Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models
obsoletesony.substack.com163 points by speckx 19 hours ago
163 points by speckx 19 hours ago
Article 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 tweet rather than just embedding a nearly-too-small-to-be-readable png of a JPEG and six links to the tweet author's X profile.
Yes, that is the primary reason
people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing
same happen with physical games
> same happen with physical games
And now it’s faster to get them online than to go to the store, even if the game doesn’t have to download itself again for updates.
... and you end up being the donkey they can pin the tail onto, when they feel like bilking you again.
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...
I imagine grok on x will do this too
X’s auto translate of tweets has been really awesome actually.
I wonder why its so much better than localised titles and subtitles on youtube.
LLMs can mentally match and replace whole sentences with culturally similar concepts rather than having to go word-by-word. That tend to yield more natural sounding, not necessarily accurate, translations than literal ones. That's great if you don't need accurate details and/or consistent inverse translations.
Classical machine translations can't take "EUTs sets up a bearer with eNB" and produce "The device (like a phone) connects to the cell tower."[1], it's a fragment of confection to an LLM, and that's useful when/where it is.
1: I just literally asked Gemini Flash to do it
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.
Obsolete 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 connectors and standards) I think that much of their success was enabled by their willingness to cut off and bin whole swathes of their catalogue. Ok, a lot of it was binned later than it should have been (Cassette Walkmans were crap by the late 1990s, post 2000 Discmans/CD Walkmans too) the fact that they did it was a good signal.
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.
CRTs are a stronger example. The R&D Sony has lost to the sands of time means we would need decades of sustained effort to reach the same quality of shadow mask that we used to have. It wouldn't be picking up where we left off, it would be picking up at the idea of where we left off with none of the supply chain that enabled it.
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 and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.
> I think they are. Not all knowledge is captured in documentation and blueprints. A lot of knowledge existed only in brains of now retired people. And even blueprints are lost when companies go out of businesses.
We are talking implementations details to build the slimmest walkmans made in history.
That doesn't mean we couldn't make a much better sounding tape player protoype and still a slimmer one than the We are Rewind player and what is available today on Amazon, then iterating on making it smaller and smaller over the models. The main issue is still money and market, you can't spend that time on iterating and improving the design if the market is small and you are losing money.
There's still TAPE drives out there, but nowhere near as many as there were, and they're expensive.
You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
Tape now is very niche - it’s for data archival purposes, and often only exists for regulatory reasons. This is why it is ludicrously expensive- it only needs to be cheaper than the next credible commercially available alternative, which only needs to offset the risk of going to jail for malicious malpractice.
There are lots of portable cassette players on the market, starting at 20€ or less.
Only low quality. But yes, building better quality shouldn’t cost $ 10k
They are as good as the price the market wants to pay for them. There is a match at $20, but not much more than that.
But the article explains WHY the investments are necessary in the first place.
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 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.
Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
> 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 commodity markets.
The alternative is to move upmarket where prestige or specific features are important:
> some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much.
There you go.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
They can and do. Look on Amazon.
They call into the two buckets you outline above. Just buy one of the $50 ones from the companies you haven't heard of.
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 $500, somewhere between absolutely piece of shit and extreme prestige. But I'm dreaming if I think anyone is going to serve that market
Doesn't Fiio and the like make a bunch of fairly affordable stuff ? Definitely well under 500$
it's a little weird but most of the sub $50 ESP-32 boards on waveshare include an MP3 player as one of many demo bits of code (primarily because it shows off code for "read from microSD card" and "drive the DAC".) It's not quite what you're asking for, just a benchmark that it's kind of "too easy to build" which might get in the way of actual products.
The basic Sony Walkman is 74.99 $
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
It looks like they recently discontinued that model, I don't see it new anywhere.
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
They had models like the A55L (https://www.whathifi.com/reviews/sony-nw-a55l) which were more affordable, but the venn diagram of "cheap" and "niche audiophile gear" is two separate circles. Those who want nostalgia get iPods and mod them with SD cards and new batteries. Those who want Android and a headphone jack have older used phones or new budget ones (Moto g Power 2024 is US$129) and the market for cheap "nuggets" is not wide enough nor would there be enough margin to justify continued production.
