Walkman II : The Do-over. The start of something small

the original Walkman is a very important piece of Tech History it's something that people associate with the 1980s but I think in recent years it's moved into a bit of a legend rather than the reality so I want to pull things back more to the reality and explain what really was going on and where this all fit in with things so the original woman the TPS L2 was launched in Japan in 1979 it made its way over to the US I've seen a magazine said it was due to be launched in December 79 I think it was more 1980 when you'd perhaps be able to get one a lot of people are very familiar with the fact that the original wman the TPS L2 was actually based on a Sony portable Pressman recorder as far as the production model goes that was the TCM 600 and that dictated the design of the original wman Sony really spent very little time and effort on the original Warman because they weren't sure that there was going to be a market out there for it they didn't want to devote a lot of resources to it so they got an existing device as I'm sure we all know they took the speaker off it they took the record off it they made it into a stereo player only but that is pretty much it in fact one of the stories about the original Sony Walkman is the reason it has the individual stereo left and right sliders rather than a single control for both is because at the time nobody was making a small enough stereo volume wheel which then gives you an indication as to the amount of effort that Sony was happy to put into this at the time they really did want to just raid the parts Spin and put something out there and see how it went rather than exerting a lot of effort into creating something even as simple as a a volume control for it now again not saying that it didn't have a lot of influence on what went after but really the original Sony wman is is revered as some kind of amazing in design classic and in reality it's the idea that was the very important thing the product itself isn't all that this isn't what Sony wanted to make it's what they had to make at the time because this came out as I say say 1979 1980 in the US well in 1981 just the year after they brought out the Walkman 2 the wm2 and this is it this is the wman 2 this is really really what Sony wanted to create it's significantly smaller and neater because it's been designed from the ground up rather than cannibalizing an existing product it started all over again and there are very few reflections of that first device in the design of this one and interestingly as this came out just one year after that original one this same design then continued to be used for well over 10 years as far as products come into the market in 1991 there was the Sony wmdd 33 that came out in 91 it stayed on the market for a couple of years after that so over 10 years of products that look similar to this and really as far as the original Sony wman goes well there was the original one and then there was cheaper versions of this it was the wm1 which was based on another portable recorder and then they renamed this to the wm3 Chang the color altered a couple of components on it and sold it more as a a budget model but really they were pretty quick to kind of drop this idea they go right the product is a success get rid of that and start all over again and then they came out with this and really to me it's products like this that are the Walkman of the 80s so when you want to represent what people were using in the 80s you might think well use one of these again trouble is Sony were way too expensive I remember in um I think it was 1985 I was on a school trip with my friends on a coach and quite a few people had personal stereo cassette players and not a single one of them had a Sony within the first year of the Sony wman come into the us there were 20 other manufacturers making knockoff type models in fact some of them though looked just like the original and then of course Sony comes along same year brings out something a lot sleeker and more modern and catches everyone on the back foot and in fact the companies that were selling kind of knockoff style models like this soon out to knock them out at Great discounts you know it's almost a decade on now since the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie featured the original Sony wman quite heavily as a direct result of that the prices of these on the secondhand Market shot up and the desirability of this particular model went through the roof and ones in good condition now fetch an absolute Fortune but just one thing about that first movie the start of it is set in 1988 and the child listing to his tpsl 2 well just to give you an idea as to what people were listening to in 1988 by that point I was working I was commuted every day on the train to a job and on that train loads of people had personal stereo cassette players and I can tell you for certain there wasn't a single one that was using one of these they didn't have one of these clipped to their belt no I mean Tech in the 80s moved very quickly a lot quicker than perhaps it moves nowadays because by 88 most people had something along the lines of this for playing their cassettes and they weren't listening to it through over the ears orange muff earphones no they they used earbuds and they pop this whole thing in the inside pocket so the whole idea of someone using one of these in 1988 is a bit an acronis now again I understand it's a fantasy film and you can come up with some kind of backstory that it had been handed down through the family and all that kind of stuff but I'm just saying that a lot