Last week I was scrolling through local auctions and found a lot of 33 Walkmans for sale, $3 a piece. They weren't in good cosmetic condition, but at that price it didn't matter to me. I bought an Aiwa HS-J36, Aiwa HS-PC202 Mk. III, Aiwa HS-J07, Aiwa HS-PX337, a Sony WM-B47 and a Grundig BeatBoy 170. There was also a 1970's recorder branded "Eversonic", I grabbed it too. The other 2 models I got were what made me interested in this lot in the first place - a Sony WM-2 and a Sony WM-DDII. A DDII and WM-2 for $6 in total! I dare anybody to find a DDII for less than that, haha. The plastic BeatBoy 170 really suprised me, it sounds fantastic.
Ha, unfortunately not, he was selling a whole bunch of old PC parts as well though. I bet he had snagged all of that from some recycling center.
And I doubt if it was the original owner who took them there. Around here there are House Clearance companies who you pay to empty a house (usually when someone dies or has to go into care). The other possibility is that the seller decided to try and get some money before taking them to recycling. I bought my sister a working LG 26" LCD Tv for £20 buy it now. The seller explained "It was my late Father's. I'm glad it is going to someone who will use it rather than me having to take it to recycling" Needless to say his own TV was some 50" wall mounted one.
I think they were definitely pulled out of an electronic garbage haul from Germany (Poland recycles a lot of trash from Western Europe), because 2 of these Walkmans have German FTZ Prufung stickers on them. Which means, wow, people are still throwing out highly collectible devices, in the day and age when you can easily look up if something has any value.
I realised a long time ago that there are people who understand collecting and those who don't and find it very strange. About ten years ago a colleague told us he had recently taken his Acorn Atom computer to the tip. I then showed him that even non working they fetch about £200. Not quite as big a mistake as the person who took an Apple 1 to recycling ! https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/may/31/apple-1-steve-wozniak-recycling A different colleague was proud of the fact that he used the metal from the case of a genuine IBM At to fix his car exhaust. Although he found collecting extremely strange, he was happy to spend many hours working out how crack satellite encoding systems, download pirate copies of films etc.
Ey, I'll take that DDII for $12, and you can quadruple your money! I really shouldn't let you get away with a profit like that, but hey, I'm a nice guy.
Jokes aside, I can't imagine that DDII is worth anything much - it's really scratched up. Works fine after fixing the center gear with epoxy though. The WM-2 is now working too, and it had the weirdest failure I've seen on a Walkman. The head wire for the right channel was open. The solder joints on the head and board were fine, the wire was broken inside the protective sleeve, interesting.