That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.
I guess there just is no room in the current market for a mid-ranged product.
The segment is being squeezed on at least five sides (probably more):
- Cheap low-end no-name players;
- Audiophile products like the Sony walkman stuff;
- People who are happy using their phones;
- (for the exercise "phone too heavy" use case) A smart watch, paired to bluetooth headphones;
- Second hand iPods from the 2000s, often refurbished and/or modded;
Maybe one of the low-end no-name players meets your needs... But how could you find it wading through the crap?
I had an ipod, but the battery is dead, and it still had a rotating hd, so I thought: I liked Sony Discman, back in the day, this new player must be good. I was wrong. It sucks in many different ways. I've described some of the problems before and copied them here:
My iPod Classic was in a terminal phase, and since I like to carry my music around instead of streaming arbitrary stuff, I bought a Sony Walkman mp3 (+ other formats) player. It's bad. It takes a long time to boot, the battery life is mediocre, the UI is mainly lists of things, searching always misses tracks or albums, the volume defaults to a pretty low level, and when you increase it, it interrupts you asking if you're sure.
And when I started copying my itunes collection to the "walkman" (it is branded Walkman, but not worthy of the name), it would constantly stop copying. The included software was useless, and wouldn't copy a single track, giving up after 5 to 10 minutes of scanning. I had to write a Python script to overcome problems with long directory and file names and copy them to the proper directory.
Worst of all: there's a very loud click when you stop a track (using wired headphones). It's as if they never even used it.
Refurbished iPod is the way try go, I have a 2006 model with new battery and 128GB flash memory, it’s great for leaving plugged in in the car
There are so many 3rd party parts available for iPods.
Pry it open, replace the battery, swap the HDD for something like the iFlash.
I just thought that maybe this is something for a personal Pi 0 project. DAC + microSD card + off the shelf display + 3D printed case + battery.
Or even the Pi Pico.
You really don't need that much processing power to decode mp3s and FLACs.
I was looking at the Pico first when writing that, but you would need a SD card header. Small issue - I use one for my Dreamcast controller Maple>USB bus.
You already need to add a decent quality DAC/Amp, might as well add a SD card slot at the same time.
On top of the lower power consumption, another advantage of the pico is that you can actually buy the raw RP2040 or RP2350 chips (for roughly $1) and make your own custom PCB.
> which is why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players
the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)
so you're basically competing head to head with every shitphone maker out there, and they have economies of scale. you do not.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware
and so... now you're competing with simple smartphones. you're going to charge more for a fancy case for something that requires to be carried separate from your phone and offers zero additional advantage?
there's a huge market for external mobile DSPs for this reason. this is an example of an entry level one https://www.microcenter.com/product/705193/moondrop-freedsp-...
btw, im sure someone like shanling is making exactly what you're thinking of, but they often have limited production runs and still cost within the same range as a basic android phone (usually a bit more)
>the burning answer is really, by the time you've chosen a modern merchant soc, and put a screen on it, you're really more or less at the same BOM cost as a very low end android device (and frankly, the soc bsp you chose is likely to be android/aosp to begin with)
This is, incidentally, also almost universally an answer to "why doesn't nobody make a dumb TV anymore?!"
The off-the-shelf SoC that handle the TV decoding/HDMI bits already has a bunch of general purpose ARM cores; might as well put Android on it instead of writing your own firmware.
I think everybody talking about how you can get an android device that does this missing the point. Android is not very good. These devices are just repurposed cell phone components, basically.
The original iPod was an offline device with high quality interfaces and it "just worked." The fact that such a thing can't be found for music - let alone video - speaks volumes.
IDK I've got some rando Chinese product that looks pretty much exactly like a late-2000s iPod "classic" and has some fairly generic Android interface including a decent music player. I think it cost like $40.
