{"id":38,"date":"2010-10-25T16:00:22","date_gmt":"2010-10-25T23:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/?p=38"},"modified":"2021-09-08T17:50:27","modified_gmt":"2021-09-09T00:50:27","slug":"audio-a-walkman-down-cassette-land","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/2010\/10\/audio-a-walkman-down-cassette-land\/","title":{"rendered":"audio: a Walkman down cassette land"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sony’s discontinuation of cassette Walkmans<\/a> (in Japan at least) induces a bit of reverie.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My friend got the very first Sony Walkman straight outta Hong Kong when it first came out (it looks like this TPS-L2<\/a> at walkmancentral.com). Its innovation-that-died was the two<\/strong> headphone jacks, so you could listen with a friend. We tried it, quite strange. Unfortunately his weren’t labelled “guys” and “gals”<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Walkman was an immediate hit, but it wasn’t quite revolutionary: I had a Walkman 7 years before there was a Walkman! I got (and still own) a Sony TC-44<\/a> mono dictation unit and would play music from it inside my jacket while hiking and skiing. So I invented the first Sports Walkman, cue Panasonic slogan “Just slightly ahead of our time”. There were no ear-bud headphones back then. Like all 1970s-early 80s Sony stuff, it was a high-quality tank, it worked for 20 years. I acquired all Sony’s accessories for it: leather case, pillow speaker, rechargeable battery, all high-quality. Enjoy a timeline of Sony’s glorious gadget history<\/a> (which leaves out Elcaset<\/a>, SQ quadraphonic, Glasstron, Sports Walkman, and many other innovations).<\/p>\n

My very first cassette player was a Philips unit that was more geared towards dictation.\u00a0 My dad got it for me along with four “musicassettes” (sic), two of which I still own; Bach Organ favorites by E. Power Biggs, and a fine performance of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue and An American in Paris.<\/p>\n

I still have my cassettes of my sister’s records and radio programs. (Yarr, piracy back when you had to push RECORD at the right split-second and adjust knobs and write song titles down.) I occasionally play them on a Denon DRM-510 deck that still plays back but can’t record. It replaced another Denon that replaced a Yamaha; unfortunately hi-fi cassette decks aren’t very durable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was present at the birth of the Walkman and its pre-history. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-38","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-audio","category-electronics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=38"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1268,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/38\/revisions\/1268"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=38"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=38"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skierpage.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=38"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}