of people look at that movie and think oh that's what everyone was listening to in the 1980s well it didn't sell amazingly well at the beginning of the 80s because it was very expensive and by the end of the 1980s well most people have moved on to something else in fact the wman 2 outsold the tpsl to quite comprehensively so I think maybe this is the model that perhaps could feature more but yeah it's not the most photogenic of things I understand that that looks more interesting on a film than this but then again got to think that Martin McFly well he used in Iowa let's have a look at the Walkman 2 let's just see what this thing does differently to the first one and then also let me ruin it I'll explain more about what what I mean by that in a moment the wm2 was the first Walkman that was sold around the world using the Walkman name the tpsl 2 was referred to by a variety of names outside of Japan when Sony set about creating the wman 2 part of the design brief was to get the size as close as possible to that of a cassette case and if you were to believe the selective measurement used in their promotional material it seems like they achieved that goal with a wman that was 0.5 mm smaller than a cassette Case by selective I mean that height-wise yeah it was a tiny bit smaller widthwise not so much and perhaps the less said about the thickness of it the better but of course when compared to the original it was significantly smaller overall and perhaps just as importantly it was considerably lighter a TPS L2 loaded up with a cassette and two AA batteries comes in at 415 G whereas the wm2 manages to shave around a quarter of that off coming in at 310 G the literature of the time made much of the fact that they pursued weight reduction down to a single screw of course it is also using a completely different mechanism to that of the first model and it's hous in a plastic case rather than the metal one of the original all of which contributed towards the reduction in weight talking of that mechanism though for the first time the head and pinch roller assembly was housed in a hinged section in the do which reduced the size significantly when compared against the traditional cassette well of the original model this hinged head configuration became the standard for future models whether those were ones from Sony or other manufacturers once the twin headphone sockets were carried over the hotline button disappeared which isn't a surprise because even back in the early 80s I remember thinking this was an old Feature A friend had a TPS L2 and I do remember questioning why it had a microphone when it couldn't record if like me back then you still don't know what the hotline does the idea is that pressing the orange hotline button would play any sound that was picked up by the mic through the headphones so you could hear what was going on around you without having to remove your headphones the reality though was that it was just as easy to turn down the volume or remove your headphones as it was to press a button a shadow of the hotline feature though remains on the wm2 or to be more precise on its supplied headphones these had an orange button on the wire that when pressed would mute the audio interestingly the idea of a microphone picking up ambient sounds and sending those through earphones has seen a Revival in recent years so in a way the original walkman's hotline feature gets to live on as far as improvements on the wm2 go though well they finally figured out that stereo volume wheel of course not every change was perfectly thought out though you can see that on this later dd2 model that volume knob has been moved back further from the front panel I suspect the original control would have been too easy to accidentally nudge while the device was being carried in a pocket now whilst both the first model in this one were powered by two AA batteries the Walkman 2 managed to eek one more hour of life out of a pair of AA alkalines for a total of 9 hours rather than the originals eight the W2's battery compartment has been moved inside the bottom of the cassette well now some articles of the time mentioned that this meant you were now less likely to drop the batteries while you were changing them I don't know if that was the intention but this relocation did mean that there was now no longer a need for a door on the outside of the case which meant that there was no longer a clear front and back of the Walkman as on the original so the wman 2's case was now double-sided you got to decide which one you considered to be the front of course not all improvements were visible the new anti-rolling mechanism employed two flywheels in an attempt to keep the playback speed more stable whilst the device was being moved about kind of essential for a Walkman and the fact that this system wasn't on the first one tells you a lot about that unit's non-music oriented dictation machine Origins whilst this flywheel system is mentioned in promotional literature it's only in later models like this dd2 where it's specifically mentioned on the case and just a side note I managed to live my entire life up to now without realizing what anti-rolling was actually referring to another Improvement is seen in the button layout although I do remember these diagonal buttons seeming rather odd the first time that I saw them but there is a good reason behind them being laid out this way it facilitates one thumbed operation of course this is something that's reflected in a modern day smartphone it's a portrait oriented oblong object that's held in one hand whilst being operated by the thumb of that same hand for the majority