Hi Mr X. The only EX series Walkman I have is the EX- 615 which also lasts for ages using the external battery pack. That Backpack is great. Never seen one or knew Sony produced something like that. Keep them coming.
I thought his could be interesting - while trying to find a certain Daewoo walkman from an old commercial, I stumbled upon this. This is a 3D scan of a real device, unfortunately I haven't been able to find any real pictures of it. This is a Sony WM-F10 rebadged as a Samsung MY-Q1. This was a properly marketed and sold product, according to the Korean site I found it on. Really, it blows my mind this exists.
Great find that thing is beautiful! I have one Samsung Boombox and it had really nice build quality. There's another I've posted that is a dead-ringer for a Marantz CRS-4000 so Samsung most likely has private-labeled some of their products. There was several battles in the electronics wars. There was so much pressure that many companies had to put manufacturing in the target country. I wonder if there was something similar with Japan and Korea? In the USA, Japan couldn't send over larger trucks, one of our best selling catagories, but we got a ton of the little tiny trucks. I've found most of my Samsung Information on archive.org in the Italian Electronics Magazines, they did a lot of advertising in them, maybe you can find something on this unit.
This is on the Samsung Website from 2014, I can't remember is autoreverser has one of these clones in his collection and the mymy4 looks a lot like a Unitech. Samsung didn't have a huge footprint in the US so we didn't see their products until something like the 90's.
I think that Samsung along with other rebadged Sony models I've found (labeled as GoldStar) were only meant for the Korean market. My guess is Sony did it because of the tension between Korea and Japan - I think they figured their products would sell better if they were sold under Korean brands. The auto reverse Samsung you posted is the same as the Unitech, I'm kinda amazed Aiwa didn't do anything about that particular clone - it looks virtually identical to the HS-P02.
I've been doing more digging into the topic of Korean players and found something perhaps even weirder. So for a while now I've been seeing those cheap, no-name walkmans on Yahoo Auctions Japan that looked awfully close to WM-EX series based on the WM-150 mechanism. But, none of those listings showed the inside of the cassette bay, so I wasn't totally sure if they were using the Sony mechanism (which would've been very weird!) But at last, I have found proof that Sony indeed sold their mechanisms to different companies! Take a look at this Daewoo: It is not a rebadged WM-EX series Walkman - it's a completely separate model, using the Sony mechanism.
Here's a cool blog on the Sony Discman CD-1 IVO-V10, the intelligent Discman! There's some other cool vintage items on this website as well. https://smallmart.nl/artikelen/vint...-portable-cd-i-player-the-intelligent-discman
Sony's History Timeline, there's some cool information here. The historical portion of these websites seems to change alot, hopefully this doesn't go away. Go to the website to see all of it. https://www.sony.net/SonyInfo/CorporateInfo/History/sonyhistory-e.html
Here's some interesting Sony Information found on the web. http://cws.cengage.co.uk/thompson5/students/cases/sony_corp.pdf
An interesting Sanyo, a car stereo like, never seen before. https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/Sanyo-M6...=254735402253c3c79392de184d54a285e343f4033dfa
Those are neat looking and I've never seen the bag before. The only thing I can think of is it was the fastest way to market using existing car decks and a new shell. There's at least three models, this one, the unit that's in a lot of ski magazines and there was a USA Version using a Pioneer Car Stereo, they might pre-date the Walkman by a year or two. All of them pop up from time to time, I can imagine them being very popular with skiers and joggers.
That looks to be very similar to the original Stereobelt, which Andreas Pavel, invented in 1972. https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@albert07/history-and-evolution-of-the-famous-sony-walkman
elite1502323 posted this great write-up (on the forum reader) of the Astral Tune http://www.stereo2go.com/topic/index.php?content_oid=327665205117594116&board_oid=193392314111653418
Interesting to see personal stereos being advertised in print, before Sony made one. If Skiers were using them, I understand the heavily padded bags and guess it was more to protect both the equipment and the skier if they fell flat on their face. Regarding the original inventor, it is the first person to sketch out a workable design. You don't even have to make it. There have been many cases where the original inventor wasn't the person / company who made the product famous. https://www.cracked.com/article_20025_5-world-famous-products-that-are-shameless-rip-offs.html
Sanyo M6060 (MR-777 in Japan) appeared in 1981 along with MR-G1 (32000 Yen), MR-333 (24800 Yen) and MR-S1 (36800 Yen) , it was heavy (750 g) , big (115 x 165 x 36.5 mm ) and expensive (32800 Yen). Probably the reason for its existence was its 100mw amp. A year before in 1980 Sanyo had only one stereo "walkman" in their catalog (info comes from a catalog dated "80/12") the MR-555 (M5550) , though , no walkman models in 1979.
So they had a pretty decent line-up, maybe a few notches better than Sony, what was the higher power amp for? At first I'd assume that they used the old fashion cans but they have some pretty small headphones in the ads and no other external jacks.
