81–90 of 180 posts
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.
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it's not the name it's how and why it was on a tape
> 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…
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…
When I was a student I worked up a mix tape for a girl I was into. I spun the tape to the start of the second track then gave it to her. Next time I saw her I (casually) asked her something she could only answer if she'd heard the first track. That meant I knew she'd played it through, then rewound it and played it again.
I have a D6C Walkman Pro -- bought in, I think, 1990 -- that still works (or did last I tried it, anyway, maybe a couple of years ago). Great little deck; with metal tape and Dolby C, did a fine job recording CDs.
I replaced the belts, which got playback working again (see picture here https://twitter.com/chris_cannam/status/1043961675114840070) but ffwd/rwd appeared to be victims of a seized pivot which I couldn't get moving. So it plays beautifully once more, but still can't wind.
Might be worth checking that yours is still going ok, in case lack of use is a factor.
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> Remember how iPod beat Walkman No. No I don’t. Who the fuck was still using a Walkman in 2001?
I did, AFAIR. USB MP3 players haven't happened yet AFAIR, and the alternative were DiskMans, which had all the problems of optical drives: shake it harder, it'll lose playback or damage the CD; any scratch or speck of dust on the CD was likely to make some tracks unplayable or even half of the CD unseekable, etc. Optical media really sucked hard for regular use. In retrospect, I'm surprised people put up with CDs and…
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it's even more interesting to think that people designed these devices without this frame of reference
They didn't :-). The cursor -- a moving indicator, as part of a slide rule or any other similar instrument -- has been called that way since the early 17th century.
Fond memories of Sony and the Walkman era. I worked part time for Sony from the mid to late 1980s while I was a student, paying tuition bills. It was a dream job for a consumer electronics nerd and budding AV enthusiast, getting to demo and play with everything. Sony was still king of CRTs with XBR line of Trinitrons consistently on top. (Back breakers to move across a room, BTW.) Their ES family of audio amps and re…
Fond memories of Sony and the Walkman era. I worked part time for Sony from the mid to late 1980s while I was a student, paying tuition bills. It was a dream job for a consumer electronics nerd and budding AV enthusiast, getting to demo and play with everything. Sony was still king of CRTs with XBR line of Trinitrons consistently on top. (Back breakers to move across a room, BTW.) Their ES family of audio amps and re…
Amazingly thin. As you pointed out you had to pull the device open so the cassette could fit inside. The battery seemed to take a lot of the internal space.
The main disadvantage was really slow fast forward/ rewind but you hardly did that with mix raves anyway.
This isn’t the same model but the photos give a good idea of the inside mechanism. These were complex mechanical systems.
http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/just-picked-up-this-beau...
Some bigger model internals: http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/sony-walkman-wm-f2097-mo...