Timewarp's Collection

I intend to post some of my Walkman/Discman/Minidisc/DAT/Scoopman collection over the next few months and look forward to some discussion around them. As an engineer, I focus mainly on the technology and craftsmanship of mechatronics in these wonderful little boxes.

Some I consider true art, a level of brilliant engineering that was at its peak in the 80s and 90s.

I thought it might be a cool idea if I post the devices one at a time, explain what I like about it and what's unique/quirky/differentiating about it.

But first, an impression picture:

 

I will first explain my personal situation and what got it started.

I loved Sony for its innovation and cool devices as long as I can remember. When I was a little kid, my father bought his first walkman, the most basic version one could buy - a WM-31.
To be able to listen to music anywhere was a fantastic experience.

My father wanted a radio too, and upgraded to a WM-BF22 soon. At that time he gave me his WM-31, so I was the proud owner of a real Sony Walkman!

This is the very device that started it all for me personally:


The most basic of basic, but it was a real Sony, while many people had cheap clones back then. I listened to it all the time.



This was my father's WM-BF22. I'm glad I still have it as a memory, he passed away a long time ago.

Then I started saving... and saving... because in the Sony brochures, I saw the endless possibilities of cool features such as auto-reverse, mega bass and equalizers.
I didn't have much budget but finally saved enough to buy a super nice WM-B47:



I listened to this one A LOT. On my bicycle, when walking, in school, in bed before I went to sleep... etc

The next target was one of the cool higher end models with touch control, remote controls, digital tuner, metal bodies and smaller size.

A friend of mine had a WM-FX77, the fantastic model that had it all, but it was too expensive for me.

A good compromise was the WM-FX55 - it ran on normal AAs and had all the nice features that I wanted, and was much more affordable than the FX77.



I bought it and listened to it even more than the WM-B47 - you'd always see a wired remote control sticking out of my jacket, enjoying the music on the go.

After my FX55 I switched to Minidisc, an MZ-R3, and it would take ages again before I bought another walkman.

That was a few years ago when I found my old walkmans back, all of the above, and I started looking for the models I always wanted but couldn't afford as a kid.
The rest is history, I still have all the old Sony brochures and started buying the ones I always wanted. I now have 500+ and counting, and I really enjoy collecting these gems as a hobby.

I'll stop here for now and will post more about my collection later.

 

That is an extremely impressive collection of sony items in that first picture,Think i even spotted a Glasstron on the top of the unit.
Outstanding!

 

Thank you and good spot, that's a Glasstron indeed. VR glasses from the previous century.

I have a company working on novel laser technology for AR glasses, so besides portable audio I'm also interested in AR/VR.

 

Let's start in the corner where I tried to make a timeline. First I will share two overview pictures:




In the upper right, we see the TCM-100, which is not a walkman but represents the line of recorders of the pre-1979 era.
Then a TPS-L2 with the STEREO marking, the first walkman from 1979 when Sony still wasn't sure if "Walkman" would be a good name internationally (it was sold as Soundabout & Stowaway in certain regions).
Then a TPS-L2 with the "Walkman" sign, the most common TPS-L2.

Before I move on, let's think about the 1979 era.

 

I have many pre-1979 devices which are typically mono cassette recorders with limited bandwidth.

I won't list them all now, but one I particularly like is the TCM-55b







This recorder is extremely heavy, it is really built like a tank and feels like solid steel.
Probably because it's made almost entirely out of metal, you won't find much plastic here.

I opened it to refurbish it and it's not so easy to work on, but you have to respect the Sony engineers who were able to make such super solid devices so long ago, around 1972.

 

My TC-55b and M909 next to each other...

 

From the TC-55b to the TC100 to the 1st model TPS-L2, natural evolution.


The TCM-100 is a nice device


TC-55b, TCM-100, TPS-L2 (pre-Walkman era) and TPS-L2 Walkman



I won't write too much about the TPS-L2, so much has been said already. It is considered the 1st Walkman and here are 4 version with various builds, from 1979 until the latest serial numbers. For historical reasons I like the TPS-L2, but from an engineering standpoint it's not a major breakthrough. Sure, they managed to make it stereo with a decent frequency spectrum and all, but from an engineering perspective there are much more impressive devices in the light of their time.



I do like the manual of the TPS-L2 very much though.

If you take the manual literally, you'd have to do the pencil-in-tape trick every time you'd insert a cassette
And how do you like the nice Sony hands from that era? I think it's super nice, joyful, funny and it makes you want to RTFM.



The hands are pretty small, or these tapes are big. Tapes with the letter A embossed!



And this is the one I like the most. The HOT LINE button explanation, by the hungry guy. How cute!

 

Next to the TPS-L2s and the predecessors, I also have a fair number of TPS-L2 clones from 1979 & 1980.
Here are two:



The Grundig Beat Boy 100 on the left, which is fairly common and actually a nice player - with a HOT LINE button, similar volume sliders and two headphone sockets.

