Hi there, As a teenager I bought my first ( second hand) walkman. A clone of the famous sony walkman but at a far cheaper price. I fell in love with this new way of enjoying music anywhere and still do to this day. so I’m here to find out more about these walkmans and I know I’m in the right spot. So of anyone has the time I would love to hear about it’s history and of course the stories. Kind regards, Hank
@autoreverser has a huge collection of clones http://www.stereo2go.com/forums/threads/my-tps-l2-clones-westman-so-far.331/ I wouldn't call brands like Sanyo (which were cheaper and consequently more popular than Sony here in the U.K. clones, as they only copied the idea of the personal stereo as opposed to the design.
Hello Longman, I agree Companies like Sanyo and another brand that comes to mind is Panasonic far as Sanyo goes it was sad to see them go ! they made a lot products over the years from televisions and vcrs to Walkman style cassettes. Sincerely Richard
Hank, welcome here and yes, you found exactly the right spot. not many personal electronic items changed the civilized, private world as much as portable stereo cassette recorders, wich started their walk-of-fame after Sony had the right marketing-idea for them with the invention of the Walkman-campaign in 1979. for myselfe, Walkmen and their derivates are at least as important for society, as Apple‘s iPhone in 2007. giving people the chance to have their favourite tunes, audiobooks etc. allways with them meaned giving them a good chance to get distrected from stressy daily things, share their tunes etc. and the used media compact-cassette was an easy to handle thing to supply mixtapes to friends, record radioshows, concerts (i remember recording a few concerts myselfe in the 80‘es with a bricky Sony D6c hidden in my pants and little microphones mounted left and right in the coller of my leatherjacket). nowadays, that i hardly even listen to tapes (i prefer vinyl at home and silence while travelling or at work), i still love Walkmen, the story behing, like my memories connected to their use in those days and off course collecting them. as for technical changes, nobody uses cassette-players anymore, besides for sentimental reasons - let‘s face it: in times of uncounted streaming-services, available 24/7 im good quality and almost everywhere plus the possibility of storing huge amounts of audio in tiny portable units such as a smartphone, using a cassette-player means circumstances you can avoid like carrying cassettes around, tons of batteries in your pocket (fook, was this one here empty or not ? may i mix it with others ?…) and so on - nowadays you have wireless headphones/earjets with perfect performance and no wire-hazzle… b.t.w., on the weekend i was chilling in a gardenchair on the veranda playing an old mixtape from former s2go member DAIWA (some here might remember him) on a TC-D5 and with wired headphones yes, as founder of the hype Sony deserves the crown - but like many royals around the world, that doesn‘t mean much - there has been so many nice, inventive, tough and well designed units been constructed by uncounted brands, so enough backround to start a collection, carry on and you‘ll enjoy it maybe as most of us do here
Do we now rely on the internet too much? Yesterday as a result of a storm we had a widespread power cut lasting over an hour. Our mobiles were showing "emergency calls only". I plugged a wired phone into the house phone socket, found the number of the electricity board in a Yellow Pages "last edition" and called them to get an update on what was going on. Stupidly the automated line suggested I could get further updates on their website. Maybe you could if you had satellite internet. The POTS (plain old telephone system) here had huge amounts of resilience built in. The reason phones work from 50V is that they have a large bank of lead acid batteries at each exchange so it can continue operating for many hours without mains power. There are plans to replace the POTS system here with an all IP based system, but after a realisation as to how badly such systems perform in adverse conditions that has been postponed. p.s. Back to music I still think that if you don't have a copy of a song yourself (even if it is just a digital file) you can't rely on being able to play it in the future. Having said that I have just bid on a CD on eBay after my Sony ZS-D50 chewed up the pre-recorded cassette of it that I bought over 30 years ago.
Wow, I didn’t expect this so thank you very much for the replies. Me very happy . Autoreverser said it better than I could. It was a great era back then and it was a lot of fun. Nowadays we take it for granted but I do still respect the good old days. There were a lot of clones back then but I could never imagine so many. Autoreversers collection is mindblowing. I’m just happy with the few I still have but indeed they are there for sentimentel value. If I have the time I still use them. I don’t know if any of you ever had the problem of remembering a song but just couldn’t figger out who the artist was. Well, that happened to me some years ago so here’s me climbing through the attic trying to find a shoebox full of cassettes. It’s like playing twister and after getting a few cramps ( bloody hell, why do I put myself through this ) I finally reached the holy grail. I opened it and was glad to see my old friends from the past. I didn’t have a cassette deck anymore but I did still have my vendex clone walkman. So……here’s me listening through about 120 tapes and after nearly giving up, I found it. Now I’m a pretty big bloke but the tears started streaming down my cheaks and couldn’t have felt better than in a long time. It’s that kind of feeling that I wanted to cling on for a while so the walkman has a prominent place next to my audio in the livingroom. Every time I pass by it it reminds me of a youth well worth while. So thank you again for the wonderfull replies again and I’m looking forward to read more articles here. Cheers.
Yes, I’m a huge fan of tech moan. I did see this episode and really enjoyed it. It’s great to see so many fans here. Thank you.
Hello Hank, Yes , I’m a huge fan of tech moan me too ! I was on Etsy yesterday and seen a 3d printed Sony walkman prop made for holloween . Sincerely Richard
