The Story of the Sony Walkman

and maybe that's the case. I do find it a little hard to swallow because number fifty on their list, as in the bottom of the list, was the Apple iPhone. Now, y'all, I am not the biggest fan of Apple. I don't own an iPhone, but I think if I were to make a list of most influential gadgets of all time, the iPhone would be way higher up on that list than the very bottom. You know, the iPhone really ushered in the era of the consumer smartphone. It was not

the first smartphone. Apple rarely ever brings a product to market as the first of its kind. They bring refined products to the market, and it was the first smartphone to see huge success with a mainstream audience, not just you know, executives on the go or executives who wanted to have a technological status symbol. Plus, I mean, the entire nature of the web changed due to a shift toward mobile computing, and I think we have to lay

that largely at the feet of the Apple iPhone. While the iPhone is not the most popular smartphone in the world, I think that it's really what got the trend moving toward mobile computing, and that in turn changed really like the entire web. So I put it higher on the list. But then my guess is that making a list of the fifty most influential gadgets is hard in anyway. Today's episode is not about the iPhone at all. It's just this was the article that kind of launched me into

where I wanted to go today. So instead of talking about number fifty, because I've done episodes about the iPhone before, I thought we would talk about number forty seven on this list. So this is more influential than the iPhone according to that group of writers, and it's the Sony Walkman as in the portable cassette player. It's still not very high up on the list, but you know what

can you do? So the Walkman created the chance for folks to experience pre recorded audio in a pretty new way, a way that was portable, and it let them create a kind of bubble around themselves, even if they were walking around in public. And it meant you weren't tethered to like a wall outlet or lugging around a large tape deck or tape recorder. So that you can listen to your pre recorded cassettes. You could just PLoP in some batteries, a pair of double A batteries into this thing.

You put in your favorite audio cassette, You plug in your headphones, put them on your ears, you push play, you head out into the world. I think it's easy for us to take for granted how portable the music experience is today. You know the fact that we had MP three players and iPods and then smartphones and streaming services and all that that's transformed the way we experience music in large part, But once upon a time that

wasn't so much of an option. So let's turn back the clock and learn about the development, the release, and the impact of the Sony Walkman. And before we get to that, we have to have some preamble, because you know this is tech stuff. You know tech stuff. I like to talk about the history of technologies, and not just the technology, but the stuff that led to the development of that tech. So let's talk about recorded media and the development of the cassette tape medium. Now I've

done full episodes about the invention of recorded media. How one of the earliest versions was recording sound to cylinders that were coated in wax. Recording to a wax cylinder essentially involved shouting into an acoustic horn, and that acoustic horn at the narrow end had a little membrane that was connected to a needle, and the membrane would vibrate when sound waves would come into the horn. The needle that vibrates would carve into the wax on the cylinder.

The cylinder would be turned and the needle would start to carve a spiral into the cylinder. You could take the carved cylinder and put that into a player, which essentially did the same process, but in reverse. You would put a stylust like another needle and fit it into the groove in the cylinder. You would begin to rotate

the cylinder. The needle would travel through the groove and it would vibrate as it did so, which would cause a membrane to vibrate at the narrow end of an acoustic horn, and then if you listened real carefully at the wide end of the acoustic horn, you would be able to hear the recorded sound, the playback of whatever

sound had been recorded originally. Now, it didn't take too much longer after the invention of the cylinder for various folks to come up with flat recorded discs as an alternative, so instead of a cylinder, you would just have a flat disc with audio recorded on one and then eventually both sides of the disc. These would ultimately become easier to store and to produce than wax cylinders were. They were originally made all of stuff like shellac, which is

essentially something that you get from insects. But eventually companies would make the shift to vinyl. While different music companies battled it out over formats, we would mostly settle on albums playing back at either forty five revolutions per minute or thirty three in a third revolutions per minut on turntables. Some older albums would actually play it like seventy eight revolutions per minute. Now, the record album traces its history

back to the late nineteenth century. By the nineteen sixties, you know, more than half a century later, vinyl albums were the dominant form of recorded media for home use. In fact, they were almost exclusively the media format for home use unless you were really well off or maybe you worked in the music industry or something, because then you might have a real to real player. But otherwise

