The early 2000s were the halcyon days of physical media. While not as svelte as MP3 players became, why are those early 2000s machines smaller than all the new models popping up amidst the retro audio craze?
We’ve bemoaned the end of the electromechanical era before, and the Verge recently interviewed the people at We Are Rewind and Filo to get the skinny on just why these newer cassette and CD players aren’t as small as their predecessors. It turns out that all currently produced cassette players use the same mechanism with some small tweaks in materials (like metal flywheels in these higher quality models) because the engineering required to design a smaller and better sounding alternative isn’t warranted by the niche nature of the cassette resurgence.
A similar fate has befallen the laser head of CD mechanisms, which is why we don’t have those smooth, rounded players anymore. Economies of scale in the early 2000s mean that even a cheap player from that era can outperform a lot of the newer ones, although you won’t have newer features like Bluetooth to scandalize your audiophile friends. A new Minidisc player is certainly out of the question, although production of discs only ended this February.
If you’re looking to get back into cassettes, this masterclass is a good place to start. If you don’t fancy any of the players the Verge looked at, how about rolling your own incarnation with the guts from a vintage machine or just going for the aesthetic if cassettes aren’t your jam?
2000? The Sony WM-10, even smaller than the circa 2000 EX-910 player shown there, was introduced in 1983. A delicate, precious little thing though, not something you casually handed to friends to play with.
Toshiba KT-AS10 is the world smallest “Walkman”. I have one, but broken.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nxgxGYkIVLw
Arguably not the smallest if you watch techmoan…
https://youtu.be/nTwbpHp0TFI
Er…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=jKnMZHiZAKU
I had a wm 10 saved for a year to get it, I was about 10 it lasted about a month and started eating tapes if you actually walked or moved with it I was devistated
I have e anout 100 cassettes tha t zI still play on my Player
My guess is that anyone buying a cassette player today does so purely for nostalgia or for some sort of retro image, and as such they probably couldn’t care less how big it is. They make even want it to be large enough to be conspicuous. I suspect that the manufacturers understand all of that and just made it easy on themselves.
You don’t need to guess or suspect, they tell you right there in the article why they’re bigger. Which is a shame, my last walkman was barely bigger than the cassette, even having a custom NiCad to make it smaller.
I get tired of HaD sending me off to some other place on the internet to find the answer to the question they posed that they should have included in their own summary. I should only have to trudge off somewhere else if I want more background.
What are you talking about? The answer is right there. Just read the words in front of you, no “some other place on the internet” required.
I don’t have portable players. My two newest hifi components were actuality built this decade (a Topping DAC and a Planar 2)! But the Rega Planar 2 has its roots firmly in the last century.
My hifi is unashamedly retro. It’s what I could afford. From my behemoth Castle Inversion 100s (the speakers that sank the first iteration of the company) to the Technics twin cassette deck. I have a DAB tuner but no streamer. Physical media is my wont.
I’m not going to be beholden to a denial of service attack wiping out my listening pleasure.
This isnt the first article I’ve read with this headline, and the answer is clear. Few care about this old tech, it’s nowhere near as popular as it once was. The scale needed for research or manufacturing isn’t there. Anyone buying this is probably in it for image, and wont use it for long.
I disagree, I use my Sports Walkman daily, I’m 20. I don’t as I only have 3 tapes, so that’s where my Bluetooth Headphones come In
That status quo could always change, but it would definitely need to become a little less niche first.
The scale needed for research or manufacturing depends a lot on the underlying motivations and whether you depend on existing systems to achieve it.
If the desire and capital existed to start a business for reasons other than maximizing profits that would change the equation/dynamic.
Anyone who uses these didn’t grow up in the 70’s.They always break, the tape that is.Memories of driving down to the surf, when the tape gets chewed.Pulling out a tangled mess and trying to rewind it with a pen in the spool to aid the rewind…no thanks.. Bluetooth for me.
