The First Walkman Ads

You really seem to have outdone yourself with such a great ads, mate!

 

So it was called Stowaway or Soundabout in other countries?

 

Yes. The various names are explained in the Wikipedia article.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkman
I had read before that people in Sony didn't like the Walkman name but wasn't sure who.

 

They act like they were the first with that style of headphone, is that really true?

 

Absolutely
In fact if you look at the video I posted in this thread
http://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/40th-anniversary-of-the-walkman.4546/
the reviewer spends about ten seconds on the "small cassette player" and then several minutes eulogising about the "impressive headphones".

There is nothing about the Walkman that couldn't have been made in the early 1970s. Similar machines were taken on the Apollo Moon Missions. Whether they could have made the headphones back then is a different matter. Until the Walkman headphones typically looked like this

and had a sound quality matching the kids face

 

The reason I asked is, I never remembered anything especially advanced about Walkman headphones. Sure, they were small and lightweight, but the drivers themselves, did they represent a big technological breakthrough that other manufacturers were incapable of making? I doubt it.

I suspect the other manufacturers mistakenly felt there wasn't enough market potential in a feather-weight on-ear headphone. Gotta remember, headphones were until that point considered mainly a home-use product, so light weight wasn't really cared about.

 

Watch the video especially the bit about the use of "rare earth" magnets, which were a massive improvement over the ones that were used before. My experience with 1970s headphones is that some of the cheap ones were nothing more than a couple of 2" transistor radio speakers inside large plastic housings.

Better headphones were available, but they were the preserve of audiophiles, and few people would have ever heard a pair.

The whole situation was a bit chicken and egg. There wasn't a market for lightweight headphones as people only used them at home and there wasn't a market for a small portable stereo cassette player as the available headphones were larger and heavier than a cassette playing business recorder (which was actually what the TPS-L2 was based on). The two had to be sold together as a package for either to make sense.

 

I decided to look what the large U.K. retailer Argos was offering in 1979.

Two Stereo Boomboxes.

Eleven Stereo Music Centres ranging in price from £59 to £205.
And this motley looking assortment of headphones which are probably all of the radio speakers in housings variety.