Yesterday it was announced that Sony has halted the production of Walkmen. “This makes sense,” I thought to myself. After all, with the proliferation of mp3s players in today’s market, who needs portable CD players? It was only after reading further that I discovered they were actually talking about the Walkmen that play cassettes.
My reaction was probably the same as yours: “They still make those?”
When most people think of advances in technology they think of things getting smaller, but during the Awesome 80s, cassette players actually got bigger. Boom boxes (or “ghetto blasters” as we called them) were all the rage. The one I owned was modest in size compared to some of the mammoths my friends owned. One kid in my neighborhood had one that required 8 D-Cell batteries and even had its own disco ball! Throughout the mid-80s, most companies believed that when it came to portable stereos, bigger was better.
But not Sony. Sony launched the Walkman in 1979, and its selling points were its portability and small size. For the first time, people could take their purchased cassettes (or make their own mix tapes) and listen to them on the go. It was revolutionary at the time.
Compared to those big boom boxes, the best thing about the Walkman was that it only used a few AA batteries. My friend Jeff and I used to go on road trips to Tulsa (about a two hour drive) in the back of his mother’s van, and I can remember the two of us sitting in the back of that van, each with one side of those cheesy headphones, listening to Motley Crue, KISS and Alice Cooper as we barreled down the road.
Sony’s CD Walkman — originally dubbed the Discman — was released (believe it or not) in 1984, although our family didn’t own one in until around 1990 or so. In fact, the first two CD players I ever saw in person were owned by my dad, and Jeff. I used my Dad’s Discman a time or two in my car, using one of those cassette adapters to route the audio out of the CD player and into my car’s stereo via the in-dash cassette player. Ah, the joys of placing a portable CD player on a folded up t-shirt on your dash to try and keep the thing from skipping as you drove over pebbles.
But, I digress. I haven’t thought about cassette Walkmen in twenty years now, about the time I started converting my music library over to CDs from cassettes. I’m surprised to hear Sony kept making them all these years. Maybe they were big sellers in third world countries?
Even though we’ve had CDs at home since early 1986 (first album bought by my parents: Brothers in Arms, by Dire Straits), when it came to portable players I almost switched directly from cassette walkmen to MP3 players. Got a CD-only discman (a Sony) for Christmas 2002. Spring 2003, bought a Creative discman that also played MP3 on CDs. Hated it so much (its buffer was abyssmal) that 6 months later, I bought my first iPod and haven’t looked back since.
So, basically, I spent approx. 15 years using a cassette walkman (many models through the years, although I was particularly fond of the Panasonic ones), only one year with discmen and 7 (so far) with MP3 players.
And to this, I tip my hat to the cassette walkman, for all the years spent listening to audio tapes from beginning to end, when nowadays I tend to prefer the shuffle on my iPod…
I’ve never used mobile CD players at all. It’s just a wrong technology for slamming over potholes and rail crossings on a highway, or jumping a mountain bike 3 feet high. Just as I planned in my adolescence I went from cassettes to solid state. My minivan has a tape player that i use with a cassette adapter and a solid-state music player. I updated all 6 speakers myself – sound is awesome.
As a big fan of audio books, I’ve still used a cassette player until the past couple of years because so many books (I used the library for a lot of mine) were still only available on cassette. Thank goodness that’s changed so I can go DVD now. I should be doing the mp3, but technologically as I get older they have to drag me along slowly.
Even though Sony is abandoning production of the Walkman I’m certain that there will still be a few off-brand manufacturers kicking them out for a couple of years. The last time I remember seeing a portable cassette player for sale available anywhere was at a Walgreens. It was this hideously cheap looking thing with Play and FF only, no radio, priced at $5. I found it amusing that, brand new, the player conceivably costs less than the media (assuming one could find a new cassette for sale somewhere).