I've bought a few for the kids but they generally have weird issues like sorting music in bizarre unpredictable ways (can't seem to get it to play an audiobook in order). There's no customer support, and they also break fairly easily
Yeah, it's definitely more of a consumable item than an asset, as the logistics guys would say.
Have you looked at fiio? They’ve been doing it a while and aren’t crazy expensive https://www.fiio.com/player
These actually look decent, thanks for the link. I wonder why I could never find them in my endless googling
There's other competitors as well. Just search for "DAP" (digital audio player)
Or buy any old but decent condition LG V series phone (like a V20, v50 etc etc)
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
There are a ton of these and they're all behind your "company I've never heard of" blind spot.
Maybe a pair of these: https://uk.shokz.com/products/openswim-pro
They have 32GB of storage, no screen, light enough to run and swim with.
The old HTC One M8 used to fill this niche but they might be too old to use on the daily any more. I’ve been thinking of digging mine out, the headphone output was great
Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time!
Yes the old box of obsolete smartphones and PDAs and datalogic falcon x3 pocket pcs waiting for me to do projects with them are why I can never justify buying even a20 dollar mp3 player.
Here's a one in close to the form factor of the last iPod Shuffle: https://www.fiio.com/m5
They have an AI assistant on the webpage and it says that the shortcut to activate it is cmd+Q (on Mac this is a global shortcut to quit an application, akin to alt+F4) which is absolutely psychotic. I wonder if in chinese macOS the shortcut is different or something or the person designing it uses windows and just thought ctrl+q(uestion) makes perfect sense
you could use a smart watch, not nearly as much storage but for playing music while running it can work well enough.
There's a case [1] for the Apple Watch that turns it into an 'iPod'. It's also quite similar to the Pod Case concept [2].
[2] https://www.behance.net/gallery/72386255/Pod-Case-for-Apple-...
MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions. And "MP3 player" is a feature of other devices, not its own device. Both my Apple Watch and Garmin watch can store and play MP3s without a phone; both also support music subscriptions.
The only market is in the "enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much", just like it is currently for vinyls and DVD players.
I buy films from local charity shops for €1/film, but it seems the local electronics stores are not selling many DVD players any more.
It seems like streaming "won", which is disappointing.
Disappointing, but that's the harsh reality of how the market works. Convenience wins. Which is why physical media sales first suffered (allegedly) from piracy; I don't think it was primarily to avoid paying for stuff, but because having years of music in a winamp playlist was much less hassle than managing a CD collection.
Piracy was ultimately defeated or at least greatly diminished thanks to streaming services. It's making a comeback now due to increased prices and fragmentation though (and to a degree, the politics of prominent figures at these streaming companies - artists pulled their music from Spotify out of protest).
> MP3s have been on the way out for a long time, being replaced by music subscriptions
I both have music subscriptions (Spotify for the wife, Qobuz for me: Qobuz streams lossless but sucks for music discovery) and good old files (mostly FLAC files indeed except some very old, impossible-to-find, live recordings I only have in mp3). One does not prevent the other.
Also some people self-host or partially self-host things: you stream from a server you own: be it family pictures (I'm Mich / immich), movies and/or music (Plex or Jellyfin). And, well, the stream doesn't spring out of thin air: there are good old files on the server.
Lastly: some music streaming services allows you to buy albums and/or individual songs, DRM-free.
I'm not saying that MP3 and CDs and cassette tapes and vinyl don't work. But they are on the decline and no company would be wise to make a mass-market device specifically for them, when the mass market has moved on.
You want an mp3 player with no DRM lockin and proprietary store and so on? Sorry, that's not competitive anymore. That will not happen for the same reason people don't make affordable dumb TVs anymore. The manufacturer needs a way to spy on you or get recurring revenue some other way.
Maybe a nice 50%-200% tax on recurrent revenue streams could force things back to sell-once + no spying...
Sony and Fiio both make high end "mp3 players" aka Digital Audio Player. These are expensive devices and have more in common with mobile phones, but you can buy them
> 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.
