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| Topic: The Newest thing for music listening!! | |
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WOW! I heard this one the news tonight.. The original Sony Walkman, the first personal stereo tape deck, which made its debut in 1979. Attention, the 160 million or so owners of an Apple iPod MP3 player: take out those white earbuds and listen for a second. Before the iPod became ubiquitous — way, way before — there was the Walkman. The portable cassette players, first introduced 30 years ago this week, sold a cumulative 200 million units, rocked the recording industry and fundamentally changed how people experienced music. Sound familiar? The Walkman wasn't a giant leap forward in engineering: magnetic cassette technology had been around since 1963, when the Netherlands-based electronics firm Philips first created it for use by secretaries and journalists. Sony, who by that point had become experts in bringing well-designed, miniaturized electronics to market (they debuted their first transistor radio in 1955), made a series of moderately successful portable cassette recorders. But the introduction of pre-recorded music tapes in the late 1960s opened a whole new market. People still chose to listen to vinyl records over cassettes at home, but the compact size of tapes made them more conducive to car stereos and mobility than vinyl or 8-tracks. On July 1, 1979, Sony Corp. introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, a 14 ounce, blue-and-silver, portable cassette player with chunky buttons, headphones and a leather case. It even had a second earphone jack so that two people could listen in at once. Masaru Ibuka, Sony's co-founder, traveled often for business and would find himself lugging Sony's bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder around to listen to music. He asked Norio Ohga, then Executive Deputy President, to design a playback-only stereo version, optimized for use with headphones. Ibuka brought the result — a compact, high-quality music player — to Chairman Akio Morita and reportedly said, "Try this. Don't you think a stereo cassette player that you can listen to while walking around is a good idea?" All the device needed now was a name. Originally the Walkman was introduced in the U.S. as the "Sound-About" and in the UK as the "Stowaway," but coming up with new, uncopyrighted names in every country it was marketed in proved costly; Sony eventually decided on "Walkman" as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. First released in Japan, it was a massive hit: while Sony predicted it would only sell about 5,000 units a month, the Walkman sold upwards of 50,000 in the first two months. Sony wasn't the first company to introduce portable audio: the first-ever portable transistor radio, the index card-sized Regency TR-1, debuted in 1954. But the Walkman's unprecedented combination of portability (it ran on two AA batteries) and privacy (it featured a headphone jack but no external speaker) made it the ideal product for thousands of consumers looking for a compact portable stereo that they could take with them anywhere. The TPS-L2 was introduced in the U.S. in June 1980. The 1980s could well have been the Walkman decade. The popularity of Sony's device — and those by brands like Aiwa, Panasonic and Toshiba who followed in Sony's lead — helped the cassette tape outsell vinyl records for the first time in 1983. By 1986 the word "Walkman" had entered the Oxford English Dictionary. Its launch coincided with the birth of the aerobics craze, and millions used the Walkman to make their workouts more entertaining. Between 1987 and 1997 — the height of the Walkman's popularity — the number of people who said they walked for exercise increased by 30%. http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1907884,00.html |
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I got an 8 track.
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I had an 8-track...and a turn table... I am going to get the turn table again...I still have quite a few vinyl records... I was just surprised that it had been 30 years since the walkman! |
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I have a Walkman mp3 player, it's pretty nice, alot cheaper than an Ipod.
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my ipod is my best friend and through time to date it is my most favored portable player. i love zeepod because i can carry around 5,000+ songs, books, tv shows and videos, and i can plug him into a computer and download stuff, games included. now i call it the best player from an informed perspective, at some point i used to have the cassette walkman, then i upgrade to a discman. those served the purpose and i appreciate their existence.
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In my first car, I had a tena cassette 8.
It played both cassette tapes and 8 tracks in the same slot. |
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My favorite device is my Sony Psyc Mini-Disc player. I love that thing!
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I use a walkgramophone..
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I use a walkgramophone.. That's mine, you Whippersnapper! Give it back! |
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I use a walkgramophone.. those are not legal in the US~  |
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My favorite device is my Sony Psyc Mini-Disc player. I love that thing! my son had one of those....do you make your own disc's? |
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i have a sterio at home, a sterio in my van, a radio on site/work........ i dont need one
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I use a walkgramophone.. those are not legal in the US~ Here you only get in trouble with the Style Police! |
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My favorite device is my Sony Psyc Mini-Disc player. I love that thing! my son had one of those....do you make your own disc's? Yea I do, I have 2 one for listening and one for recording. I also have a 4 track recording studio and I mix everything down to mini-discs.
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I use a walkgramophone.. That's mine, you Whippersnapper! Give it back! No way. Try and catch me, old lady! |
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I use a walkgramophone.. That's mine, you Whippersnapper! Give it back! No way. Try and catch me, old lady! For your information, I'm in great shape thanks to my walkgramophone (which kept me going all those miles), so I can catch your young sassy arse easy, Kid! |
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Great?
Great as in BIG? |
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In my first car, I had a tena cassette 8. It played both cassette tapes and 8 tracks in the same slot. |
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Great? Great as in BIG? As in I'll have a great time making you scream momma! |
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In my first car, I had a tena cassette 8. It played both cassette tapes and 8 tracks in the same slot. the first car I can remember only had AM radio too... I was just shocked when I thought about the Walkman being 30 years old now...and all the changes that have happened in media in those years... |
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