Walkman 2.0 Is any manufacturer developing & wich features must your Walkman 2.0 have? Fun!

Having fun dreaming about it Do you too? Will it become reality soon? And which manufacturer is capable and can be motivate to make it happen?

I'll start

My walkman 2.0 does have:
- metal brushed casing
- dcc & compact cassette playable
- bluetooth & wifi
- recordable functionality
- line in /out/ mic
- vu meters
- EQ/visualizer faceplate
- Rechargeable and removable batteries
- square with very few curves

 

Not going to happen, just check the offerings we got for cassette decks! Horrible cheap mech glazed over by the bull of hi-res upsampling and/or A/D converters for digitizing cassettes onto digital garbage...
Once you add bluetooth/wifi to a Walkman the result will be the same as with iPhones vs. Pono, iPod, Questyle, A&K: extra shielding needed kills the sound!

 

Excactly my thoughts too. The reviews about todays 2018 walkmans are clear about it. Bad, low quality, horrible.

Hopefully a company will pick up the glove. In a different section of s2g about boomboxes i read that Panasonic, Aiwa, Sony are "tasting" the market by bringing out low-end boomboxes to see if there is demand. It's really unbelievable living in a time where everything possible, but creating a good walkman 2.0 is not. There is definitly a market for it.

 

As long as they don't do this.



It's a Sony - It was my MP3 player which I lost for five years.
This is what had happened when I found it.

It did actually get resurrected after another one I bought did a similar thing.
That donated the display while a £3 Chinese player donated its battery.

Next time you find the belts have melted in your cassette players don't mistakenly thing that a solid state player would be longer lasting.

 

as long as "everything" means slapping a few chips onto a board, and squeezing it between pieces of Gorilla Glass/brushed steel (Questyle DAP, for example) then Yes. To resurrect decent cassette mechanism? If QP1R costs $600, how would you price such Walkman? $1,600?

exactly the reason I am not in a hurry to sell my half-dozen iPods and Pono player: unlike Questyle and similar beauties the batteries here can be exchanged

 

I like that too, and I like it with a big illuminating windowscreen to see the cassette playing.

 

Would a EQ/visualizer faceplate be asking too much?

 

You know I'm curious as to why Sony, Maxell etc. don't produce any new tapes, even if it's type 1 - is it that expensive to manufacture? I've heard about the national audio company in the States who produce millions of tapes every year, and there are Chinese tapes being manufactured too (don't know about their quality though). I'd really love to see a Sony audio deck with cassette functionality, I've seen awful modern boomboxes that have a SD card/USB slot for digitising tape but they seem to output at awful bitrates and, most importantly, in mono rather than stereo.

Considering this year is the 40th anniversary some kind of limited release Walkman would have been great. Sony have a Walkman exhibit on in Japan and there's currently a giant Sports Walkman statue living in a park but I'd love to see even a basic budget cassette player like the later EX models. I don't think this cassette revival is as big as people think but there are still people who use the medium, would be nice to throw them a bone.

 

Agreed, this is why I feel a budget design made purely for tapes would be the way to go. The selling point for a modern Walkman needs to be affordability too, as although there are teens getting interested in the medium I feel like most of them won't see the point in buying a tape Walkman if it's expensive, even if it does have wi-fi or bluetooth functionality. It needs some kind of sleek design and I feel some recording capability would be a huge plus. Doesn't have to be on the level of the disc drive models but I feel that would be a selling point.

Of course you run into another problem - which demographic is this targeting? The way I see it they can either go for the audiophiles you find on forums like these, who dream of a Walkman with a multitude of features, in which case they'd probably raise the retail price as they know these buffs will buy it... Or they could go for the new crowd, kids looking into cassettes not so much for the analog aspects of it but because it's trendy right now. In my (unsolicited) opinion I feel like the biggest obstacle a big brand personal cassette player would face in 2019 or 2020 is the problem of who it's meant to appeal to. I have no doubt that engineers within Sony, Panasonic etc. who appreciate the mechanisms within these players would be capable of producing a more robust personal player in this day and age, I feel the advanced technology present in those fabled disc drive has reached a point where it's more affordable in terms of manufacturing, and hence we could realistically have better Walkmans for a reasonable price if these companies were truly set on producing such devices... If this is not the case please let me know. Wow I rambled on there, apologies.

 

[QUOTE="Mister X, post: 35293, member: 352"

These were big factories cranking out miles of tape, not just for cassettes and their variations but VHS, Beta and the oddball professional stuff.[/QUOTE]
I am sure that economy of scale is a major reason there aren't many new audio cassettes available. My sister is moving house and is wondering what to do with the 400 VHS tapes she accumulated when Tape was the only option for home video recording. There is a lot of tape in a VHS cassette. When VHS was loosing popularity you could buy three Maxell E180s for £3 in Lidl. At that point it easier to just buy another pack than to decide what to record over so sales probably stayed high during that time.

P.S. did anyone get any further regarding loading VHS tape into an audio cassette ?
BASFs big selling point was that their video tapes were Chrome.

P.s You mentioned Scotch (3M). Only two years until this first advert reaches the date it was set at.

The second advert is the one I remember

 

Long before Samsung's " Digitall " campaign Sony had started to concentrate in digital media for its portable line, at first with compact disc then minidisc , Dat , memory stick ,hard disc drive and finally internal memory storage.

By 1989 , the 10th Sony walkman anniversary, there was already a Professional walkman prototype that if it had reached production probably would have a model name something like Sony WM-DD9o Pro and would cost today ,used ,at ebay at about 1ooo-1500 euros. But that didn't happen , like a strategic marketing decision was made at that point, to invest for portable R&D on the upcoming formats mainly dat and minidisc.




Smartphones have seriously damaged the digital camera market, ipods and certainly digital Walkmans of today.
Sony tried to move upmarket with the High-Res line like their flagship Sony NW-WM1Z Premium Walkman and they celebrated their 40th anniversary this year with an exhibition but I'm afraid that the real question is not if there will be a cassette walkman in the future but if there will be a dedicated portable audio player , of any kind, at all.
It's sad , I know, but the truth is cruel : No sales ,no games.

 

I think there will be, just as there will always be a market for dedicated cameras. However, it will be a limited specialist one rather than the situation in the 1990s where there were pages and pages of music players in the Argos catalogue.

That was a UK advert so guarantees might have been different in the USA and it is quite likely that the tapes were made in a different factory. After watching the advert I did think it would be amusing to play a tape until it wore out and then Scotch (who I believe were part of 3M) for a replacement. ​

 

I agree but editing my paragraph in your quote and removing the phrase "Sony tried to move upmarket with the High-Res line like their flagship Sony NW-WM1Z Premium Walkman and they celebrated their 40th anniversary this year with an exhibition but " is changing the meaning and my point that what you say is already happening and my worries are for the near or not so near future.

 

Sorry. I didn't intend to change the meaning, just highlight the bits relevant to my reply. You won't find any premium products like that in Argos, although they do still sell Sony's £150 NW-A45 MP3 player.

 

No problem , that's what I figured too. I have the impression that Sony , regarding walkmans , is investing more on their heritage than in any real market demand , it wouldn't be surprising if their most important market is the local one.