I recently got the Shanling M0s. It runs its own OS and seems to me completely at parity with what MP3 players used to be back in the day; in fact I think it's the best one I've ever had, and I've been buying those devices since the Diamond Rio. If more people just got one, Shanling would no longer be a company nobody's ever heard of, and the economics would change to further bring down the price too (although I think it's not all that bad right now).
The battery life’s reportedly kind of garbage, though, isn’t it? As it seems to be on all these devices. I understand this is partly due to overpowered output amplifiers (to support obscure headphones) and software decoding (to support obscure formats), but still, <15hr of playback is pitiful.
Mine was great for a year until it stopped working out of nowhere, not turning on. The company told me they wouldn't help me in any way. And there seems to be no good alternatives.
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Why can't people simply take inexpensive smartphone hardware, install modern media player software on it, and then just use it to listen to music?
Is it fundamentally impossible to properly enjoy music while ignoring the extra parts that sit disused inside?
I mean: At least here in the States, a person can walk into a Walmart or Best Buy with a fifty dollar bill, and walk out with a brand new Motorola MP3-playing device with wifi, an IPS screen, a headphone jack, and an SD card slot -- and they can then simply use it.
they do. tons of them. https://www.aliexpress.com/w/wholesale-mp3-player.html
I've bought too many of these. They never look like the picture, the screens are awful, they all use the same shit soc, they don't last and they have issues with tags and sorting.
I just want a company I've heard of to make something that doesn't absolutely suck but also doesn't cost more than a phone
You get what you pay for.
Ultimately what you are wondering is why electronics companies aren't relentlessly updating and optimizing products like they did during 1980s-2010s at every price point between $4.99 to $499.99M, that just wasn't normal, and that wasn't sustainable after all.
I think there's a chance that the world would go through these discussions again for software, and we realize why only US could produce great software, but we'll see...
The iPod was a product in an interesting time... if you ignore the screen, a modern mp3 player could be made as small as a SD card... as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen. Nobody wants to put the effort into something that's going to be as basic as a mp3 player.
> as soon as you add the screen, you need a full operating system to manage files and run the screen
More software? Sure. An operating system? No. There were (are?) plenty of cheap MP3 players that had screens but just drive it with some budget microcontroller.
So like the original iPod Shuffle? Just buttons, a clip and a headphone jack, no screen.
(I do think they need a minimum size to be usable but companies can be creative with the form factor)
It barely needs a screen. I adored my minidisc players and they were all basically calculator displays
I adored my MiniDisc too but the limited storage of a single disk makes it easy to find the music you want
Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen
Would you still adore it as much today, though? I know I don't adore my iPod classic as much now as I did in 2006, and that's inclusive of the nostalgia kick. It's just not very practical and usable in today's world.
I still adore the hell out of my 512GB (SD) iPod Classic/Minis
You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.
The tactile experience is a nice throwback in a touchscreen mostly/no physical buttons present, but the display is garbage by modern standards, finding specific tracks sucks, and doing any amount of playlist management is an exercise in frustration. And that is with replacing the firmware with rockbox, which significantly improves on those areas :-)
I don't use it daily, but I enjoyed rediscovering and using my MiniDisc stuff that I was inspired to build a pretty popular website around it :)
I would really love to try MD: besides the "tactileness" of it, the storage limits imposes to actively curate playlists and make compromises on how much/what music you can carry with you given the circumstances. An iPod classic already has so much storage available that this thought is secondary and you don't have to engage with your music to the same extent.
Absolutely, and that's something I've tried to highlight in the FAQs on the site - limitation breeds creativity. It makes you appreciate the media just a little bit more.
One of the best places to have MD is in a car. You can quickly identify (by unique color or label) each disc, which is either a full album presented as the artist intended or a playlist you curated. There's no "shuffle all 5000 songs" or "here's a playlist Spotify calls 80s kitchen songs but is half 90s pop you've heard before"
The other place I've thought I'd like to go back to MD is just sitting in bed and listening to some music.
I don't want to fiddle with my phone and get blasted by light from the screen.
I don't want to swipe through an infinite list of all music known to man.
