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.
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.
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
> has low resilience to physical damage
No it doesn't.
As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
The real issue was the skipping when you tried to use a portable CD player.
you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new.
> No it doesn't.
Yes it does.
> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.
They must’ve had a really robust kind of CDs wherever you lived, then. Like everyone else, I wore out a lot of discs simply by storing them outside their case.
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
I'd like to see the minidisc come back but the sheer cost of the units is bonkers today :)
Those were the days and gone they have.
> They were very inconvenient.
They were also very affordable!
eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone
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.
Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
isn't that just because it's an Apple device? I mean, there are people buying those old Macs that shipped with System 7 or 9... it's a fun hobby I guess.
But there again, fast forward to 2025, you download a 17GB OS update so it can tell you which apps you can and can't run on your computer (in a barely readable messages because transparent backgrounds are a thing now)
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?
USB front slot with USB memory sticks? One stick per playlist/album. Different form factors so you can locate the right one without taking your eyes off the road. Possible to embed into larger enclosures if you find them to small.
(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).
Do they eat cassette tapes just as good as the originals?
No, not if you rewind them. At least mine doesn't. But I can't trust the tension on a new tape.
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.
I have found that sometimes it is nice to have fewer choices when selecting media. It helps prevent analysis paralysis for me.
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
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?
Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
I don't have the video saved sorry.
The video is probably from the “techmoan” channel. Very good content.
They’re not very good. As the other comment said, they all use the same mechanism. It gets the job done, but that also means the “premium” models are rip offs. Basically lipstick on a pig, so to speak.
Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
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.
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
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.
There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.
Tbh, i loved my minidisc player, robust and shock resistant (I guess it buffered ?) rewritable media. Compared to even CD players it was ahead of the game.
Mine was great too, but it just never took off quite the same, maybe because of price. 'originals' were expensive, and so were recordable discs.
There was also (IIRC) built-in DRM, so you could record digitally from a CD or read-only minidisc to a writeable minidisc, but not then from writeable minidisc->minidisc. Even recording from analogue to minidisc resulted in something that would be restricted.
But this is all just rehashing things that have been talked about many times over the intervening years. They were great, but they never quite made it and then mp3 ate its lunch.
nostalgia is a helluva drug
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 was in the market for my kid who is going through a hipster phase
A review of one unit said that it didn’t honor the cutout tab so if you accidentally pressed record with any tape you would dub over your music
I shopped for a while and came to the conclusion that these are mostly kitsch.
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. I suppose that's part of why legit Walkmans are going for so much now. I love cassettes and it would be cool to have a good portable tape player again, but it really can't compete with my phone. Unless we go back to carrying around all the individual things a phone can do. It's tempting but just not as convenient.
I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
I loved my Sony WM-10 back in the day.
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.
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.
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.
> The only downside of CDs was that you couldn’t record from the radio and Napster eventually solved that better than radio ever did.
This was far from the only drawback with CDs especially early on, at least in mobile applications: the media (and thus player) is bulky, cases are fragile (in part through increased leverage), it has low resilience to physical damage, and before memory prices hit low enough for significant buffering the slightest g forces would lead to skips.
MDs were real progress on that front. Shame it was quite expensive and the digital models were hobbled by horrendous software. And obviously flash-based pmps then smartphones are their lunch entirely.
> has low resilience to physical damage
No it doesn't. As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
The real issue was the skipping when you tried to use a portable CD player.
you were probably scraping the thick transparent side, not the side with the label? the data is immediately under the label. the clear side can be surprisingly scraped up and still read properly, though I'm not sure how!! I have some CDs that I thought were ruined because of how scratched up the underside is, and they play just fine. Pretty sweet! Then I have one or two where the label side got a scratch taken out of it, and indeed, you can see right through the disc at those points - unrecoverable damage. Conversely a scratched up underside can simply be buffed/polished smooth and the disc will read good as new.
> No it doesn't.
Yes it does.
> As a child, one time I tried to make a CD unplayable and literally couldn't do it. (Sandpaper didn't do the trick.)
Either child you was incompetent or your player was very good at error recovery, because I personally saw a number of car CDs thrown out as the car’s stereo was unable to read them anymore.
They must’ve had a really robust kind of CDs wherever you lived, then. Like everyone else, I wore out a lot of discs simply by storing them outside their case.
minidisc has a lot going for it. you can easily carry a few around with you. you dont really need to carry the outer cases. you can put some album art directly onto them. if your player has netMD support then you can just use a web browser to manage the tracks on a disc.
the only downside i can think of is the loud screeching every once in a while when the disc is seeking. but that could just be the player that i have maybe
Vinyl is populair, inconvenient and doesn't have crisp audio quality. Cassettes are also inconvenient and have poor audio quality, plus they are cheap and portable. So I definitely also see them stick around. I also see plenty cassettes being issued on e.g. bandcamp for years already.
