Hi all I've been thinking about the current resurgence in all things cassette and am surprised there isn't a decent player/recorder available new so that people can indulge in the wonders of creating and listening to their own tapes. What is available seems to be various levels of total rubbish so I wonder what people (general public that is - not the gluttons for punishment that make up the constituency of this site who delight in broken gears, perished rubber bands and arcane measurements) are using to listen to the new commercial tapes available and are they getting to make their own tapes. If I were the Divine and All Seeing Being I would smite my staff on the ground and conjure up a range of portable player/recorders to suit every pocket and distribute them throughout all the lands of the earth and there would be much rejoicing and feasting and no more gnashing of Central Gear teeth. But apparently that isn't how it works.. If, however, one of the larger Eastern manufacturing corps. decided to recreate, say, the Sony WM-DC with added recording function - so I mean a properly HiFi device that could play and record whilst being portable - how much do you think they could sell it for in this day and age. Consumer products have become so cheap (relatively) that I wonder if they could be made pretty affordable. And if such products were available wouldn't portable analogue music then become a viable medium again? Prob not, eh, but I can dream!
When you look at an open Walkman or boombox, there really isn't a ton of stuff in them, especially the newer models, I don't think the issue is the electronics or the case but more the mechanicals. Maybe it's the reason there's only a handful of companies still making the transports and they are pretty bare bones. Just using the inflation calculator, the TPS-L2 would have been around $600 USD when released and the D6 was around 3x that price a few years later. Would people buy it at $1800, sure but it would be a very limited market, back then the high end units were aimed at the professional market and there were hundreds of thousands of potential users/buyers, now it's a fraction of that, the professionals have moved on. I know at that price I'd probably pass.
Most if not all the quality parts / expertise needed are long lost. No company is going to invest in the R&D for something that only has a tiny niche section of the market. For any company to want to tool up and recreate anything good, will cost millions. They will never get the R&D money back from the tiny demand there is for cassette players be it, full size or portable. So if you want one, you are better off getting a good old unit and having it serviced and brought up to factory spec.
To buy the technology - or just license it - would probably not cost too much. No r&d needed - it was already done. Admittedly tooling up would be pricey but there are plenty of companies making a profit from turntables at the moment so the market for outdated technology isn’t necessarily small. the cassette market will never get bigger unless someone supplies mew hardware to play the things on though.
Turntables never went away, plus it has plenty of software (records) for it. Cassettes on the other hand, no good hardware and no new good software (cassettes) produced. If you think it’s that easy, go for it and get it started.
Turntables have much less mechanicals, it wouldn't be too hard to build one from scratch. Check out an AR-XA, there's nothing to them but modded they get great reviews. I think if there was a cost effective way to make a new transport, they would have already, look at the dozens of companies using the same 1-3 mechs now available and they are all entry-level. I'm sure all the end manufacturers are asking for something better, who knows, something might still show up, the cassette culture is still popular and doesn't show signs of slowing.
Ah but there is “easy” and there is easy, right. and yet they are so (relatively) expensive. Of course economies of scale made Walkman production cheaper and that position is now flipped. I see the company that makes RTM tape have started selling a Walkman but it looks to be as atrocious as the rest of the current crop.
For most mid-level TTs, the tonearm is where all of the money is spent, everything else is basically off the shelf, the millions of Walkmans sold made the much more complicated instrument very reasonable priced.
DAPs of today is the Walkmans of my "youth" (should be pronounced as in My Cousin Vinny!) DAPs are priced from under $100 to over $3k as A&K SP2000 BUT... as of today we have "Perfect Sound Forever" of Discmans, we have Hi-Res Audio, we have Master R2R tapes... and we have iPhones... Walkmans had managed to survive the 1st Gen Discmans, but "on the go" factor got neutralized by shitty 1-Bit Discmans with skip-protection. As for the Sound Quality, not 'on-the-go' factor: Walkmans and pre-recorded cassettes had never pretended to be The Ultimate Sound.. Unlike turntables!!! Take a closer look at my own setup for when I had some extra cash, or at @TooCooL4 amazing room: quality-pressed LPs played at my $10k+ LP12 managed to beat SACDs and CDs (to my ears) in my home setup: NaimHead So... what is the point for a New Walkman in 2021??? Definitely Not portability, and definitely not Sound quality... then why exactly do we need a new Walkman??? Please, crucify me!
Nothing I disagree with above, although I do wonder if there might be a big enough market for one or two new cassette decks. After all there are always plenty of vintage turntables available yet there is also a market for new ones, from Crosley to Technics SL1200s and beyond. I think the point that people usually miss is that quality Audio Gear was never cheap when it came out. Techmoan has just done a review of a new £20 Personal cassette player (complete with speaker and radio), and not surprisingly it was as bad as you would expect for £20. In 1984 Sony made a big fuss about the WM22 being the first Walkman below £30. Feed that through and inflation calculator and you get just under £100 in 2020 money; and that was for a basic mass produced player they expected to sell a million of. Trying different things in the inflation calculator, something that surprised me is that in real terms Vinyl records are no more expensive than they ever were. Picking one at random (with @Jorge in mind) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dark-Side-...+side+of+the+moon+vinyl&qid=1615718253&sr=8-2 this would have been about £5 back in the 1980s so it is no more affordable / unaffordable then back then, when of course you wouldn't have the option of a digital download. The WM-D6C often gets mentioned as the cassette deck that should be reproduced, but as @Mister X has pointed out they were really expensive when new. Did anyone actually have one, or know someone who had one back when they were available new from any Sony showroom.
That proves a point. You don't give a date or model but you swapped a computer that originally cost several $Thousand for a D6C. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macintosh_Quadra_700 I think we can conclude that people should be prepared to pay a similar price for a new decent cassette deck as for a new Mac computer.