I don't want to wait for an app to update, page to load, song to buffer or pop-up upselling me to need to be dismissed.
I want to listen to music I own, on a device I own, which instantly responds when I press play. That's it.
What's the website ?
The MiniDisc Wiki at minidisc.wiki [didn't mention it before because self-promo]
Hard to be objective through the nostalgia tbh. I would expect more today I guess
I find this seriously underestimates what jackets 6 will undertake for fun, even unpaid.
My understanding is there are decent MP3 players by places like Fiio at this point? Haven't used any of em in anger though
Though I have a walkman (that kinda sucks cuz it's android.... it's (USB-C AND annoying Android OS) XOR (Proprietary charging cable) from Sony nowadays
> Why can't somebody take simple smartphone hardware and make a modern media player that is not a phone?
Sony Walkmans are this, along with a bunch of the random mp3 players you would find on amazon. I don't know why some other people replying to you are acting like this doesn't exist.
> Sony Walkmans are this
The cheapest one I'm seeing is the Sony NW-A306. That's around $600 - I think it fits into the OP's category of "some sort of enthusiast audiophile flac player thing that costs way too much"
My "MP3 player" is a phone with Musicolet. If you really distrust phones, you can buy a cheap phone and use it only for that and nothing else. There are probably other offline MP3 players but this one seems pretty good. (It is hard to find a phone with an SD card slot and a headphone jack but that's a separate issue.)
Did you even read the article? They mention Sony sells a new Walkman just like what you mention https://www.sony.co.uk/walkman
Maybe it's just me (am I holding it wrong?), but the link you provided lands at only two products:
DMP-Z1 Digital Music Player Signature Series (price unavailable)
WM1ZM2 Walkman® Signature Series (£3,299.00, financing available)there is also what looks like a headset integrated player in the sports section but it is true that it seems they have totally abandonned their regular non luxury walkman line that was still available a couple of years ago.
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
Fiio has been making these for many years at every price point and size. Quality seems very high
They're very well known and have several competitors
That is the decent player you're looking for. (It has an SD card slot.)
iPods weren't cheap either.
Fourth gen ipod was $399 new.
(the one with the touch wheel and colour display, usually what people think of when they think “classic ipod”.)
It released in 2005, so adjusted for inflation thats $668.91
Yowza!
Now we're just haggling over price. Make more money and be less cheap.
I'd like a Ferrari for $20,000 but we both know that's not gonna happen.
These days, you can just buy a name, but it's expensive.
Factory A is going to make a device for $50, sell 1,000 for them for $150 and make $100,000 ($150*1000-$50*1000).
Factory B can make the same device for $50, buy a name that you've heard of for $100,000, buy some reviews in magazines you're heard of for another $100,000, and sell 1,000 of them for $350 a piece and then they'll make $100,000. ($350*1000-$200,000-$50*1000)
> ... why can't Sony or Apple or anyone else bring back decent MP3 players?
I know the late 90s called and want their MP3 straight out of Napster and their 10 GB HDD back but you can safely up the ante to lossless FLAC files.
MP3 is, literally, 30+ years old and I traded my 10 GB HDD for a 1 TB NVMe SSD that could read an uncompressed dump of my entire 10 GB HDD in about two seconds.
FLAC files are only about 2x the size of 320 kbps mp3.
Really, it's 2026. We can do it (I do it).
Hey I'm happy if it plays flac, but all I want is decent storage and it to not cost a fortune
These companies did everything they could to get people off the "I own files I paid once" model and onto the perpetual "I pay for streaming" model. Of course they dont want to go back to that. It goes against the profit incentive which dictates all business decisions. That's how capitalism works on its most fundamental level.
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 me meant Apple Music compatible.
7) Wired. Not Bluetooth.
A $400 Sony Android-based player doesn't meet 3, 4, nor 5. Most importantly, $400 for a product that doesn't meet some pretty important criteria is ridiculous. A shitty tiny Chinese player isn't going to meet 3, 4, 6 and it'll die on you in a couple of years and you'll be back at square one.
