Other day the network news show in the morning had a few things from 1979; McDonald's happy meal, some other stuff and an early walkman. Couldn't really identify it because it was in a case. They did open it and showed how a small,powerfull mp3 player with 20,000 songs could fit in the cassette mechanism. I think I've got it taped but the effort to get it to utube just not worth it--it was a not a great moment for the Walkman.

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the network news show in the morning had a few things from 1979; McDonald's happy meal, some other stuff and an early walkman. Couldn't really identify it because it was in a case. They did open it and showed how a small,powerfull mp3 player with 20,000 songs could fit in the cassette mechanism. I think I've got it taped but the effort to get it to utube just not worth it--it was a not a great moment for the Walkman.

I know what you mean. Everyone can gloriously appraise trhe wonders of modern tchnology. But no one considered this: today's mp3 players are nowhere near walkman in those days. Why? Because when designing the early walkmans, manufacturers had to pull all stops on trechnology. it really was the best thing they could make. Overengineered and for today's standards, a ridiculously quality build and parts. Mp3 players are hardly state-of-the-art and the technology has been available long before the first models appeared. But everyone here knows that

mp3 is bad for your ears. throughout the compressing of sound "non-hearable" parts (allways same frequencies !!!) get cut off, and your ear got the tendency of loosing sensability for those - funny enough ear-doctors spectored those losses especially in the range of electronic sirenes, f.ex. from emergency-vehicles in the US and Australia - very cool when you walk on the road with earplugs and mp3, not hearing an ambulance, you get runover quickly, how cool daan !!!

most interesting: this is happening also at LOW VOLUME !!!

Analog audio is reproduced while digital audio is sampled, or as everyone keeps saying.

Digital must quantify everything to be definite, but analog, the resolution is infinite, as you probably already know as enthusiasts.

Sure, it takes quite a lot to get an analog reproduction to sound good, given there are so many factors to getting it to sound well. The perfect "recording/mix" is much left to be desired at times. With digital, practically who can go wrong with logical "high" / "low" (binary)? Just put together some commodity IC chips following manufacturer's data sheets and you're go. To be fair, I bow to wonders of being able to store 20,000 songs vs at best 90 minutes per tape, despite the "digital artifacts".

Dont get me wrong digital can sound good if not better it has to do with how it the sampled, the problem is CD can only do Stereo 88.2 KBytes/sec CD 44.1 16 Stereo 176.4 KBytes/sec 20-20000 Hz that where it hits it limits, which is why studios never used to to do there masters with and CD kind of sound harsh at times. Now that being said you have three other formats DAT, SD recorders being top of the list DAT 48 sample rate 16 bit Stereo 192.0 KBytes/sec 20-20,000 Hz which is no lossy compression sounds just as good if not close to the best LP player that you can get. The old casette's quality is not even close to the DAT's digital recording qualty or even a CD for that fact of the matter. the only other good format was DVD audio which did 48hz and minidisc HiMD which never had a chance to catch on to the consumer market because of the crappy IPOD, music sounds muddy in comparison even at Apple lossless format. and for field audio recorders they use a SD recorder which is just as good as DAT use the same A/D converter just different media.

Great comment Autoreveser. What you say is true.