Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models(obsoletesony.substack.com) |
Why Sony can't bring back its classic Walkman models(obsoletesony.substack.com) |
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.
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.
people just want it but not enough people to buy the thing
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.
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
I wonder why its so much better than localised titles and subtitles on youtube.
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.
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.
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?
In the mid 2010s after some lobbying, they eventually invested into new tooling to build a successor.
The new models have a handful of components in common, yes, a possibly even better re-engineered direct drive motor (and I don't remember about the tonearm) - but of course the prices put them in the "too much" range, even the more streamlined versions aimed at the DJ booth.
And they have worse feedback than the classics.
/me pets his M3D/MK5s
It's amazing how ephemeral these incredibly complex manufacturing networks are.
https://teenage.engineering/products/tp-7
- scratches a similar itch, but is also a:
I would not be suprise if it was cheaper to find and refurb a vintage Walkman.
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.
We had rewriteable CDs but they were so awkward, large, and unreliable that it never quite filled that need.
Buying second hand is not that nice (smells that never go away) and “vintage” places sell min. catalogue buy way overpriced.
This is probably not near, but maybe in 10-20 years?
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.
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).
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
:)
> 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.
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 running out of replacement parts.
And you'll be out of consumables long before then.
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.
You could make a Walkman; it'd cost $3-10k each.
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 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
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
https://electronics.sony.com/audio/walkman-digital-recorders...
The cheapest walkman model is $399.99
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
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)
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.
Because you can do that with any phone and just not use the phone part?
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
(I don't know about Apple's current iPod lineup but I'm assuming they all have the app store on them. I do miss my old iPod classic though.)
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.
It seems like streaming "won", which is disappointing.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
(I do think they need a minimum size to be usable but companies can be creative with the form factor)
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.
"Android is not very good" is completely subjective. It does provide access to streaming services and lots of media player options.
The iPod was definitely known for a high quality DAC+amp, but do we know what's inside each older or budget Android device? A lot of components have improved over 20 years, and others haven't. I would also disagree that it "just worked." The cable was proprietary (after Gen 2), iTunes was often buggy and locked down, it didn't support standard FLAC files, you couldn't extract audio officially.
And considering that there are numerous audiophile-focused MP3 players on the market from Sony and FiiO, plus cheap nuggets from no name brands which likely play music just fine... what's being spoken volumes?
Although FiiO is probably the company to look at for these kind of products.
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.
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"
DMP-Z1 Digital Music Player Signature Series (price unavailable)
WM1ZM2 Walkman® Signature Series (£3,299.00, financing available)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).
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)
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.
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.
You can make random search N in the MP3-module, because OFF/ON restarts and then you short NEXT-button wires N times.
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.
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.
---
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.
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).
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.
Clothing prices have been kept flat more by making the products worse. Cheaper synthetic blends, lower stitch count, thinner fabrics, .. and of course by making them in cheaper places with cheaper labor and fewer laws..
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.
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
We could barely agree on the probable scenarios - "dollar collapse" is bad enough without even getting into "aerosol transmissible Ebola" or the like.
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).
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
Or buy any old but decent condition LG V series phone (like a V20, v50 etc etc)
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...
* Naked and Famous (Canada): https://nakedandfamousdenim.com. They also have a cheaper brand that uses the same Japanese denim but the garments are made in China (https://theunbrandedbrand.com), which is still better than Levi's.
* 3Sixteen (US): https://www.3sixteen.com
* The Flat Head (Japan): https://privateandco.ca/collections/the-flat-head
* SugarCane (Japan): https://sugarcanejeans.com/
* TCB (Japan): https://tcbjeans.myshopify.com/
Most of the Japanese brands are hard to get outside Japan, and flying to Tokyo is often the best way to get one, otherwise you're stuck with buying online but you have to know well what you're doing because Japanese denim is almost always unwashed, meaning it will shrink after use so you really have to know how much higher a size to order so that it will fit you well after 6 months.
The M-disc is a better option for most use cases-- but if you have a ton of data that needs archiving, the tape involves less human labor and less physical space, which is I guess how the high prices are justified for those 'niche' applications.
Yes, that's true and IMO the main reason why even people with the money end up buying the same bad products: they often don't have the time to learn and form a taste.
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.
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.
Maybe your better off with something like a refurbed iPod
They're very well known and have several competitors
iPods weren't cheap either.
(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!
That product category simply isn't worthwhile for big brands anymore.
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?
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.
Pry it open, replace the battery, swap the HDD for something like the iFlash.
You really don't need that much processing power to decode mp3s and FLACs.
They have 32GB of storage, no screen, light enough to run and swim with.
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.
[2] https://www.behance.net/gallery/72386255/Pod-Case-for-Apple-...
Given how much we can store in solid state not sure I’d want to navigate my library without a screen
You can buy new shells, colors, storage adapters, batteries, etc.
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.
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.
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"
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.