My solution was to buy a 5.5 Gen iPod off eBay ($100), a microSD card carrier (iFlash.xyz - $40), and four microSD cards (Back in my day, $50 each for 256gb). Yes, I had to open the iPod, but yes, it checks all my boxes. And it came in less than the Sony player.
Why not a Fiio ? Or any of the other nicer brand DAP
I just stated it above. Because I don't want a touchscreen, I want to eventually replace the battery when it starts going bad, I want a good software experience along with it.
Fiio can't even keep their site in order. They have broken links everywhere. Nothing about it makes me think it isn't just another shitty Chinese-made disposable.
> For me, I was looking for
To add:
- A physical switch to turn off all inputs. The older ipods had a slider switch that disables all buttons and screen inputs, which was awesome.
Mostly I use an mp3 player when working on things (yard, cars, house, etc) and need something very small and very light, so not a phone. My older ipod with the switch broke down so I'm stuck with a newer ipod which lacks that switch and I hate it. Every few minutes it activates some button press from being in my pocket and ruins the listening.
I swear, this site jumps on the tactile control bandwagon when it comes to something like cars, but for this thread, it's all "meh, everything's touchscreen these days. Get used to it."
MP3-module from Aliexpress and some ESP-board with tiny display and micropython. Ten Euro.
You can make random search N in the MP3-module, because OFF/ON restarts and then you short NEXT-button wires N times.
You forgot to add /s. In no universe would this suggestion be at all practical, and meets practically none of the criteria I'm looking for.
Everything else isdoable, expect maybe "lossless". But then, alas, WAV is as lossless as can be and memory is cheap.
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 still be easy to push/slide, they'd be metal, often powder coated to match the body, would involve super low tolerances, and have a satisfying quality reminiscent of closing/opening the door of a Mercedes! It feels like we can't even do them justice now... Or maybe it's just the economics?! Either way, what an era that was!
Some things we have today have incredible build quality compared to anything that existed in the 80s and 90s. Compare any flagship phone today and the tight tolerances between the edges of different parts of the assembly compared to any walkman. Now of course there are downsides to the way phones are constructed, many downsides. My point is simply that the quality of construction is very high today for some things.
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.
I remember those days very well indeed.
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.
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:
Only 1500 euro.
I would not be suprise if it was cheaper to find and refurb a vintage Walkman.
Geiskes makes a series of aftermarket bent Walkman like cassette players aimed at musicians. I remember spending a lot of time as a kid half pressing buttons to hear the song playback in reverse or chipmunked.
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.
One thing I would love to have is a device like ipod nano (or even a smaller device) with like 1TB storage so I can have all my music offline and have with me all the time. I hate the subscription fee services and just want to buy and own my own collection.
I wonder how far we are from being able to custom spec electronics to locally manufacture low volume dedicated hardware devices at the late 90s Sony level of quality. Is this something that's likely to be possible as 3D printers, cnc machines, AI design tools and microelectronics advance. Or is the combination of materials science and expertise impossible to ever replicate? Basically is a solar punk local fabrication future where you can custom build a CD Walkman, or equivalent technical device - in small run quantities, to high tolerances, making small runs of all the requisite components - even possible. Or do we need to 'wait for' nanobots or replicators for that kind of manufacturing?
I wonder if LLMs will evolve to allow ordering such things by request. Surely this is a a dream of many, manufacturing things same as we are vibe coding apps.
This is probably not near, but maybe in 10-20 years?
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.
MiniDisc would have been an ideal successor to the floppy disk if only Sony had unclenched their fist just a little bit. USB sticks are higher capacity but there's utility in having media you don't have to keep track of; especially in the early 2000s it would have been very handy to give somebody a MiniDisc of data and just say "don't worry too much about getting that back to me, I have a whole box at home".
We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
MD was so cool, but the portable players were so fragile, insert the MD the wrong way and you risk ripping the read head out, at least with the Aiwa one i had (and killed that way..)
Sometimes reading these articles I can't help but think we've pushed ourselves into a local but sup-optimal maximum technologically speaking. i.e. If we didn't follow the path of trying to stick everything into an iPhone/Android (along with moving everything into the cloud), we'd have a more interesting technological landscape.