of the time at least one button that disappeared from the original though is the tone switch in its place is a selector for the playback of normal or metal tape in 1981 Sony were banking on metal tape being the next big thing and in advertisements the wm2 was often shown alongside a Sony metal tape in fact one of the reasons behind the rebranding of the tpsl 2 as the wm3 was so that the new model could now be updated to include metal tape compatibility and this meant that both the wm2 and the wm3 were now ready for metal unfortunately the rest of the world wasn't as while metal tape did a great job of eliminating tape his and increasing dynamic range it was also expensive when compared against regular fic tape which resulted in minimal takeup and as far as mainstream pre-recorded album releases went metal tape was pretty much completely ignored then again in 1981 while pre-recorded cassette sales were on the increase they still had a long way to go in 1981 it was anticipated that you'd be recording most of your tapes at home dubbing them from records or recording them from the radio of course the CD wasn't on the scene yet but when sales of pre-recorded cassette albums did take off the preferred option was to use cheaper type one tape and attempt to mitigate the hiss by employing Dolby B noise reduction note that neither th the tpsl 2 or the wm2 offered Dolby B decoding in reality though playing a Dolby B tape on this would just make it sound a little bit brighter which many people preferred anyway even when players had Dolby be a good proportion of users would permanently leave that switch in the off position now talking of sound quality there is no point in attempting to pit these two against each other nowadays because after over 40 years of wear and tear neither of my examples is sounding great they're both a bit worn out and wobbly if I wanted to listen to a tape on a personal stereo I'd been much better off using one of my more recent models like the WM X900 which is a spring chicken in comparison at a mere 23 years old now I mentioned that I was going to ruin the wm2 experience but don't be concerned I'm not damaging anything I'm just undoing all the good work that Sony put into making this smaller and lighter first off while the wm2 had a pretty decent battery life on a pair of aa's it does mention here that it could work for 60 hours on two D cells but how did you get it to run on D cells well you use one of these this is the Sony EBP 500 battery case and I believe it was included in bundles with the wm2 along with the headphones the belt clip and the carry strap this battery pack could be clipped onto a belt right next to a Walkman and there's also mounts on it for a strap so presumably you could sling it over a shoulder with two Dells inside the weight of this pack though is 33 30 G which is a little bit more than the Walkman itself so while Sony was working hard to remove every last screw to shave off fractions of a gram we've now just undone all that by turning this Warman into something way more bulky and over twice as heavy but we haven't finished yet remember how I mentioned that the wm2 didn't have a tone control well maybe I can Rectify that by adding in a five band graphic equalizer the Sony sq50 takes two AA batteries and sits between the headphones and the Walkman and enables you to adjust the tone to your liking on the rear is printed a couple of suggested positions for the five sliders including one to reduce the hiss by limiting the high frequencies of course now with this in place things are getting pretty messy and inconvenient perhaps it would be a good idea to get a tool belt to clip all these things too but then again there's still one more thing that we could do with adding let's say I've been recording all my tapes at home using the dbx noise uction system but the cassette albums I've been buying used Dolby B ideally I could do is something that I could add to the wman that would decode both of those something like this the ppa1 an external noise reduction device this uses another couple of batteries and whilst its main function is as a dbx decoder it does have a position on the switch which enables it to approximate Dolby b as well note though that they're very careful to avoid the use of the dword on the device itself s the instructions advise you to set the headphone output on the wman to 50% and then use the PPA 1 to control the volume as it acts as a headphone amplifier as well as a decoder so now it's just a matter of adding this into the system it goes straight into the headphone output and then the graphic equalizer is Daisy chained off that so now with all these things we're finally ready to hit the road but just to be on the safe side we better make a quick detour to the battery shop on the way but yes this is it if you really want a historically accurate depiction of what the average 1980s person was using to listen to their tapes while roll skating backwards through a slalem of cones it wasn't this no it was far more common to see somebody rocking this setup of course anyone old enough to remember already knows this but it's always good to pass down historically accurate information to Future Generations before these things get forgotten but anyway that's it for the moment as always thanks for [Music] watching [Music]

Channel: Techmoan

Views: 293,914

Keywords: Techmoan, 4K, Walkman, Walkman II, Walkman 2, WM2, WMII, WM-2, WM-II, Sony, TPS-L2, Sony walkman, DBX decoder, PPA-1, DBX PPA-1, Sony SEQ50, SEQ-50, EBP-500, EBP500

Id: 8hMtcq_agWY

Length: 18min 2sec (1082 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 02 2023