 

From a functionality standpoint, it's a TPS-L2 copy, but internally it's quite different. Grundig was a well regarded brand back in those days, it was solid German engineering way before they sold the brand to the Chinese.

The Heru Walky III is a cheap clone, not a very nice model, but I thought I'd post it here anyway as it's very unknown.



It looks pretty cheap, but actually feels OK as it's partly made out of metal. Obviously, a cheap clone, one of so many that came out in the early days of the walkman. I won't post any more here, these two are just examples.

 

From a Sony Walkman timeline perspective, next in line is of course the WM-2. It's so common and so much has been said, I won't post too much about it other than one of my WM-2s, and by saying is that when I open them up, it's really a nice piece of engineering and so very different from the TPS-L2. I particularly like the smart mechanics with the play/ff/rew/stop buttons pushing down, and already using the concept that a mechanical small movement is sufficient to switch on the motor and "pre-select" the right movements, the mechanism does the rest. Pretty neat.




Yes, pretty nice. The concept and style would later define a large range, when the DD models were developed.

 

I will stop here for today. Would you like me to continue like this, or do you prefer a different focus/order?

Later on I also intend to post about the internals, I have opened and repaired countless walkmans and some are even more beautiful from the inside than from the outside. Let me know.

 

Yes, continue please

 

Yes it will take a while, but I will share a model and some thoughts around it every now and then. Likely won't keep a chronological order though.

 

As a random twist, let's switch to Scoopman.

I love these wonders of technology. They have only been around for a very short time, I believe 1 or 2 years only, and Sony released only 2 models.

The Scoopman used digital tapes that were incredibly small, could record up to 120 minutes, with audio quality that was just a few notches below CD quality.

Its rotating head, similar to video recorders and DAT equipment, allowed to increase the density by a lot. And digital memory allowed a buffer so that the rotating heads could read data semi-randomly, and it would be buffered and organized in memory.

This was aimed at journalists initially, and super expensive. But it was not only for voice recoding. Audio recordings sound impressive for such tiny tapes. Sony promoted it as "Micro DAT recorder" and aimed it at both journalists/professionals as well as audio enthusiasts, at least here in the Netherlands.

The Sony NT-1 with its semi-mechanical operation can be found regularly. The Sony NT-2 is much rarer and it took me some time to find a really nice one. It was optically 9/10 but broken. I was able to fix it, only after tearing the whole thing apart until the very last flex/screw. When you do, you start to appreciate what a wonder of engineering this is.

For that, I like them so much, they are incredible and especially the NT2.

For Sony it must have been a big commercial flop, because at that time the first digitial music players became available and the Scoopman was maybe 10 times as expensive as a regular fine walkman.

I will post more pictures later.

 

I know quite a lot and I've never heard of scoopman, so thanks for that.

 

Ok, good reason to make a little detour from the Walkman and go to the Scoopman now.

One of my all time favourites and a marvel of engineering. So much respect for the Sony engineers who made this.

The Scoopman NT1 was announced at the Audio Fair Tokyo in October 1991. The engineers spent almost 10 years developing it, including 6 custom ASICs with a total transistor count of 1.8 milion transistors, a huge number at that time.
The "non-tracking"scanning of the 3-head rotating head (an A head and two B heads, at +/-27 degrees azimuth) used an 1MBit memory to buffer and organize the data.
The audio quality was (and still is) super impressive for the size. The sampling frequency is 32KHz, the bandwidth is ~10Hz...16KHz. If I listen to my NT1 with good headphones, it's not that far off from CD quality and I'm a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to audio quality.

I won't go into too much depth here, maybe a seperate topic with a lot more info at some point. Let's share some pics:


These are the NT tapes of the Scoopman. They come in 60, 90 and 120 minutes.
And yes, that's a regular €2 coin.


Comparison to a regular cassette. Not "just" a regular tape, it's one of the tapes I had as a kid that has probably seen >500 hours play.


This is the NT1 Scoopman. Fantastic device. I have a number of them, including a boxed one. Unfortunately Sony used "soft velvet plastic" at some surfaces, it was popular at the time but tends to become sticky and ugly over time. My various NT1s all have it, some more than the other. The one from this picture is working perfectly.
As you can see, the Scoopman has mechanical buttons for operation, except for the REC and PAUSE buttons. It has 3.5" stereo headphones and microphone sockets. An accessory that was delivered when you bought one new, was a mini docking device that you'd insert into the (single AA) battery compartment.


This is where the tiny tapes go...


And here you can see the rotating head. It really is like a DAT recorder, just miniaturized to an unbelievable level.


Some NT1 Scoopmen and some NT tapes. The tapes came in boxes of 4 like this. If you never held one of these tapes in you hand: It's a wonderful experience.


This is from one of the (dutch) articles showing the way they put all the electronics on folded flatcables into such a super small space... not to mention the extremely complex mechanics, they go on the right side of this picture including loading mechanism, rotating head, more or less everything that we know from VHS/Betamax/Hi8/DVvideorecorders and DAT equipment.