there just wasn't any call for that. So the music industry had been relying upon real to reel players for a while in order to make master recordings of performances, as well as to edit and put together that master in the first place. And this, of course is magnetic tape we're talking about now. Magnetic tape also traces its evolution back to the late nineteenth century, though at that

point we weren't yet talking about tape. So back in the eighteen eighties, there was this feller named Oberlin Smith, which what a name, What a great name, Oberlin Smith. Oberlin reckoned that you could use magnetization to record sound onto a magnetic medium, and it would have to obviously be a medium that would respond to magnetic fields. So his suggestion was using like silk thread that had been coded in steel particles. And here's how he proposed such

a device would work. So first, for recording, you would have a microphone, so sound goes into the microphone, like speaking into the microphone would then generate an alternating current. I've done episodes about how microphones work, but essentially what you're talking about is similar to what we were talking about with recording with wax cylinders, except instead of the membrane moving a needle to carve into wax, the vibrating membrane would interact with an electromagnet and create a current,

a variable current. That current you could then use to represent the sound. You could actually just send that current to an amplifier and then to a speaker, a loud speaker, and that's how you get microphone to loudspeaker amplified sound. Well, in this case, you wouldn't be sending it to a loudspeaker. Instead, you'd be using that current to go to an electromagnet

create a fluctuating magnetic field. And meanwhile you would run the steel dust coded string past this electromagnet, and that fluctuating magnetic field would cause the particles on that string to align a certain way according to whatever the magnetic field was at the moment that the string was running past it. And because that field is in fluck, the direction of those particles would vary over time, So the string would actually become a record of the magnetic fluctuations

over time. And you know, obviously the rate at which you pulled the string past this electromagnet would determine the speed of recording. So to play it back, you would put the string near a conductor essentially connected to some sort of playback device like a speaker, with an amplifier in between, because the signal you're going to get is going to be too weak to really drive a speaker.

So the magnetized particles on the string when you pull it past a conductor, then you can induce current to flow through that conductor, and that current, when amplified and then sent to a speaker, would play back the recorded sound used to create the record on the string in the first place. Now, all Obey never build a working model of his idea. However, a Danish inventor named Valdemar

Poulsen built upon this notion. He either had read about the previous concept or had come to the same conclusion independently. It's not clear which is the case, but you know, Obey didn't build it. So Valdemar creates a patent for a similar invention that he called the telegraphone, and he got the patent. He was awarded the patent for this invention in the late eighteen hundreds, and he landed essentially

a licensing deal here in America. He also landed other deals elsewhere in the world, but in America he got some folks to buy into it, and they created the American Telegraphone Company of Washington, DC. So that device used like steel wire to record upon, but same sort of basic idea. You would run the steel wire past a magnet that would magnetize the wire in various alignments, and then running it back across a reader would play back

the recorded medium or media I should say. In that case, well, the device didn't make that big of an impact here in the United States. The utility was somewhat limited, and the idea was that it really would be more like a business equipment, right. It was meant for things like taking notes for dictation, that kind of thing. The sound quality wasn't fantastic. It was not really intended for pre

recorded music. It wouldn't do well for that purpose. The invention actually did a little bit better in Europe than it did here in the United States. Here in the US, the business didn't stay around for very long, but other businesses that also took Polson's patent and licensed it, they were able to create a business that stood the test of time a bit better than the American version. But

let's get to the development of magnetic tape. So this approach showed that it was viable to use magnetism as a recording medium or recording method, but the steel wire

just wasn't really the best approach. In the mid nineteen twenties, there was an American named Joseph O'Neill who theorized that you could quote quote a strip of paper or some other cheap material end quote with magnetic material for the purposes of recording audio to it, and this would remove the need to use steel wire, or steel coated threads, or steel tape. These all had limited utility. With the case of thread, there was limited resilience, like it could

eventually break or fray. So he said, why not just use a strip of material coat it with this magnetic stuff and then use that for recording. However, while he had suggests did the concept, he didn't appear to pursue this in any serious way. As far as I am aware, he did not produce an actual example of this. He just kind of theorized that it could be done. Whereas a German engineer named Fritz Fleoimer had developed a method to put metal stripes on cigarette paper to want purpose.