A TRUE cassette was one you left on your car dashboard, in the summer sun.
If it didn’t warp from that, it was virtually indestructible.
Why Are Cassette And CD Players So Big Now?
They aren’t?
The industry spends far less these days. Imagine how much Sony spent in say 2004 on disc infrastructure. I read an article about someone who determined the sega saturn disc case cost about $300,000 just for the blueprint/design phase, then youd have to justify that cost and you havent even gone to production yet. Youd need to knkw for sure you will make perhaps 100,000 units, is demand even there?
This is actually cheap in terms of mass production tooling.
Does not even need to be cassette or cd player which is impossible to find in smaller size. Good luck finding small portable fm radio today, preferably with replaceable battery. In the 80’s and 90’s there were many great portable radios, using aaa batteries, smaller than size of 2 matchboxes side to side, including relatively good speaker. Also many very tiny radios without build in speakers, great tuner in the size of 2nd gen ipod shuffle. Micro size, no nonsense fm-tuner with good reception and replaceable batteries that lasted forever would still be great option in multiple cases today.
Those old radios tended to work better too, being true superheterodyne designs with some engineering put into their performance. I haven’t seen a car or portable radio in years that wasn’t based on some craptacular least denominator SDR chip, with crap selectivity and crap sensitivity and poor audio quality even when everything else managed to pull in a station. It’s as if nobody remembers how to design an actual radio. This was also true of digital tuners. When the digital changeover came and you had to use a converter box, those worked quite well at pulling in stations because they were designed with an antenna in mind. Most TV sets though were terrible at pulling in OTA stations because they were designed with a cable network in mind, where signals would be strong and well-separated without interference and propagation losses.
Small portable radios (I found on Radio Jay Allen and his portable radios shootout) and without speaker (Sangean SR-32, Prunus J-985, Aiwa R-22, Retekess V112) that exist suffer shorter battery life, worse reception and durability. Although the size seems to me acceptable I agree they can’t match devices I have seen in ’90 (some of them being just merchandise).
Just look at this battery life test:
https://swling.com/blog/2016/08/update-3-sangean-dt-160cl-v-sony-srf-39fp/
Sony’s design is over a decade older and totally outperforms Sangean – not only lasts longer but also runs on 1 battery not 2.
I still don’t understand why FM radios got removed from mobile phones – I much prefered the tiny battery usage, no data usage and constant signal over internet based stations.
I think the doing away with headphones had something to do with it, the headphones were usually used as the antenna. Theoretically still possible with a software defined radio but the reception would be lackluster
Because people use bluetooth earphones and you need the cable for the antenna.
https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/04/16/400178385/the-hidden-fm-radio-inside-your-pocket-and-why-you-cant-use-it
It’s old issue and only recently have more to do with technical difficulties.
My phone has FM radio capabilities without requiring headphones. I know this because it said so on the package. I have no idea how to use it and no intention to find out as I have no use for it.
I’m on the other side where I don’t understand why people would use FM radio. It’s all commercials and DJ’s shouting at you. I either put on Spotify and play the songs I like, or I’m at home and I put on a nice vinyl record and sit on the couch with one of my cats on my lap listening to music with a nice drink.
It’s so you don’t have to constantly “curate your experience”. Eventually it gets so boring to listen to the same albums or playlists that you just skip ahead going “Ugh, not this again”, which kills the nice passive listening session. With FM radio you just sit back and let the world come to you; at least they play something new occasionally.
Because FM is the same for everybody in range, the ads and music are only aimed at all listeners of the station, not some hyper-personalized algorithmic slop feed. They also don’t get to collect or sell your info, your listening habits, etc, at least with a physical radio. Maybe the app still does. They don’t get to stop you from recording it, or from changing the station when the ads come on, or limit your audio quality unless you pay for a premium streaming account. You don’t have to sign in to listen. You can turn on two radios in the same room on the same station and they will be synchronized. A hardware radio also has no need to consume much more power than the speaker you connect it to, nor does it have the complexity to require particular effort in use.
