This is the "metal lines" or "brushed aluminum" or whatever it is called, that you saw on several mods of this era, which I really like.
In the plastic bag we find a nice overview of living devices, all happy that the Sony briefcase guy is calling a woman. I have no clue what the Japanese text is saying but decided that it's better not to know, and just enjoy the picture itself.
Another small brochure in the WM-30 box. Speakers and trains. That was the WM-30 unboxing, hope you liked it.
Radio R. had his D3000 CD Players which I found out were sold door to door in Japan by Sony, I wonder how many other products they also sold this way. https://stereo2go.com/forums/threads/sony-d3000-cd-radio.8240/
Coming back to the NT1 Scoopman for a moment. I knew I had the box of one of the NT1 Scoopmans but I kept it elsewhere, here it is: It's a cool box with a lot of accessories, which you may expect for the super steep price. It came with one NT tape, microphone, attenuator, case, power supply and the adapter that sticks into the battery compartment for additional I/O. This manual has no English, only Dutch and 3 other "local European" languages. It is a pretty interesting manual though, as it describes the format in quite some detail. After all, it was a completely new format. Here it describes the non-linear tracking, as well as the fact that the rotating head is sticking into the tape, so that no mechanism is needed to pull the tape out like in videorecorders. Here it explains how they achieved the small size and how the tracking works. Pretty uncommon to explain these things to the consumer buying it these days. The MZ-1 Minidisc manual does the same thing in the same style, it dedicates several pages to explain about the technology. I like that. I'll post the MZ-1 later on.
Some NT tapes. They came in boxes of four, and some tapes are all alone in such a box with some room for labels and notes. 60, 90 or 120 minutes. I put the dedicated cleaning tapes in the front.
A red one that is. This one is used and not fully complete, but it does come in the original box. The boxes in this era were just so cool!
The WM-805 is a well featured player with auto-reverse, logic control, dolby etc... and the main attraction is that it has a wireless link to the remote control, not just for the controls but also for the audio. Here we see the slider to open the lid, as well as the unusual "STANDBY ON/OFF" switch which makes this walkman listen to a remote control. You can safely stow away the walkman in any pocket or put it on the table, and forget about it.
We know these dipswitches from computer mainboards back then. In this case, there were 4 bits for 16 unique codes. Sony called this "SECURITY CODE" - Sounds pretty cool doesn't it?
The remote control is "programmed" and ready to go. Don't you just love this small device with its pretty buttons and tiny screen? The headphones are hard-wired to the remote. They are the MDR-E472.
The remote takes a shorter version of the regular gumstick battery, and as far as I know we cannot buy those new anymore. If anybody knows, let me know. I'm powering it with an external 1.2V power supply here, mimicking the NiMH battery that it needs.
It's a smart move from Sony to use an LCD with symbols, as it's consuming orders of magnitudes less than LEDs in this use case. I really like how they were able to make wireless connections for audio & controls with so much functionality back then, way before Bluetooth. The WM-805 and its remote are remarkable. Very well done, the only dissapointment is that it feels quite plasticky and therefore a bit cheap for such an advanced machine.
Opening up the remote. How did they squeeze all this wonderful functionalty - including local DBB, headphone amp, LCD and wireless links into such a tiny package?
Well, by stacking 3 PCBs, one of which has a glob-top ASIC for the LCD control, and the others saying "Mitsumi". Later models also sometimes show Mitsumi on the user interface PCBs - buttons, LCDs etc. I'm guessing that Mitsumi made Sony's custom displays, and as it's not trivial to make the LCD glass to PCB connect, Sony likely asked them to supply the whole sub-assembly.
My WM-805 did not work so I did some refurbishment. It's running now, but the wireless link is still a challenge. I would not be surprised if the RF electronics of the transmitter and receiver had some shift over time. I may give it more time later, but for now I'll box the WM-805 again. I think the WM-805 is impressive, a 1990 predecessor to what is common finally in 2024: Wireless earbuds controlling your device which streams audio to them. Again, not only visionary of Sony but also quite an achievement to actually make this work 34 years ago. The only thing I don't like is the cheap look & feel of the plastics, but now that I think about it, there was probably a very good reason for the plastics. A metal casing would have made the RF transmission a lot harder, if not impossible. I have a couple of later year wireless walkman models, including the cool WM-WE7 and "Hi Band" models like the WM-WX1. However, I think the WM-805 is one of the oldest, if not the oldest wireless walkman. Does anybody know if there were earlier wireless models similar to this one?