I do not know. I'm sure there was a reason to put metal stripes on cigarette paper, but I don't know what it was, but I didn't look it up because I've got enough bunny trails going on in this episode anyway. But he reasoned that because he had figured out how to do that how to put metal stripes on cigarette paper, he could use a similar approach to coat a strip of paper like paper tape, with magnetic material, and then the paper tape could be used as a

recording medium for audio. The process of recording and playback would be pretty similar as what it was with the telegraphones, so not that different from steel wire or steel tape. You would still have a right head that would use

a fluctuating magnetic field to record audio. Signals sent from a microphone to this magnetically coded paper tape as it passed by underneath the right head, and then later if you wanted to play it back, a playback head a red head would pick up the magnetic stripe with its particles in various alignments, and this would create the electric current that was created through induction, and then that current would get amplified by an amplifier and could then be

sent as a signal to playback sound on a loudspeaker. His work in the late nineteen twenties would ultimately lead to the development of the Magnetophone K one, which he unveiled in nineteen thirty five, which was the first practical tape recorder. Okay, so that sets the first stage for

what would become the foundation for the Walkman. When we come back, I'll talk a little bit more of about Walkman prehistory, and we'll talk about Sony itself and how it came about developing the Walkman device and why it became one of the top fifty most influential gadgets in history according to these folks in time. But first, let's

take a quick break. Okay. When we left off. Before the break, I was talking about Fritz Fleoimer, a German engineer, an Austrian German engineer who developed this magnetic tape that ultimately he would unveil in nineteen thirty five, and that was the Magnetophone K one that was the first practical tape recorder. But this was also during a time where

the world was heading into World War Two. Obviously, World War two ends up being this massive conflict, and you US forces were very much interested in one learning what technology the Germans had access to and two stealing it. Now that's not just the Americans. Everybody was like this, right in. Any country that perceived that another country had a technological advantage wanted to remove that advantage from their opponents,

wanted to be able to exploit it themselves. So this was going on across all enemy lines, like everybody was spying on and stealing from everyone else, even allies in some cases. But here US forces were able to get possession of some German recording equipment as well as some German tapes, and soon Americans began developing their own version of Floimer's technology. They began to create their own magnetic

tape systems and magnetic tapes themselves. By the late nineteen forties, the recording industry had begun to use magnetic tape in order for you know, music production. Tape actually opened up a ton of new opportunities. For one thing, you could record several sessions to tape, and then you could physically cut and edit the tape to put together a master recording.

You know, maybe you have some various takes that are all pretty close to each other, but maybe take three the band had a really great intro into the song. It just sounded really good. But take five has the best version of the bridge, and the group really nailed

the ending of the song just on the second take. Now, before the days of magnetic tape, you pretty much had to decide which of these takes was your favorite, and it may not have all the best qualities of all the best takes, but you're stuck with what you've got, and so you got to pick whichever one is going to be the master, and that's what you go with. But with tape, with a really good editor, you could actually put together a recording that doesn't really exist right,

or at least it doesn't exist in one performance. It's actually a combination of performances. You could do that if you were really good with editing, and if the band was really consistent, you could actually put this together. And you could also do other things, like you could do multi track recording. You could do overdubbing. That really opened

up a lot of opportunities. Overdubbing means you would record someone, Let's say it's a vocalist singing, but it could just as easily be a musician playing some instrument like guitar or piano or whatever, and then you've got your recording. Then you could play the recording back, and meanwhile the vocalist or musician or whatever could play their own harmonies along with the original recording, so they're accompanying themselves. They're

accompanying the recorded version of themself live. Then you could record that. That's overdubbing. This way, you could layer your recordings again, a more lush, rich sound than would be possible if you were just relying on a single artist or band or whatever. You could really flesh sounds out that way. The tape machines in those days were often these big, real to real devices, and so it was not common for your average person to get hold of

one of those. I mean they were sold sometimes to consumers, but they were expensive and to get the actual media was hard to There weren't a lot of places selling real to real tape of performances, so vinyl records were still the dominant form of recorded media in the consumer space, but that would change thanks to a Dutch electronics company called Phillips. Now, the Phillips Electronics Company dated back to

eighteen ninety one. Sensing a theme here, I'm sure like all these technologies and companies date back to like the late nineteenth century, Brothers Anton and Gerard Phillips created the Phillips Company in the Netherlands. Their original focus was on light bulbs, and generally the company's philosophy was that they would aim to create high quality products, even though that meant that their products would be priced for a fairly limited market, which is a nice way of saying their

