Because they dropped physical medias?
Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
181–190 of 257 posts
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#182Article is just a (wordy) recapitulation of this tweet from a former Walkman engineer: https://x.com/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490830680500 But fair play to OP, you'd have to bounce it through at least Google Translate to make it legible to the predominant English-speaking HM crowd: https://x-com.translate.goog/akiraa_tanaka/status/2080114490... Still would have been good for the Substack author to link to the twee…
IOW, it was also technically hard for Sony to launch the original Walkman, but they overcame the difficulties, because they expected a huge market success (which followed). Now the product would be niche, and what had been originally built for its production became unavailable. The effort to stand up it all over again would not pay off.
The first Walkman from the late 70s was just an existing Sony portable cassette recorder (the TCM-100B), but with the mono head replaced with a stereo head and the recording functionality removed. Once that first unit proved there was a market, they were able to continually re-invest the money into miniaturization and new features so by the mid-90s Walkmans (Walkmen?) were high-quality cassette players that were barely larger than the size of a tape. All the tape enthusiasts would want a recreation of a high-end 90s Walkman, but the tooling and supply chain required to build one no longer exists and can't be recreated without the revenue stemming from portable cassette players being the predominant way to listen to music on the go for 15+ years.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If I want to buy a new MP3 player, I have to buy something from a company I've never heard of with a terrible screen, use an old phone, or buy some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much. Is this surprising? They are a commodity (you can literally build a fairly decent for less than $10 in parts) so therefore are low profit. Brands you have heard of generally don't want to play in c…
I've bought several of these and they don't last. You're right that they are commodity items. The components and quality are shit, there's no support, and six months later the company has vanished. I guess I just want somewhere between $30 and $500, somewhere between absolutely piece of shit and extreme prestige. But I'm dreaming if I think anyone is going to serve that market
Sounds like you're unironically describing a Tangara [0]. They most certainly hit their goal, though I can't verify if they get restocked or how often.
Mine's lasted, and it works pretty well, though the touchwheel isn't quite on-par with an iPod. I like the modern connector and openness (both hardware and software) though
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#184Earlier quoted context omitted.
Modern economy cannot exists without economy of scale. It's unfortunate is that if you want something else than millions of other people the price likely will be prohibitive - small scale production is not viable economically, especially for high tech components and devices. > I don’t think it’s true that the capabilities to make these devices are lost. I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation…
This is - in passing - why billionaire prepper fantasies of surviving an apocalypse on a private island are insane. Sooner or later spares and consumables will start running out, and without global supply chains nothing is repairable. You might get ten years if you stock up on ten of everything you can think of, plus a few things you can't, but after that things will start breaking down, and you're going to start run…
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Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#185... because the physical support would give people ownership over the music and we can't have that.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#186This 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…
I have an Astel & Kern SE-100. Amazing build and sound.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are so many 3rd party parts available for iPods. Pry it open, replace the battery, swap the HDD for something like the iFlash.
Are they useable on Windows for loading music?
You can use iTunes on Windows to load music on the stock firmware. If you load Rockbox onto it, it works like a standard MP3 player where all the organization is done at the filesystem level. Note that I don't really see a point in buying an iPod to load Rockbox onto because you can get lots of other standard MP3 players that aren't well over a decade old, such as the Hifi Walker H2. That also gets you other modern features like bluetooth audio, expandable storage, and USB-C charging. It really only makes sense to get an iPod if you use iTunes to manage your music.
If you're running the stock firmware, one other thing to keep in mind regarding storage mods is that the main limiting factor for how much music you can keep on an iPod is the number of songs, not the amount of storage you can cram into it. One optimization Apple used on the iPods was to keep the entire music database in RAM. This made the player a lot more responsive and more battery efficient, since you could browse through your library without needing to spin up or seek the hard drive. However, it also means that having too many songs will make the iPod unstable because it'll keep running out of RAM and crashing. The limit is around 20,000 songs on the 5th gen and 45,000 songs on the 6th/7th gens. This means that it's not really worth putting a crazy amount of storage in your iPod unless your library is all lossless.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's an irony here, because Sony do make MP3 Walkmans based on Android: https://electronics.sony.com/audio/c/walkman-digital-recorde...
That would be "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much" The entry level Walkman is $400 and only has 32gb internal storage. It's all about flac and hires audio but you're paying through the nose for the brand
In 2005 the iPod with 30 GB of storage was $299 ($511 in today's dollars) so the entry level Walkman is actually fairly comparable to Apple's pricing from back then. You can use some of the $100 you're saving to buy a 256 GB MicroSD card to load more music onto.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
Firefox didn't offer to translate this, so initially I wasn't aware that it could. But I could get it to translate via the menu. And Google Translate is still a bit better, so I do regularly fall back to that.
Unless something changed recently (and things change all the time where LLMs are involved), deepl.com does the best translations. I have a sister who translates professionally; she said it's the only one where she can use the result and make some improvements instead of throwing it away and starting over.
Deepl's professional advantage is not in the translation itself (even though it has always been a notch above the rest), but in the UI. You can literally click any word on the translated text and (a) see a list of alternatives, and (b) pick one and then the following text adapts to your choice.
In technical terms it lets you stop the transformer at any token, sample alternatives from the probability distribution at that point, pick your desired next token and resume the generation.
This UI lets an expert guide and control the output of the tool, instead of having to fight it. I wish there was a frontend for large GPTs that worked like this instead of the ubiquitous-yet-useless chatbot.
Re: Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
#190Obsolete Sony is a lovely-looking website ram-packed with errors and false claims, which means it’s actively worth ignoring. I chat with Akiraa Tanaka on Twitter a lot. He’s great. Sony was informally regarded as Japan’s electronic R&D department, regularly coming up with new and cool shit for everyone else to get behind, and while their strategy was annoying a lot of the time (control everything: proprietary connect…
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