The FM transmitters were of course technically no streamers, and it was obviously way before we invented any digital audio streaming. They were literally frequency-modulating (FM) the analog audio signal as such that any radio close by could receive the broadcasted signal... unless there was another stronger channel. That's why you could tune them for a free frequency. I guess the transmitting power of the HS-P3X was pretty low, I'd doubt if it would work on radios more than a few meters away. But it must have been pretty cool to step into someone's car, tune the radio to your set frequency, and play your tapes through the car's speakers wirelessly. Very common today with BT streaming, but a small miracle back then. Oh those were the days, the used frequency bands and density of the signals were maybe 100x less compared to today.
Cassette2go, don't you remember "Mr. Microphone?" The wireless mic that broadcast to the FM band, it had a famous commercial around 1979 where boys would dialog girls while driving a convertable? "Hey babe, I'll be back to pick you up later" I think in the USA they got in trouble with the FCC, as far as I know these types of units were banned here. There's a thread on Marantz Portables, the CP-53 has FM broadcasting, I've also got an AIWA FMT-1 that plugs into the headphone jack, it has an antenna and volume knob. Japan seems to be the only country with the ability to do it legally, there's a cool Technics TT I posted, the ad shows it broadcasting to a boombox, as a kid I would have loved that!
By the way, about your view that digital streaming is limiting bandwidth: That's not the case, depending on Now that you mention it... I remember in the Netherlands you could buy these FM transmitters with a 3.5mm jack, but I guess they were illegal now that I think about it. They were not offered by known brands, probably because it was forbidden to transmit in the FM band. We did have a lot of "Radio Pirates" as they were calles here, folks with very strong FM transmitters making their own radio station from their back yard. The police were chasing them and sometimes arrested the pirates, but they would always find creative ways to re-open their illegal radio station. They weren't using "On Air" walkmans for sure, they transmitted with 100W+ tube amps back then.
You could say in a way that they are successors in the sense that they were the high-end feature-rich models. Technically they're completely different, the mechanisms were fully redesigned for the 701 chassis. If they're a 1 on 1 successor time-wise, I'm not sure, could very well be that no comparable models were in between. The 701 series were the 10th anniversary super impressive range, and it's one of my all time favorites. I have 20+ 701/702/703/707 models and will post them in the future, incl the 701S and the WM-EX80. I do not have a 701T yet so if somebody knows one for sale, I'd be very very interested.
I'd like to focus on Sharp for a moment, an underrated walkman maker in the early years. I think they made some incredible devices and I'd like to mention the JC-7 and JC-N7 models. They look pretty different from a distance, design-wise.
Nice players with a lot of features. The N7 has dual headphone sockets and an equalizer - special at that time.
Look carefully and you can see that both the mechanical tape controls as well as the equalizer are exactly the same, despite the completely different visual design. I like both quite a lot. The green button is for auto-reverse, but is called "PROGRAM" for some reason I'll probably never understand. That's OK, no need to know everything in life.
A big difference is that the JC-7 has a tuner pack, whereas the JC-N7 has the tuner built in. The JC-7 tuner pack situation and connector are well designed.
Which reminds me of Sony. Visually, the volume control of the Sharp is identical to the Sony walkmans from the WM-2 and its successors. Can you tell these 3 apart? They're Sony WM-20, Sony WM-101 and Sharp JC-7.
By the way, anybody who has opened a WM-2, WM-101 or similar knows this: The middle part of these dials is actually a screw, a very innovative way to connect a potentiometer to a dial in miniaturized devices. If you want to open it, just put tweezers in the 2 holes and unscrew.
What I really like about the Sharp JC-(N)7 is the mechanical tape controls. The buttons are on the "top" of the player, and if you push them you're actually pushing "through the lid" all the way to the real mechanism. If you open the lid, the buttons won't be mechanically connected. See the 2 arrows for the FF/REW buttons. And yes, taking this picture I realize this player didn't have proper maintenance recently.
Concluding with details about the JC-7 that I really like a lot: -The AUTO REVERSE text has pixelized arrows next to it - graphical display style, how modern! -The Thumbs-Up "New Life Now" with a red heart next to it, that makes me smile quite a lot. I'm not sure if this is a Japanese translation of some sort? I have no clue what it means, but it sounds so cool... NEW LIFE NOW!!!
There's a lot of things I missed in the years 1977 to 1980 in the USA because I was in the army and went to Germany in the fall of 1978 until I think February of 1980. So I missed all that was going on in the USA during that time. And of course from the beginning of 1977 I just got out of high school. Graduated and went straight into the army. Didn't have a job but straight into the army and I wasn't interested in anything but home stereo at the time and photography and women LOL.
