Hiya all!!! "First time caller, long time listener" as they say. I'm 56 years old, and am originally from Juneau AK. USA where I got my first real ghetto blaster in 1981 or 1982. It was a JVC RC-M70JW that cost me $455.00 at Alaska Music. It was a large and fairly weighty machine, but it had decent tone and played quite loudly when called upon to do so -- though it was a bit of a dry cell pig (battery hog). I've had a number of ghetto blasters (boomboxes) over the decades; and although I currently have neither the income to purchase them nor the room to display them in, I'm still interested in them.
I've had the following machines over the last 20 or so years (I have web pages for each machine linked near the top of http://www.ledmuseum.net/mmenu43.htm on one of my websites; but linked individually below): Aiwa CS-600 JVC RC-550JW JVC RC-M70JW JVC RC-M80 JVC RC-656 JVC RC-838JW Panasonic RX-5090 Sears SR-2100 (I JUST NOW DISCOVERED THAT ALL OF THE PHOTOS ON THESE WEB PAGES ARE "BROKEN"!!!) Back in 1981 when I still lived in Juneau, an acquaintance of mine, Albert Dick, had a JVC RC-550JW, a monaural box sporting a three-way speaker that included a 10" woofer challenged me to a "sound-off" at Eagle Beach so that we could determine who had the louder machine. Needless to say, my RC-M70 rather handily won.
Oh man, I remember your website and completely forgot about it. It's still the same, back when everything was new and people were posting cool new information, at least for me. I really miss those days, a lot of it was for fun but people just aren't doing it as much anymore.
My website, The LED (and Laser) Museum at http://www.ledmuseum.org has been in continuous operation for over 21 years now. :O I hope you still find it useful or at least mildly entertaining.
No I love it, I had it bookmarked on several computers going back to the first generation but it was lost over time. I just read that you bought a box from the "Boombox Museum" I think that was one of building blocks for this forum. I remember they would have some cool stuff for sale but it was always out of my price range at the time. That was back when I was discovering that there was 1000's of different boomboxes and Walkmans, equipment I'd never seen before.
I remember (quite vividly) getting an original Sony Walkman in 1978 or 1979 and how the music played on it sounded so crisp -- not like anything that I had ever heard before. I had a friend who was somewhat of an audiophile and it blew him away as well.
I was just a kid but all we had was a mono cassette deck, like everyone else had. We still used that for everything, recording sound was so much fun. Then the boomboxes came out, they were neat looking but very expensive, followed by the Walkman. When the copies hit the market, everyone had one. The Sonys were always considered the best and they were the most expensive. Like you said, the batteries were the worse part, my portables always had a radio which would play for days after the tape deck quite.
Unless you were working for Sony, it would have been 1979, and in the USA far more likely 1980. Last year was the Fortieth Anniversary prompting this discussion http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/40th-anniversary-of-the-walkman.4546/ You were spot on about the sound though. Even test equipment showed it was far better than any portable and many home systems from before then.
This website is excellent; great data and insights. Did you ever think of doing a Discolite with all of its LEDs?
