Giving up my iPod for a Walkman

[Melrose]

I had several Walkmans (Walkmen?) One a Sony and one an Aiwa. Actually, I had two Sonys. One broke, the other finally died also.. only the Aiwa served me until my Discman came along.

 

[themoonisdown09]

In fact I used to stay up late to catch the "Top 10 Songs of the Day" on the radio because it was easy to record all of the hits. Boy did you get ticked if they cut the song off early, started a ways into it, or broke into commercial. The goal was to get the cleanest recording you could get. Wow, I'm laughing thinking back on those days.

Hahaha... same here.

I had several Walkmans (Walkmen?) One a Sony and one an Aiwa. Actually, I had two Sonys. One broke, the other finally died also.. only the Aiwa served me until my Discman came along.

I had a Sony and an Aiwa. I actually liked the Aiwa better because I thought the design was cooler.

 

[Melrose]

I had a Sony and an Aiwa. I actually liked the Aiwa better because I thought the design was cooler.

yeah me too. That little Aiwa wore like iron. I can't tell you how many times it got dropped, stepped on, etc. and just kept on chuggin' away.

 

[Ntombi]

I gave my Discman away, but here's my last Walkman. I think it's late 80s, because I remember having it in high school (class of '91), but I'm not sure, and don't care enough to look it up.

It's funny that I could lay my hands on it immediately, and that the batteries still have enough juice to tell the time. Well, someone's time, anyway. I think I last turned it on over 5 years ago just to see if I could.

And yes, I still have a box FULL of mix tapes. Memories...

 

[redking31591]

I'm only 18 and I remember using my cassette player. all the kids in kindergarten were jealous because I was the only one that had one. I didn't get my first mp3 player(not ipod) until 8th grade and my first iPod until 11th grade. I was still rocking a cd player. Though I might be a little odd, I have a record player in my room that I frequently turn on so I like old and new tech.

 

[conch575]

I remember I had a Discman when I was in year 4 (9 years old), then in year 6 (11 years old) I upgraded to a pink iPod Mini -The batteries on those things were a b*tch.

Now I'm 16 and I have an iPhone (after having a White iPod 5G)

 

[EX1127]

So i guess this raises the question what will replace iPods and MP3 players?

 

[LizKat]

When I was a kid, I used to sit at home listening to the radio and if a song came on that I liked, I would record it to a tape. I probably had no less than 50 cassette tapes sitting around with songs I recorded from the radio. When CDs became popular, I remember hating that I couldn't do this with my CD player.

I was (and still am) obsessed with music.

Yep, me too. I made miles of tapes off the radio when I lived in New York and was commuting to the Catskills a couple times a week. My current car is pretty old and only has a tape player and a radio, so although I now can and do use an iPod and FM transmitter, I have also been known to make 45-minute playlists in itunes and then cable the laptop's audio-out to the aux-in of a Panasonic boombox and record pairs of the playlists on 90-minute cassette tapes. No fuss, no muss, no worry about melting an ipod in a hot glovebox, just leave the tapes in the car in the glovebox (along with some choice recordings off the radio from the 80s in NYC) and who cares if something happens to them, can make the tape again.

The only problem with some of those old radio tapes is there are quite a few songs that I really like but I have NO IDEA who the artists are or what the song titles are, because I didn't pay that much detailed attention to non-classical music at the time. I would just think "oh I need to make some more radio tapes" and would spend a few nights dialing around NYC fm stations and just hitting the record button when I heard something I liked. Lots of times they would not announce the artist right before or after a song, so who knew, and I wasn't about to record a bunch of DJ chatter just so he might get to telling me what I had just heard.

I remain amazed that any of my old tapes still work after all this time. A couple of them have sat year-round in the glovebox of this and two or three previous cars in hellish weather, hot or cold. I think the trick is not to drop them when it's below zero, or hit rewind when they've been sitting at 125ºF.

On Walkman players, I still do have one, but it replaced an Aiwa (which would record, not just playback) that I really loved and I hardly ever use the Sony except for its weather band on the radio.

 

[covisio]

Like all technology, it's better to remember the impact it had when it was new. When the first Sony Walkman came out, it was many people's first real experience of something approaching proper stereo sound. 'HiFi' was out of the reach of most young people, then all of a sudden it became possible to buy a piece of equipment that delivered pretty astounding sound, for reasonable cost. Okay, not that reasonable - I seem to remember the first players costing somewhere in the region of £100 ($200?) at the time -but eventually even Sony were turning them out for less than £10.

A friend of mine had one of the very first Toshiba models. All metal construction, with a special cassette module you could slot in which actually contained an FM radio! Oh my, were we impressed! And the sound - wow, it was as if you were actually in the studio!!!

I eventually owned an extremely trick JVC model with full logic control (i.e., not mechanical, but motorized transport controls). It was very small and sadly very delicate, but it was a truly lovely thing to behold.

Okay, cassette-tape was a technological nightmare in reality. Broken tape, wow and flutter, motors that could barely cope with hauling the spool around, battery life, size, capacity - you could go on forever detailing its flaws.

Even so, I still think we lost something with the advent of 'track selection' (i.e. CD-onwards). We gained the ability to 'skip'. No longer were we more-or-less forced to listen to an entire album, to discover, then learn to appreciate, the full extent of an artists work. With that leap in technology, the album as an art-form was effectively rendered obsolete.

 

[SingaporeStu]

Oh, yeah that brings back memories. I personally had several Aiwas. My first one was a birthday present from my parents. I was one of very few privileged kinds in my school to have one.

It lasted pretty long (can't remember how long) and was still working long after I upgraded. Back then, new models didn't come to market so quickly, it is was possible the highest-end model would keep their top spot for at least 12 months, but my original aiwa kept working even after someone stole my newer player.

Traveling with it was a hassle when I stop to think about it now, but I guess back then, it just meant that I either stuffed more things into my backpack, or really planned what I wanted to listen to.

As many of you have mentioned, the best feature was being able to record on it. Making mix tapes, my own audio logs and even recording a Michael Jackson concert when he was in town. Yep, it was a very useful device out of the box, to me anyway.

Eventually, I graduated to MiniDisc, but I nearly went DCC (anybody remember DCC from Phlips?) CD's were playback-only, and back then CD recorders were horrendously expensive, and I guess I was really into mixing my own music then, so portable CD players never really did it for me. I used the 3-disc changer on my home hi-fi, made a playlist timed exactly right, and recorded via the optical-out to my MiniDisc recorder.

Of course, now I own several iPods and an iPhone, and am waiting for the 3G S to be available in Singapore where I live.

As far as I know, recording capability is a feature missing in many mp3 devices, ipods included, and only recently implemented in iPhone 3.0. Not that I really need it right now, but it was a feature that was almost standard throughout at the end of the portable cassette player's life. Just add mic.

Aah... the memories...

As a sign of the times, and as examples of companies tried to resist the tide of change, Sony is now in trouble, and where's Aiwa now?

 

[duncyboy]

It even has a tape in it (duplicate of a Metallica bootleg from the 2nd Metallica gig I went to):

Careful! Knowing Metallica they'll probably send their lawyers round to confiscate the tape!!!

I used to love tapes. It was the done thing to make a tape for a friend from CD's and radio- took ages.

Then I had a couple of different Sony NetMD MiniDisc players. Great concept ruined by the (then) rubbish software and restrictions. That format had a ton of potential and, at the time, Sony hamstrung it.

My first mp3 player was a 20GB iRiver which I still have somewhere. Great little player.



That was replaced by my first iPod...