Everything has been optimized towards giving a small number of companies total control and surveillance over our media. That means forcing people to store their files on someone else's servers. Those companies don't really care about making better technology for others to use. Fewer options for the public, lack of innovation, and the increasing enshittification of everything is a price they are willing to pay for control, lock-in, and rent seeking.
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.
Clothes made in the 90s used different materials and stitching than they do today, and likely cost more to produce. They'd probably need old machines they haven't had in decades.
If we ban the FED from conjuring new Dollars for buying debt and securities, and the only way fresh printed Dollars enter circulation is if apportioned to every citizen equally (debt-free), then we could have all these nice things again. Companies and rich people would need to cater to the populace in order to rake in the inflationbux and pay their taxes. Right now only governments, big businesses, and big asset owners get first spend on inflationbux, and it has resulted in we the people having only 1/3rd the purchasing power for the Dollar earned in wages as we had in 1960!
My TradingView (Yearly) model for the phenomenon: 23.05*10^12/M2SL*A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100))
A4102C1Q027SBEA is total US wages/salaries,
A4102C1Q027SBEA/(USPOP*CIVPART/100*(1-UNRATE/100)) attempts to get a rough average of individual wage/salary,
23.05*10^12/M2SL normalizes the time series to today's Dollar value (in M2 terms).
Billabong and quicksilver are selling 90s board short models now. They are fairly popular so …
> 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 prices, and more expensive raw materials, exacerbated by lower production volume, means that very few would be willing to buy. As an example, take a look at the high quality jeans market: there are a few niche companies in Japan, Europe, US and Canada producing jeans at the same level of quality as 50-100 years ago, in some cases the exact same model as, say, a 1950's Levi's. Those jeans start at $200 per pair, but go even up to $400-500 and the manufacturers are barely surviving.
Which companies are those? My last batch of Levi's moved them into "never again" status - noticeably cheaper fabric than the previous batch, flawed stitching, cheaper logos and tags. I paid more per pair than five years ago (unacceptable for a commodity) and got a worse product (doubly unacceptable for anything). I need tough black jeans I can trust to last a decade; I don't mind spending £250 on them but I do mind getting soft cheap cotton which will go to holes just from daily wear.
> and the manufacturers are barely surviving
I feel for them because I wouldn't mind paying 2/3 times the price for something of measurably higher quality and durability, but it takes effort and dedication to accomplish that as a customer. Effectively the market is saturated with premium-branded items that are marginally better or sometimes worse (a lot of what you see as "technical clothing" comes across that way at least), you feel gaslit by marketing, fake reviews and astroturfing campaigns, and there are only so many deceptions, defeats and financial losses you can sustain before going back to the devil you know: the default everyone else is buying.
just buy a astell kern ak jr awesome unit im on my 2nd battery
It's all the same arguments as the "Why can't we build another Saturn V rocket" and the like. The parts are no longer available, the technical blueprints that remain do not paint a full picture of the manufacturing process, and the engineers and machinists who did know the full picture are mostly retired and decreased.
Yup. In other words, we totally could, but there is no reason to put the time, effort and money into doing so.
We can't build Saturn V rockets because there are not enough Egyptian slaves to do it today, and also we can't figure out how to prevent damage to the rockets as our donkeys roll them across the ground to the launch pad.
Not just an issue with Walkmans but also other device types like digital cameras and Mp3 players. Sad because it seems like more and more people discover the appeal of dedicated devices versus carrying a smartphone around all the time.
Most music is controlled by a few large companies.
If you could demonstrate a revenue stream higher than streaming then they may support. Without that, a struggle, as you need to have exclusives and bonus tracks to differentiate.
With vinyl there are claims of a superior listening experience, that’s not the case with casettes
If any of you are parents of young kids, buy a used book box or Walkman of eBay along with good albums and give them to a child who will love it.
