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I don't understand the question, Sony still sells a product line of both premium and cheaper mp3 player devices? Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
Show me the cheaper one please. The lowest price Walkman I can see is 400 bucks for 32gb
They're very well known and have several competitors
This is a really interesting read. But it doesn't answer one question I have, which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players? None of this technology is lost, and there are plenty of small-time two bit no name players out there still making them, often in a much smaller, much slicker form factor than than the original digital Walkman or iPod. If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to…
Apple got it right with the original iPod, and your ask, and others, is just to extend it to modern times. A lot of these comments simply aren't helpful, and people chiming in know it. For me, I was looking for 1) Music player that holds a ton of songs. 2) Lossless. 3) No touch screen control. 4) Battery that is long lasting and semi-replaceable. 5) Smaller than modern phones. 6) Great software experience, which for…
This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to…
I’ve driven many 90s and 2000s jdm cars and I also own a 2019 Japanese car and the quality of the 2019 car is just incomparable. The 90s cars feel like bits of plastic thrown together haphazardly, not that different from like an industrial Japanese truck’s interior. The cars are legendary sure but the interiors are awful.
Now those cars are much older too, but my 2019 car’s interior looks damn near brand new despite having been in the harsh Australian sun for 6 to 7 years, while I remember older cars I owned didn’t fare so well after just 5 years.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone? Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
Because I want something half the size of a phone. I don't need a giant screen, I just want a player that can do music or audiobooks and be light enough to run with. I find myself researching, trying to find the smallest lightest old phone that either has decent internal memory or a micro SD slot, but it's not easy. Most phones are massive compared to an iPod shuffle
This is sad but no great surprise. What does surprise me a little is how far ranging the "we can't make those parts anymore" argument goes. I thought back to those seriously slim Sony Walkman and Aiwa players people would bring back to school from the Far East and even the basic things like the sliding buttons were better than products have nowadays: they would inevitably be tiny, sleek, yet beautifully engineered to…
Duping tapes on cheap decks to get one ratty-sounding copy, or spending more money to get a better-sounding original copy at the local record store downtown -- for it to eventually find itself wrapped around the pinch roller.
The weird featuresets: Some bougie later ones had auto-reverse, so the days of flipping a tape were over. But some players couldn't even stop on their own at the end of a tape when rewinding or fast-fowarding. (And some only had fast-forward. Want to rewind? Eject tape, flip tape, FF tape, flip again.)
The awesome battery life: I could get, like, whole several trips to and from school out of a pair of AA batteries -- if I was lucky! Replacing them in advance to ward off inevitable failure lead to fun games like having an assortment of variously-used batteries to experiment with when the small stack of new ones inevitably ran dry.
The awesome fidelity: A bass boost switch sometimes, even though the headphones had no bass anyway. An ineffective 3-band EQ if fancy. The interactive wow and flutter of having one in a pants pocket on the move, keeping time with your pace. The stereo image that was always just a little bit offset and slightly closer to the left or right ear than the middle.
The musical selection: It was always such an excellent time selecting a singular tape to listen to for the day, because carrying more than that took up real physical space.
Besides all that: Stopping to change tapes on these precious devices would attract attention, and attention was an astounding thing in a world with plumes of tetraethyl lead in the air. After that, there's no longer a walkman nor any tapes, but at least you've got a new black eye to talk about and the music selection problem is completely resolved!
Yeah, it was certainly an era.
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If someone from the future had somehow come back and showed the 1990 version of me any of our modern pocket supercomputers along with a $20 pair of wireless earbuds and access to Spotify, I'd have simply revered them as a god.
I always found the MD format super cool. It’s a real shame that, even with BD-like densities, it just can’t compete with a cheap USB stick.
Got it. But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
> But then why Nike/Adidas/Quicksilver/etc cannot bring back clothes from the 90s? They can, but people wouldn't want to pay the price. When adjusting for inflation, clothes today are much cheaper than 30 years ago, and the main producers of high-quality cotton (Kazakhstan and Egypt) are having continuous drought problems so the best raw material is even more expensive. The combination of customer expectation for low…
If you want something Walkman-like and aren’t short of a few bob, there’s always: https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7 - scratches a similar itch, but is also a: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objet_d'art
https://www.perfectcircuit.com/gieskes
The TE recorder is beautiful. I hadn’t heard of that term captures it perfectly. The itch is only scratched once it’s owned though right? O_o Their OB-4 has a similar wheel transport that can be scrubbed too and it keeps a rolling buffer of the last so many seconds of sound into the speaker from whatever source is playing.
It’s really only economics, there is simply no relevant market for mechanical cassette players that would justify the investment. I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. There are still companies like ALPS that are capable of making the necessary parts. But in the end, the market is too small to justify any investments.