Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

stereogum.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 180 posts

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#151

Post by EliRivers »

badamp wrote: post #34
ignoramous wrote: post #20

The 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 poc…

> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?

I recall the first time I bought a cassette tape walkman was about the year 2003, 2004.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#152

Post by slantyyz »

cat199 wrote: post #99
niftich wrote: post #11

The 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…

ahh yes.. but then there was the endless rewinding and fast-forwarding to find the part you wanted to hear.. CD's were a welcome change back to the random access of records for many

I had portable cassette players that would rewind or fast forward to the next blank spot between songs. It was slow, crude and limited to the next and previous track, but it did work well in the era before CDs.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#153

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

rob74 wrote: post #45
badamp wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?

While the portable CD players from Sony were branded "Discman", they later used the "Walkman" brand for a range of featurephones (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Ericsson_W580i ) explicitly designed as music players. So you could actually say that the _iPhone_ ultimately beat the Walkman...

They almost certainly did that just to keep the trademark active.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#154

Post by [deleted] »

astrodust wrote: post #139
Zelphyr wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And 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.

Remember the old ridiculously huge cans from the 1970s with a quarter-inch jack? They're back!

[deleted]

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#155

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

Zelphyr wrote: post #102
Daub wrote: post #2

The 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.

And 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.

It's hard to consume conspicuously when everything is miniaturized.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#156

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

opencl wrote: post #129
zeristor wrote: post #81

What 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.

Everything 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.

SACD and DVD-A have more than two channels (or 4 if you could get a hold of a quad CD)

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#157

Post by KozmoNau7 »

criddell wrote: post #134

When 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?

The 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.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#158

Post by criddell »

KozmoNau7 wrote: post #157
criddell wrote: post #134

When 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?

The 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 bar…

> The vinyl resurrection is mostly due to hipster cred, and a whole mythology that has sprung up around the (imagined) sound quality benefits.

I think that was the start of it, but at this point it's spread well beyond hipsters. One of my kids bought a turntable and they do the same thing I did when I listened to records 30 years ago - lie on the floor and examine the sleeve and liner.

Aside from the large format artwork, I wouldn't underestimate the appeal of building and having a collection. People collect vinyl toys to sit on a shelf. Is collecting records all that different?

> There are quite a few distributers that offer CD-quality downloads.

Not really and the ones that exist are expensive and have poor selection.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#159

Post by KozmoNau7 »

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #125
livatlantis wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is indeed interesting. I'd say that it has to do with: - complex structures (not necessarily always 4/4 or 3/4) - variations in dynamic range (loud parts vs. quiet parts) - storytelling / philosophical themes (the human condition, freedom, suffering, literature) - intense "solos" (Mendelssohn insanely fast yet moving segments on the piano vs. Petrucci going crazy on the guitar) - mastery of musical instruments (pa…

A surprising, or maybe not so surprising, number of metal bands, and song writers have borrowed heavily from classical. No end of interviews with rock guitarists where they talk of listening to some violin piece and wanting to honour or duplicate in on the guitar. No end of albums with a rock cover of some classical piece, from The Agonist's a capella of Swan Lake through several Pachelbel's Canon in D, etc. Not forg…

When I listen to Swedish death metal in particular, the tremolo picking and riffs, combined with the distortion (almost always a dimed Boss HM-2) almost sounds like a furious string section, somewhere around a cello-type sound. So many songs could just as well have been pieces of classical music.

Re: The First Sony Walkman Was Released 40 Years Ago

#160

Post by anticensor »

kd5bjo wrote: post #92
lm28469 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> how and why it was on a tape I think you're overthinking the whole thing, it's not really "on" a tape. It's the default operation of a tape, they didn't have to come up with the idea, it's a side effect of the medium. You need a motor to move the tape, no motor = no movement = the tape stays in its current position. To automatically rewind the tape you'd need some sort of mechanism under tension in it which would p…

What I really want to know is whether the fact that a standard pencil could be used to manually wind a cassette was an intended feature or a happy accident.

I think it is intended.
Post reply on HN