If I didn’t have any good FM radio, I’d just play my music saved on my own devices for free, with full control and no ads.
My phone can function as a FM radio. Doesn’t even need replaceable batteries, is rechargeable
“Doesn’t even need replaceable batteries, is rechargeable”
What it does need is a non-replaceable battery, which is much worse. Replaceable batteries don’t mean disposable batteries, you can use rechargeable replaceable batteries. The benefits being that you can swap batteries when they are discharged and keep using your device, and that when the batteries inevitably come to the end of their lifecycle and cannot hold a charge anymore, they can be easily replaced, instead of throwing the device away, or having to go through an often complex and potentially destructive disassembly process to replace the non-serviceable battery.
Well , I have a Viet Namease domestic market Nokia “stupid phone” or whatever these old style phones are called by the cool kids today,
I believe this one is nicknamed “The Banana” because of the curved shape and color, it has a built in FM tuner, has a replaceable battery and it will hold on to a charge for months on end, years maybe, sitting dormate, the reception is unbelievable, though it uses the headphones cable as a antenna, so not sure if it would still get such reception if plugging into a external speaker, I mainly use the “Banana” when I loose power in a storm , it’s certainly small, not 2 matchbooks small, but still…..
Some of the small cheap mp3 players have fm radio built in, using earphones as antenna.
I bought a CD player because sometimes I want to listen to music without having to turn on a computer or a phone, or worry about my listening habits being spied upon for the purpose of sending me targeted advertisements. Even if the internet is down, even if the power is out, I can still play a CD and have the experience be completely contained within my living room. Plus, CDs last forever. No idea why anyone would buy tapes.
CDs, do not, last forever. You’ve obviously never heard of bit-rot of data. The magnetic tape on cassette has a longer lifespan than data on a CD.
Bit rot is a problem with burned CDs.
Production stamped discs will last significantly longer (decades) with their issues being uv degradation, plastic degradation, or delamination of the layers if you got a terrible batch of plastic or resins in manufacturing.
Apparently Warner Brothers has a huge batch of DVDs and hd-dvds that went bad, so people bought hundreds of dollars of movies and they are bit rotted now. Especially older no longer in catalog movies.
One problem that polycarbonate can have is the presence of a salt in the resin (at least Bayer chemical was having issues with this in the early 2000’s)
You can make lossless copies and 1:1 rips of CD audio. Not so much for cassettes, which sound worse than CDs from the get-go, let alone after wear from playback.
LOL đŸ˜‚
I have thousands of CD’s going back the beginning of CD’s circa 1982 and they are all perfectly fine except for one company now defunct that used an acidic ink that did rust the data portion. Fortunately only 5 of my CD’s had that issue and the now rust color is a tell tale sign. So while I would not pretend to know that they last forever, they certainly will last a lifetime. Many of my cassette tapes no longer work from that era although that might be due to the cassette housing. I have found that bleed through now is present where it was not before. LP’s should also last a lifetime if you can put up with ticks and pops and the other isssues with vinyl.
A lot of music was only made available on cassette. Some people also enjoy the warm, crackly sound which perfectly complements old hip hop albums. They’re not called mixtapes for nothing
For the price of this cassette player, you can:
1. Buy a 2nd phone.
2. Don’t even put in a SIM card (do those still exist?) in it.
3. Put your “CD” collection on it.
4. Either use Wifi (and block outgoing internet) or disable all radio’s and just use USB.
5. Enjoy your music collection from a convenient touch screen interface.
And of course, the simple way to make sure your own personal music collection is safe, is to have (preferably off site) backups. I have a few (mostly old) HDD’s lying around in drawers for this task, and I rotate my backups between them. A (extra) NAS is more convenient, but an HDD lying in a drawer is also safely air gapped against any sort of malware attack on your network.
