Hi there,

Today, 1st of october, but 30 yrs ago started to arrive the CD player to the stores, and the decline of the walkman era began.

An excellent spanish blog has published a small article about that and they published a photo of my collection, where you can see almost every musical portable player in this 30 years.

This is my small tribute to 30 years years of music players and all the enjoyment they give us to allow us enjoy music in a intimate way.

*: The Rio MP300 is the first comercially available MP3 player, but there were one player before it: the MPMan, but only very few units were sold.

Long life the personal music players!

look at the cool early designs compared to the crappy bland looking no style  thought out ipod's

why no SONY NW walkman Hugo?

Runs the continuity having non Sony products in your pic

token crappy badger iphone pic

The Magic gate walkman was the SONY option the 1st gen iPod  - and as I did not own a MAC it was the logical (three hundred quid) choice - ouch!

64mb removable sticks seemed to be a more flexible option than a portable hard drive

who knew

30 years? blimey. I`ve got a beautiful, mint, sony cdp-101. Doesn`t sound That good though.

Well, I added the iPod because it's the only player comparable to the walkman born in terms of world changes in human mass.

There were another important MP3 players in the history, like the Creative Jukebox or the Archos (the first one with a color screen)

I don't like the sony mp3 players because of many things that SONY did badly. SONY was always against the mp3 compression and always put barriers to the user. I.e. for many years you couldn't upload an mp3 digital file directly to the player; you had to recompress them to ATRAC format, and this takes time. Only after many years, SONY allowed the user to upload directly MP3 files, but then it was late, very late, and they lost millions of potential buyers.
I have one of the best sounding SONY MP3 players, the NWZ-A810. It has an impressive bass, but the interface is bad.

For me, SONY did many mistakes after the digital music appeared. Reason why I loose interest in SONY after year 2000. But I don't like ipods too, because IMHO they sound so plain and flat. Like Plop would say, "deadly flat" ;-), but in this case the deadly flat D6C sound waaay richer than an iPod or an iPhone.

In fact, IMHO Sharp did things better even earlier than MP3 era, back in the Minidisc era.

So, IMHO SONY has "lost the train" of modern music, in terms of usability and interfaces. SONY didn't understand what Internet, sharing and on-line resources means, reason why Google, apple and many other brands are leaders now.

Wow, I think I wrote so much... :-P