The thing with vinyl is that record players never really went away, but more importantly compared to the walkman (and in the spirit of this article / tweet), they are big and relatively simple, with the pickups probably being the most specialized part of them. And since people kept vinyl players around and they need replacement every once in a while, some of the companies making them never really went away.
Anyway, yes, give your kids physical media, if anything it'll give them something physical to associate with the memory of e.g. music. For me, streaming has lowered the value of music. Before streaming I'd pirate, because digital music was easier, but even then it had more value to me because I had curated playlists and whatnot. Trying to make up for it by buying vinyls of my favorite albums, even though I don't own a player (yet).
If mechanical time keeping hadn’t made the leap to luxury, I wonder if it would’ve ended up in the same situation as walkmans.
I'm generally not zealous in either way of the good old time or everything old is bad...
But seriously, have your vinyl and be happy, I am buying CDs for home use (even in a car it got annoying fast).
But why would I ever go back to something huge, clunky, fragile like MCs (or MDs to a degree)? I'm not saying stop using a dedicated music player (although I've been team mobile phone for music (with mp3s) forever). But the only reason I see for exchangable media would be trading playlists with friends (I hardly did that with MCs or CDs, but ok) - but why not cheap small SD cards. Why do people want their Walkman back? I just don't get it.
When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape, not MD, but whatever...
Minidisc understandably gone away (until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?) but on the tape front ... Maxell thinks they have something with cassette players.... wonder if/how these are selling:
Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player
>until maybe hipsters revive that too like they have with tapes?
That is already happening. I like to frequent Vintage Computer Festival and for the last few years a few of them have had MD-Con as part of a convention within a convention. A whole room dedicated to MiniDisc tech showing off laptops, desktops, camcorders, pro-hifi gear, etc. There is a collector that even brings a large portion of his collection which is all in blue including rare blue color minidiscs themselves from company promo's. One example is a promo MD from Boss Coffee in japan which looked fantastic.
There is even a revival in the software used to burn/format minidiscs since most of the original software is ancient now.
Its pretty fun to visit them as someone who used a minidisc player through highschool and college until I got the original Microsoft Zune. A lot of the people I met at the last two MD-Con's loved looking through all the models presented at the con to try and find the same device they back in the day.
> When I hear Walkman I only think of cassette tape
Same here.
I was just recently wondering if there were any places that sell Walkman's still. I remember walking around Seoul and ended up in a maze of closet sized electronic and nick-nack shops with some really random old parts and gadgets. Made me miss my old boombox. Thought that would be a good place to go back and look for a walkman, but the Maxell MXCP-P100 – wireless cassette player looks perfect
I was glad to find this site offering refurbished iPods, and they also have refurb Walkmans.
Maxell cassette players are not cassette players from back in the day, but cheap stuff like everything else: https://youtu.be/6XyaBls8jyg?is=Lrgqe23yWlelBvl-
Those things are highly prized by flippers now.
I disagree. Sony can't bring back Walkmans because a Walkman won't generate the returns Sony demands. Furthermore, they refuse to open-source it so it stays hidden in a vault.
Plenty of people would lose money, break even, or God willing, make a tiny profit, diving into this problem. Regardless, it would make society a happier place.
s/can't/won't/
I can take the grocery delivery order that pays $4, but I won't because the returns for my time and gas are unacceptably low.
Capitalism will make you as happy as necessary to ensure that you continue buying. No more no less.
I am so beyond sick of Sony right now.
I didn't think they'd end right up there aongside the rest of humaniry's treasonous ilk such as Tesla/SpaceX/ChatGPT/Microsoft/Samsung/Nvidia/etc but the whole "we're not making discs for playstation because we repurposed the factory for some slop meant for ai data centres" left such a horrifically sour taste in my mouth that I wish them nothing but the absolute worst.
Hell it feels weird to hate any company more than telecom ones but somehow they all managed; it's insane. It used to be so easy to make fun of comcast and yet compared to all these horrific companies they look downright angelic in comparison nowadays.
Sigh.
Best you can do is get familiar with peer-to-peer acquisition, and teach others. Starve the enshittifiers!