stuff was expensive. You know. Now, for a while, their company was part of a global cartel that dominated the light bulb market, and on the one hand, that did lead to forming certain standards in the light bulb industry, but on the other it arguably prevented competition in the marketplace anyway. By the late nineteen forties, Phillips was starting to get into other types of technologies, you know, like electric shavers. But they found out the profit margins are

razor thin. Not really, but I couldn't resist the pun. But in the nineteen fifties, Phillips got into the recording business. They launched a music label. They later in the nineteen sixties acquired smaller record labels like Mercury Records. And they were also thinking, well, how can we also be in the business of the the medium upon which recorded music

can go. So an engineer at Phillips named lew Atten's worked out of an office in Belgium where he was pioneering a new technology that would bring magnetic tape media to home consumers. This was in nineteen sixty two and the invention that he pioneered was the cassette tape. This tape would use a very thin strip of plastic film coded in magnetic material. The film would wrap around a pair of reels. Those reels would be encased inside a

plastic cartridge. On the outside of this cartridge you would see like the two holes that'd be the center of these two reels. They'd be pronged so that they could fit onto a tape player's spokes, and a small length of this tape is obviously uncovered. That section could be then inserted into a tape recorder for recording or playback. The cassette was such a small form factor that immediately people saw advantages over larger reel to reel machine that

were far more bulky and expensive. Now, the initial plan for the audio cassette was to sell them as business tools like this was an idea like again, for dictation and taking notes and that kind of stuff. It didn't take long, however, before Phillips and other companies said, hey, what if we put pre recorded music on these and sold them like we do with vinyl albums. Now you might wonder what artist was the first to offer an album on cassette tape. The answer to that is unclear.

Christian Romer has a blog post on legacybox dot com about this and lists a few potential contenders for the first album on cassette tape. One is Nina Simone's Wild Is the Wind. Another is Johnny Mathis's The Shadow of Your Smile, But my favorite is Eartha Kit's Love for Sale album. I Love Eartha Kit, What an amazing, But as Romer points out, no one was really documenting the history of albums on cassette when they first started to become a thing, so it's unclear what the actual answer

is of who was first. I would also like to point out that music labels likely produced more than just one album on cassette at a time, because it seems like an odd choice to just go with let's just do one and see how it goes. Someone's album obviously had to be the first off the manufacturing line, but I think that's just splitting hairs. At that point, cassettes were easier to store than vinyl albums, they took up

less space. They did have their own peculiarities. However, if you brought a cassette tape near a strong magnet, well you just screwed up the recording on your cassette tape because the magnetic particles on the tape would realign to this new powerful magnetic field, so effectively you would erase your cassette. Anyone who had cassette tapes also knows the pain of tape getting snagged on something and then unreeling from inside the cassette. You would just have this massive

plastic film just unspooled from outside inside the cassette. Now it's outside the cassette. So to fix that you would have to do the old standby, which is what I call inserting a pencil into the spokes on one reel and gently coaxing the tape back into place by twisting the pencil slowly, one twist at a time. What a joy that was. But you know, while the cassette media was far more portable than vinyl, the players weren't that

much more portable, at least not at first. I mean, they were smaller than turntables, but they weren't pocket sized, you know. Tape decks, like tape recorders, were still fairly large. They were too large to carry around easily. Like you could put a strap on one and wear it around your neck like it was like a handbag or something,

but it was still pretty bulky. A lot of tape decks did have headphone jacks, but not all of because a lot of them had a built in speaker in the tape deck itself, so you would just push play and listen to the music coming straight out of the tape deck. It's usually pretty tinny. It wasn't typically a very good quality of sound. But it worked. But yeah, it wasn't necessarily the case that a tape deck would

have a headphone jack. A lot of them did, but it wasn't a sure thing, and that's kind of where things sat for about a decade. But now let's flash forward to the nineteen seventies in Japan. So the story goes that one of Sony's co founders, a guy named Masaru Ibuka, wanted to be able to listen to albums on a portable playback device. Specifically, he wanted to be able to listen to opera. He took lots of flights.