Off site backups do not only provide redundancy against failing hardware, but also against fire and burglary.
I have about a 50K CD ripped collection.
The best way to back it up is to give a copy to all your friends, in exchange for them ripping any CDs they own not already in the collection.
It barely fits on a 1TB memory card.
Phone interface isn’t great for finding what you want.
I have an older iPod. With a spinning drive inside. Some people mod these, to put in an SSD.
Everything is backed up, I’ll consider that when the drive eventually dies.
it seems like you’re comparing a mass produced consumer device of yore with a novelty gimmick of today?
anyways, the only kind of cd player i still use is a usb device i use to rip cds to my pc. and looking around at the marketplaces, those haven’t changed in 20 years. they don’t lookany bigger than they were at the apex. they’re essentially early aughts laptop cd drives wrapped in a thin plastic box. so where it’s still a regular consumer device, nothing has changed?
hah and! i looked for usb tape decks — i had one of those years ago too — and they are still tiny. they look to be about 5mm wider/taller than a naked casette, and maybe 3x as thick.
The smallest portable cassette player I remember was a Sony device about half the height of a cassette. It would be trivial with modern technology (greater battery capacity in a smaller space and stronger materials, and more powerful motors) to build a player much smaller. But, who cares?
And I had that exact model when it was first released, it was the WM-10, you had to pull it apart slightly and then insert the tape. It was beautifully made out of metal, but I thought the sound was better on other models, wish I had kept it now…
They were small so you can carry them around. Now if you want something to carry around it’s even smaller. You used to have to carry tapes and CD’s too. Just last week I dinged a star off an Amazon review because they sent drivers on a CD, and had to go find my USB DVD drive.
You dinged them for supplying a set of drivers in a form that amazon can’t reach in and erase on a whim? Not like amazon hasn’t zapped out anything we’ve paid for before.
?..Permit me to toss in my own experiences with drivers and thus my personal attitude about ’em please.
Some years ago I accidentally discovered that asking manufacturers for the drivers on floppy discs, generally got you a clean set of drivers.
No trial wares or nag screens or trying to get you to let some amusement corp rifle through your hard drive and bombard you with spam mail.
Drivers on CD? Very handy if you copied them off to your hard drive and then went through them with a hex editor and stripped or remed out the adobe installation and other cruft before running the install.
Sometimes I found older drivers that would still run fine under win98, but they had been simply commented out of the OS options in the installer check lists.
My take on physical media? Goodness sakes, Grab it any time you get a chance!!
You never know what useful bits you might find, just needing a few keystrokes to make it available and let our gadgets do our bidding.
Nothing like having a utility (on CD) that still does a job you want, rather than finding out that the lawyers have had that certain function stripped from the only downloads left online anywhere.
Often that is true only possible source of drivers, the seller is just sending you what they have.
Well nobody mentioned ,currently you can visit Huaqiangbei, find a couple of suppliers of surplus cassette mechanisms (90’s & 2000) and a manufacturer of rubbers bands and you have half of the work done.
Bigger is better when it come to “deck” and flywheel, better yet is reversible play because there are 2 in counter rotation. The last of the mainstream players were trash already with plastic everything.
I guess it’s time to dig out my campo-blaster from the 80’s and give it life again with a lithium redo.
Forgive my ignorance but what’s so special about a cd laser? Can’t you get the same result from a Blu-ray laser? Shove a hdmi on it and you’ve a very portable multi-purpose player, cd,dvd, Blu-ray.
Reasonably nice sounding portable stereo cassette player/recorder with AM/FM/SW plus mandatory bluetooth can be found on them ebays for around $45-$65 including S&H. I own a couple and they are quite nice for the price paid. Not sure how long they will last, so far three years in total and working properly. Larger ones that would be called “boomboxes” go for under $100, but with some patience a used one can be found for around the same price.