I once bought a Scoopman from somebody who's inherited it from a family member.

This man bought a Scoopman new, and travelled the world with it.
He made recordings around the world, including Signapore, India, a Europe tour and many other places.
I never met this man personally but I do have his tapes with interviews all around the world.
I think he would appreciate that I'm now posting this online for the first time.
I also have some pictures of how he did his recordings in the 1992-2000 timeframe, with good microphones as you can see in the picture.

He also collected a lot of material about the Scoopman, all magazines and promotion materials related to this impressive technology. I'm very glad it ended up here, where it's appreciated.
In a seperate post I can list more about this, let's first go to the NT2.


Here we see the NT1 on the right and the NT2 on the left, both on top of a dutch magazine with an extensive article about the NT1.

The poststamp was the dutch 5 cent stamp at the time, pretty small and the same size as an NT tape.


And here we have the NT2. Definitely in my personal top 10 of my entire collection.


No more mechanical buttons, except for EJECT.

EJECTing this is super rewarding, it feels so good to open/close the lid and insert a tape. I'm pretty sure some engineer at Sony spent many days perfecting the feeling of the EJECT/insert process. I'd say it's at the same ultra high level as my TCD-D10 PRO II DAT recorder. Sorry for getting carried away about this detail

So the NT2 has more to offer than the NT1, with 3.5" line in/out connectors (on top of headphones & mic sockets), auto-reverse, fully soft-touch operated, a remote control and a docking connector. A docking station was available but I think they are even rarer than the NT2 and I don't have one (yet).

The NT2 is so beautiful. I'm very glad they decided not to use the awful soft/sticky plastic that they used on the NT1. My NT2 is near-mint to mint.




I have some dutch, german and french articles about the Scoopman, it was generally very well received and everybody was super impressed.

However, there were understandable reasons why this brilliant technology never made it, and basically was born dead:
1) It was extremely expensive, in the Netherlands it was 4000 guilders which equals to €1800 in 1991/1992 - so inflation corrected that's about €4000 today
2) DAT recorders were already available and the TCD-D3 was launched around the same time. Yes, the scoopman was smaller and very elegant, but DAT was adopted in professional environments and offered higher sample rates for real digital masters
3) Digital audio players were not too far away, the tape era was already coming to an end

My guess is that Sony started NT tape development in 1982...1983 with the intention to replace regular cassettes, similar to how Philips tried to push DCC, but the development took too long and the cost of the bill of material got out of control.

Commercially it was a flop. Technically it was a wonder. I'm glad I could write something about it here to make more people aware of this historical milestone in portable audio.

 

Well, as I have them out of storage anyway, let's make three last pictures for now:

 

Ok back to the Walkman. I decided to pick the Sony WM-7.

The WM-7 is not a rare model, but from an engineering standpoint it's a true historical milestone.

In 1982 Sony released this model with the following features: Auto Reverse, touch control, remote control and Dolby B. All in one portable device, at a time when these features were very special individually to begin with.

It is quite large and heavy, and quite difficult to repair (I have repaired a few of these myself) as it's still "the old era" of electronics and mechanics inside. So very complex, a lot of hand-soldered wires, a low integration level compared to later models and you can tell by taking a WM-7 apart how difficult it must have been to engineer one of these.
Later on I could post some pictures of the internals and the interesting design choices Sony made back then. Remember, IC technology, switched power supplies and such were all not really a given and creative ideas were necessary to make this one even work in the 1st place.

I do not think it's the most beautiful model, but from the inside and given the timeframe in which it was born - 1982, only 3 years after the TPS-L2 - it's a truly impressive device. As I like it a lot, I have many in my collection. It seems the silver one is much more common than the black one.

There's much more info on the excellent website Walkman.land and elsewhere, so I'll stop here as it may be redundant info. I will post some pics instead:




Hey that's cool, a brand new boxed WM-7. Let's unbox it!


Isn't it beautiful with the original headphones - even the earpieces are still intact - and the remote control. I believe it was the very first remote control on any portable player - correct me if wrong.


The warranty card is filled out by a shop in Emmeloord in the Netherlands, and offered 12 months of warranty. I guess that was not very necessary as the owner decided to never use it.
It came with a cassette called "Jungle Strut", the pretty nice carrying case, and all the paperwork. The manual is a bit more serious than the hilarious TPS-L2 manual which is a pity.


Looking at the label and the Dolby license disclaimer, one can see that this is a really old one. It looks so outdated.


Always nice to have the "It's a Sony" sticker still on it.


Complex inside, you can already tell here before opening it. Nice craftsmanship.


And this was absolutely stunning... touch buttons instead of mechanical buttons. That allowed the remote control too of course. Note that the remote has no seperate connector, the remote operated by shorting the speaker outputs to low resistance, which would make it less compatible with other headphones and limited the number of buttons (only two here). So later they implemented a seperate remote control connector which would not interfere with the L and R audio outputs.