Being the head of a major electronics company in Japan, he had to fly a lot, and he liked to listen to opera, and he wanted a way to bring opera albums with him on flights so that he wasn't having to pay attention to everything else that's going on on a plane. And he asked his engineers to look into a way to achieve this goal, like how could he listen to stuff on a device that was small enough for him to easily bring it with him on

a flight. And a designer named Noria Oga got the high pressure assignment of figuring out how to make something that Ebuka would appreciate. So then Oga turns to a product that Sony had already started producing at that point. This was a product that they were producing for the business market, and it was a small handheld tape recorder called the TCM one hundred B. It was also known as the Pressman because they were thinking that this would be a device that reporters for newspapers would want to

use in order to make verbal notes. That kind of thing did not digital, but recorded notes, and so it was a handheld cassette recorder for voice memos and stuff. It was small enough that you could hold it in one hand and you would operate it by pressing the various buttons, and they had buttons for stuff like rewind and fast forward and record and play. You know, all the basic functions of your tape deck all built in. So the base elements for a Walkman were already present

in the Pressman. So Oga just used the Pressman as kind of a launching pad, and he created a prototype portable cassette player. He worked with engineers to take the Pressman and tweak the design of that product. So one thing they did was they removed the recording feature, so it was purely a playback device, not a recording device.

They also changed it so that the Pressman was monaural mono in other words, so you didn't have two different channels of sound going to the different speakers in your headset. It was all mono. They changed it to stereo so

it would be able to support stereo recording. He then gave this prototype to Abuka before Abuka was to go on another flight around world to do business e things in order to test it out, and Abuka must have really liked the result because Sony would then go on to produce the Walkman portable cassette player the following year, in nineteen seventy nine. Now, this was never a sure thing. In fact, within the company, there was a lot of resistance to this idea. There were a lot of executives

who said, I don't know about this. I don't think there's actually a market big enough to support the production and marketing of a portable cassette player. But then Sony's other co founder, a guy named Marita Akio, saw the potential for great success and he said, no, Abuka was right, like this wasn't just a project for Abuka so he could listen to music when he was on his flights. This thing could be a real blockbuster hit for our company.

So with the support of the co founders, the company did go into the development for a consumer portable cassette player and they began to develop the Walkman. All right, we're going to take another quick break. When we come back, I'll talk more about the Walkman story and its place

in history. So, with the support of Sony's co founder's engineers, that Sony got to work in creating a consumer version of the prototype that Oga had created for Ibuka, and they created a device that had the designation TPSL two, but it would get the name Walkman. Akio came up with that name and said it should be called the Walkman because you can walk around with it and listen to music. Pressman the voice recording device that was for

the press. Walkman is for walking around and listening to your music, and they launched it in Japan in July nineteen seventy nine for the equivalent of around one hundred and fifty dollars, which is a big o' yikes. One hundred fifty dollars in nineteen seventy nine. The United States would not get the Walkman until nineteen eighty. Meanwhile, you might wonder, okay, one hundred fifty bucks in nineteen seventy nine,

what would that be equivalent to today? Well, using a handy dandy inflation calculator, that comes out to around six hundred forty six dollars for a portable cassette player. Keep in mind that the original Walkman didn't have recording capabilities. Just playback Holy cats, y'all. That is as incredibly expensive. Like again, I always think about things like video game consoles that launch for around five hundred to seven hundred dollars,

and people talk about how expensive that is. Keep in mind that original Walkman would have set you back six hundred forty six dollars, more than what some video game consoles launch at. That's expensive now. When it did launch in the United States, the original name for the device wasn't the Walkman, it was the Soundabout which sounds about wrong to me anyway. But eventually Sony would migrate back to the Walkman, which was a Buka's suggestion from the

get go and occhio suggestion. The two of them argued that it should have been that from the beginning. Interestingly, there was a dispute about the origins of the Walkman concept because there was another inventor who came up with a very similar idea and in fact patented that idea in nineteen seventy seven, two years before the Walkman came out. Now, this inventor was Andreas Pavel, who had an invention that

he called the stereo Belt. And as the name suggests, the stereo belt was a belt that had audio equipment attached to it, which included a battery pack as well as audio players, and you would connect headphones to this belt in order to listen to it. So not exactly the same thing as the Walkman, but the idea that being a portable music playing device is what made it