Walkman players, not sure yet, I saw a few for around the same price, so that’s my next test (for now my priorities are elsewhere).
Why cassette players “making a comeback” (imho, not really, just some kind of traction with the nostalgic crowd like myself) is something odd for sure. The mechanical/electronic technology for these overall stayed about the same since late 1990s when pretty much all R&D was shut down. If you buy a surplus cassette mechanism, in all likeness you get rather cheap plastic replica of okay kind, or if you procure surplus car stereo mechanism, it will have metal parts, but these will still be a far cry from what was made and sold in the early 1980s, well-made decks made by Sanyo or Sansui or Pioneer or Aiwa.
Regardless, portable cassette was almost never about good quality, with the exception of high-end walkman that still sell for almost the same price now (good used Sony Walkman will set you back around $150 – the well-made one kinds, not cheaper lower grade). I suppose some people like myself just enjoy the nostalgia :-]
It sucks as I enjoy the simplicity of cassettes. At the ripe age of 20, I can attest I used tape, I own a Sony Sports myself (which unfortunately bought mint and used It the way Intended, for sports. A little beat up now).
Cassette has no ads, unlimited replay, and overall cool.
Well I dunno about “unlimited…” But you can certainly replay them for a a while until they get skuzzy or chewed up
It sucks as I enjoy the simplicity of cassettes. At the ripe age of 20, I can attest I used tape, I own a Sony Sports myself (which unfortunately bought mint and used It the way Intended, for sports. A little beat up now).
Cassette has no ads, unlimited replay, and overall cool.
The 2000s example wasn’t Sony’s tiniest. That would be one a coworker owned back in ’86 or 87 and it was a Sony tinfoil thin affair powered by a single AAA battery, even tinier than a cassette case and the envy of all us peasants who had to make do with Sanyos, Sansuis or Aiwas. Though I owned an Aiwa with bass boost AND three-band equalizer and sounded great with CrO2 tape. Plus radio.
I don’t miss them so much anyway, my gear nowadays is not audiophile level but has Dolby Atmos (a midrange Samsung phone) and just replaced my old BT Philips Bass+ cans for JBLs also Bletooth. Replaying the old songs in it reveal new levels and instruments hitherto unheard in 40 years… FLAC versions of Andreas Vollenweider and Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells sound like I hear them for the first time.
Even good quality MP3 streams sound great. Two nites ago I fell asleep hearing a Prog rock station through TuneIn without setting the off timer first and in the morning I woke not because of the noise but because the melody playing was so good my subconscious slapped my face and woke me up to enjoy it too = ) pity I was so sleepy I forgot to favorite the song = (
I left 2 comments here last night and they are gone now…
For the money it takes for a terabyte of data, it almost makes sense to rip CDs straight to WAV. So bummed that back in the day I ripped all my stuff to 128kpbs MP3 and abandoned the CDs during a move.
My Sony Walkman dap has a 1tb microSD card and 100s of albums on it. No way I will go back to cassette Walkman.
From what I do remember of audio gear in that era it was all about being cheap and looking fashionable (meaning small) but not about quality sound. A big, heavy and boxy garage sale 70s or 80s home stereo sounded so much better than the curvy plastic shelled consumer electronics of the 90s and 0s.
Were these tiny walkmen talked about here actually any good or just trendy?
Maybe because the Audio Cassette Hype is pure hipster BS?
I can somewhat understand the vinyl people, but tape? nope. Totally awful. There is not a single characteristic that makes them useful or interesting nowadays….
But then again, I collect old Commodore, Sun and SGI Hardware and relly don’t get all the “IBM Compatible” Retro guys… PC hardware is as interesting as watching paint dry….
Okay so mini disks just went out of production but can we reverse course and bring them back please because that’s the coolest format and I just discovered they existed so that’s kind of sad
It probably makes sense that I discovered the existed now because if they’re going out of production more people are posting about it so the likelihood of me seeing it is higher