredible pieces of engineering. They were more a wrapper around the cassette than a player that you inserted the cassette into, with elaborate mechanical designs for bi-directional playback, auto skipping, etc.
The problem with all of these is they use the same components because only one factory makes them any longer, they're quite bulky, and relatively low quality, for anyone interested in this you're better off getting an old used player.
I love the aesthetic of cassette tapes and players -- there's just something really satisfying about the size and tactility of putting in a cassette. Beyond that, it feels better to choose to listen to a particular album rather than putting endless playlists on shuffle.
There's definitely space for tape to persist as a medium, even if quality and longevity is lower -- not everything has to be audiophile level, and the listening experience is far more than just sound quality.
This thread is dripping from nostalgia, in a good way.
I wonder how things are going to be in 25 or 50 years, what will today's kids look back with the same kind of devotion and nostalgia.
A lot of things are intangible/immaterial now (for non-geeks/non-hoarders, their inbox, online playlist and photos will likely be gone, they won't have any paper letters or plastic-framed holiday slide photographs or anything like that).
We recently dug out my portable cassette player (Not as small as a walkman, takes D cell batteries) so my daughter could listen to my wife's Disney cassettes from her childhood in the early 90s. I was amazed how a 5 year old immediately figured out how to manipulate the tape player and flip over cassettes etc. I suppose it was similar for me at the same age. We even found a NOS Disney cassette on eBay that my wife didn't have.
The funny thing is, even though I'm just about old enough to have bought a few chart music cassettes when they were a contemporary medium, I don't own any cassettes and I only had the player because I bought it on eBay to experiment with tape degradation for music.
Flash storage is so much cheaper now.
I can't imagine choosing a cassette walkman over an mp3 player just based on how much music fits on the device.
> penetrating voice and warm sound
Are they talking about cassette tapes? Maybe my memory is failing me, but I don't remember that being a thing back in the day.
Bluetooth and is nice, but it's probably a better buy to get an antique portable cassette recorder. It's really something how primitive these look in comparison to the what was on the market in the 1980s.
Probably of interest to people here is this article from the dawn of the Walkman: https://time.com/archive/6697378/living-a-great-way-to-snub-...
Anyone knows of a similar site but for portable AM/FM radios?
It’s amazing to see this. How good are the transports in these modern units? I seem to remember when cassettes died the first time, the whole ecosystem went away, from Chrome Dioxide cassettes to good quality transports, which took a long time to get right. How do these compare to a good quality unit from the 80’s and 90’s?
Where are the modern tape decks for cars? Or something equivalent where the medium is robust enough to throw in the passenger footwell, and big enough to be safely grabbable and changeable while driving?
wow, back in the day, well after the cassette walkman, the FM walkman was actually a BIG DEAL! they didn't even make a 2-in-1, not even an AM/FM! i loved <3 mine
https://www.radiomuseum.org/images/radio/sony_tokyo/fm_walkm...
(i wasn't against cassette walkmans, but i was against carrying enough tapes to mimic the variety of music that they played on the radio)
Do they eat cassette tapes just as good as the originals?
I skipped this phase I still own a portable CD-player. I think I even own 2, me and my wife had one when we where young. They both still work.
Other than the bluetooth capability - are modern walkmans as good as they were at the peak of portable tape use?
I had one of these in black - https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s30
Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.
A question to native English speakers: Do you really say "Walkmans", not "Walkmen"?
Don't these all use the same crappy internals, because there's only one company left making those, to satisfy the remaining hipster crowd?
I wonder if the same thing will happen with cameras?
I loved my Sony WM-10 back in the day.
nostalgia is a helluva drug
The FiiO Echo Mini popped up on my feed the other day. I think its cooler.
I dunno but it seems like anemoia. Maybe a few folks want to listen to a mixtape from their teen years that's gathering dust but is likely to break than play properly.
Also, it's difficult to top the school bus yellow Walkman Sports photo from Playboy that pretty much crystalized the zeitgeist.
As someone who grew up with cassette tapes, I don’t anticipate this fad lasting too long. They were very inconvenient. With most technology I see resistance from people not wanting to move on. I don’t remember seeing that with cassettes. The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
Minidisc is the format I have some nostalgia for. It never blew up, but it felt like the best of both worlds. You could record from the radio like a digital cassette tapes, and even trim out the DJ and reorder tracks… and give them names. You could also buy them like a CD. From a digital file you could use a TOSlink cable to get a great quality recording at home. And the later ones even played MP3s directly. It could really do it all.