similar to Walkman. Eventually, Pavel would bring lawsuits against Sony in various regions, arguing that there was a patent infringement going on that Sony had essentially copied the design that Pavel had created without paying for it, without licensing it. In several places, these complaints were ultimately dismissed. In other places, Sony would settle out of court with Pavel rather than have to go through the whole process of a legal proceedings,

which can be really expensive even if you win. So while Sony never admitted any fault in this, they did eventually pay a pretty hefty settlement out of court. Anyway, back to the Walkmen, so I mentioned earlier. The Walkmen ran on a pair of double A batteries, which was great. You know, their batteries weren't too expensive. You could take them on the go, you didn't have to be tethered to an outlet. They did require headphones because the Walkman

had no on board speaker. If you pushed play on a Walkman and there were no headphones plugged into it, all you would hear would be the gears turning as the spokes were being rotated by the player itself. Sony made around thirty thousand units initially in nineteen seventy nine when they launched it in Japan, and sales were a

little slow in the beginning. However, Sony used some good old fashioned elbow grease to get interest up in the product, and by that I mean that Sony employees would literally hit the streets in Japan with a Walkman and cassettes and find people out there on the street and have them listen to cassettes on the Walkmen and let them have the experience of this portable music player. And it worked.

That marketing push really was effective. By August, just two months after they launched, Sony had sold out of their initial run of units. They were hoping for around like five thousand units a month. Instead they sold thirty thousand and two months. Pretty incredible. Now, not everyone was super happy about the Walkmen and its success in the marketplace, like it also saw great success here in the United States once it came out in nineteen eighty, but not

everybody was really thrilled about this. There were people who were warning that this technology was inspiring young folks to shut themselves away from the world even while they were walking around in the world, rather than being engaged in the wholesome surroundings. Undoubtedly learning great moral lessons from their

wise elders. These wholigans would be listening to their Bob Dylan's and their Judas priests at even their smothers brothers on headphones and blocking out the outside world and allowing themselves to be shaped by the evil, wicked whims of professional musicians. Oh the humanity. I'm making fun of it, but the moral panic was real, right, There was moral panic around portable cassette players. It just shows that fuddy duddies will find moral panic in the oddest of places.

Heaven help you if you have to also play dungeons and dragons while listening to music on a Walkman, because you were just destined for h double hockey sticks. Alan Bloom, the author, said essentially as much in a book titled The Closing of the American Mind. Bloom argued that young people listening to personal music devices would eventually lead to moral decay. Pretty crazy stuff. Sony would release many follow ups to the original Walkman, so there were lots of

improvements over the device over the following models. Some of them were even smaller. Some of them would incorporate a record function because people missed having that. The Walkman would also become almost synonymous with portable cassette players, kind of like how the iPod would become almost synonymous with MP three players. Folks would use the term Walkman even if they were talking about a product from a competing company. You know, it wasn't a portable cassette player, It was

a Walkman. Even if it wasn't actually a Walkman, which meant that Sony had to do a lot of work to protect their trademark. Now, around the same time, you had the fate of the cassette tape itself. So initially, cassette sales were going very strong in the nineteen eighties, but cassettes didn't totally replace vinyl records. For one thing, you had music lovers who would call themselves audio files, who would tend to prefer vinyl records over cassette tapes.

That cassettes could warp over time, you would get audio distortion, you would get a hiss. There was a hiss associated with audio cassettes, and therefore people who really valued the experience of listening to music on high end equipment tended to prefer vinyl to cassette tapes. However, the convenience of cassette tapes plus the fact that you could purchase a blank cassette and then record stuff to make your own tapes, and thus giving birth to the cultural phenomenon of the mixtape. Now,

making a mixtape that's an art form unto itself. That meant that the cassette had a really firm foothold and culture, and the incorporation of tape decks into car entertainment systems helped too. This gets complicated by the introduction of eight tracks, but that's a different matter. Anyway, it appeared as though the party would never end. In nineteen eighty four Billboard report the cassette tape sales were outpacing vinyl LPs for the first time, and at that point made up around

fifty three percent of all albums shipped. Now that shipped not necessarily sold, but still cassettes were clearly making a lot of headway. They were easy to manufacture, They again took up less space, You could sell a whole lot more of them, You could get a lot more in stock at a record store than you could with vinyl, and yeah, people were digging them. However, the introduction of the compact disc, which also was introduced in the early