The poor audio quality can be seen as desired feature btw. It brings a certain lofi or warmth with it.
I'd like to see the minidisc come back but the sheer cost of the units is bonkers today :)
Those were the days and gone they have.
> They were very inconvenient.
They were also very affordable!
eventually I bet someone'll put a sd cassette in one and we'll be back to square one. I enjoy my atrac discman with writable disks, fits a lot of music but I'm not going to pretend I use it more than my phone
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.
Believe it or not the iPod community is alive and well! There are plenty of people buying them, replacing the battery and hard drive, performing some cosmetic mods, and daily driving them (me included)
It's popular enough that if you look on eBay, the price of an old iPod has become majorly inflated
isn't that just because it's an Apple device? I mean, there are people buying those old Macs that shipped with System 7 or 9... it's a fun hobby I guess. But there again, fast forward to 2025, you download a 17GB OS update so it can tell you which apps you can and can't run on your computer (in a barely readable messages because transparent backgrounds are a thing now)
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?
USB front slot with USB memory sticks? One stick per playlist/album. Different form factors so you can locate the right one without taking your eyes off the road. Possible to embed into larger enclosures if you find them to small.
(Personally, I do prefer the modern Bluetooth+mobile+app+voice control).
Do they eat cassette tapes just as good as the originals?
No, not if you rewind them. At least mine doesn't. But I can't trust the tension on a new tape.
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.
I have found that sometimes it is nice to have fewer choices when selecting media. It helps prevent analysis paralysis for me.
Yeap, it comes across as anemoia false nostalgia pining for a "utopia" than never existed. I had Weird Al and Metallica on cassette and a cheap-o, bulky Walkman and Koss Porta Pros. It didn't really ever play at a constant speed and ate batteries like they were free. When CDs came out (which was actually around 1981), they were a million times better, but it took forever to get the Discman down to a halfway decent price and not skip like crazy on the slightest bump. A good example of a portable CD player that worked well was the '94 Sony D-828K Car Discman that also wasn't just for cars.
And the 80's and 90's weren't that great. The best thing that happened was George Carlin on pirated analog HBO telling us how Americans were morons and that everything sucked. ;o)
Flash storage bit rots. As do consumer writable optical media. RAID HDD or you ain't got nothing.
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?
Is transport the bit that reels the tapes? I watched a YouTube video recently about these that said that it seems all these modern ones are using basically the same mechanism from a PRC factory, and thus the minimum size is quite large.
Since Sony doesn't manufacture their phenomenally small mechanisms anymore, the era of the tape sized tape player is gone unless someone invests millions in r&d and setting up manufacturing.
Also in terms of quality: fine, but the video found better quality from vintage units he had cleaned up.
I don't have the video saved sorry.
The video is probably from the “techmoan” channel. Very good content.
They’re not very good. As the other comment said, they all use the same mechanism. It gets the job done, but that also means the “premium” models are rip offs. Basically lipstick on a pig, so to speak.
Sadly I don’t see new mechanisms appearing anytime soon. But there is still hope. There have been new film cameras with modern innards recently released.
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.
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)
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.
There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.
https://youtu.be/2DWtkSVNvTg
Tbh, i loved my minidisc player, robust and shock resistant (I guess it buffered ?) rewritable media. Compared to even CD players it was ahead of the game.
Mine was great too, but it just never took off quite the same, maybe because of price. 'originals' were expensive, and so were recordable discs.
There was also (IIRC) built-in DRM, so you could record digitally from a CD or read-only minidisc to a writeable minidisc, but not then from writeable minidisc->minidisc. Even recording from analogue to minidisc resulted in something that would be restricted.
But this is all just rehashing things that have been talked about many times over the intervening years. They were great, but they never quite made it and then mp3 ate its lunch.
nostalgia is a helluva drug
Don't these all use the same crappy internals, because there's only one company left making those, to satisfy the remaining hipster crowd?
Yes, pretty much:
https://www.theverge.com/24295971/we-are-rewind-fiio-cassett...
I was in the market for my kid who is going through a hipster phase
A review of one unit said that it didn’t honor the cutout tab so if you accidentally pressed record with any tape you would dub over your music
I shopped for a while and came to the conclusion that these are mostly kitsch.
From what I've heard, that seems to be the case. I suppose that's part of why legit Walkmans are going for so much now. I love cassettes and it would be cool to have a good portable tape player again, but it really can't compete with my phone. Unless we go back to carrying around all the individual things a phone can do. It's tempting but just not as convenient.
I still play around with tapes at home. I have a modded player with speed controls, a couple of decent tape decks, and a 4 track recorder. I have a couple of loop tapes to play around with too. But yeah, as a portable music format, not sure I want to go back to that.
I loved my Sony WM-10 back in the day.
The FiiO Echo Mini popped up on my feed the other day. I think its cooler.
https://www.fiio.com/echomini
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.