nineteen eighties, would ultimately set the stage for the cassette's decline. Now, it would take quite a few years for compact discs to really establish themselves in the market, particularly since early CD players were ridiculously expensive, like just prohibitively expensive for most people. However, over time CDs would start to catch on, and cassette sales began to take a turn, just as vinyl had done before it. In nineteen ninety one, CD sales were higher, at least from a dollar value, than

cassette sales. It doesn't mean that there were more CDs sold, but more money was made selling CDs than cassettes starting in nineteen ninety one. So the nineties saw the decline of cassette sales continue, with more and more people switching to CDs. Vinyl became an almost obsolete format for the general public. It never fully went away, and of course it's enjoyed a resurgence in more recent years, but in the nineties and early two thousands it almost disappeared. Cassettes

did enjoy a brief little bit of a comeback. I mean, I guess arguably it's still going now because some artists have released some of their albums on cassette formats, including like Megan D. Stallion and Taylor Swift, but it's not

like a common thing. Cassette sales in general were pretty low, and that also meant that cassette players weren't really flying off store shelves either, so it didn't make much sense to keep making them, which brings us to our sad little tail coming to a close here, because Sony actually did continue producing the Walkman all the way through the nineteen nineties and all through the first decade of the two thousands, despite the plunge in cassette sales over that

time period. But in twenty ten, Sony threw in the towel and announced it would shut down the portable cassette player line, so the Walkman cassette player would be no more. They stopped production in twenty ten. It however, was not the end of the Walkman as a brand, because Sony gave the Walkman brand to other products that were also

in the music space. They just weren't cassette players. So the main one would be digital music players, digital audio players or DAPs, and this is what I would often just call an MP three player back in the old days. Like the Apple iPod, Sony started introducing digital audio players way back in nineteen ninety nine, which is actually two years before Apple would introduce the iPod, but Sony's version initially only supported a proprietary digital audio format called a

track at r AC. Sony had control over that file format and felt like this would protect Sony's interests in the actual music production side. In other words, this was a way to prevent piracy. Sony specifically did not want to support file formats like MP three. Now, the Walkmen would ultimately fall well behind the iPod in sales in most countries. When it got to digital audio players. The Walkman did okay in Japan, but outside Japan it just

it could not compete against the iPod. However, you can still find digital audio players that are branded as walk today, including high end players that cost a whole bunch of money, like more than one thousand dollars for some of these devices. I think that's a pretty tall order. When we live in a world where smartphones have access to tons of

music through various music streaming platforms. Now, sure, the fidelity isn't necessarily top notch, you know, that depends on the streaming service, the format they use, how much compression is used for the files, and what kind of headphones or headset you're using to listen to it. However, I think for the majority of people out there, the convenience and accessibility that is presented through smartphones that ends up being more important than musical fidelity. For most people, not everybody.

Some folks are more concerned with the quality of the experience. I think that's legitimate. I think it's legit to really want the absolute best quality of sound. However, that is also a very subjective thing, right. You could have two people and they can have the same taste in music, but they might have very different perceptions of what set up is best, and you can't, you know, necessarily agree

on a common standard. The world of high fidelity audio is filled with a lot of marketing that strikes me as being just a stone's throw away from pure pseudoscience. But I've talked about that before, so I'll leave it for now. So the cassette Walkman has been out of production since twenty ten. The brand still exists for digital audio players, and some artists do continue to put stuff

out on cassette because nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Personally, I do miss the days of putting together the perfect mixtape. There's something really special about getting one just right, like finding that right progress of songs so that you know you've got like the really high energy number comes in at song number three, and then you've got a cool down number for song number four that kind of thing. Making a curated playlist doesn't really scratch the same itch

for me. There's something really tactle about using cassette tapes and creating a mixtape that way, and slapping a really good mixtape into a portable music player and then just going for a walk is a pleasure that I think people should really seek out if they're able to. That kind of thing is just one of the simple pleasures of life if it's accessible to you. I hope that this episode was interesting to all of y'all. I hope you're doing well, and I will talk to you again

really soon. Tech Stuff is an iHeartRadio production. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.