"I suspect that I was going around carrying number of pictures of Korean ladies, Misses would be wondering what is going on" hahahahaha made me laugh. Thank you worth wile video already
There are still boatloads of cassette decks available on the 2nd hand market, most of which are easily fixed with a couple of new belts, a squirt of contact cleaner and a lick of grease. But it sure would be nice if there would be some semi-decent cassette mechanism on the market, because if cassettes become very popular, the cost of a refurbished deck will go through the roof.
Yes, it's odd. With the resurgence of vinyl, we pretty much (with some exceptions because of the pro DJ market) had godawful Crossleys at first, until decent decks made a bit of a comeback. Perhaps if we wait long enough...?
@@theone3776 Not really, if they made it in China the manufacturing costs would be dirt cheap. Or they could license their old designs on the cheap if they never intend to make them again.
@@theone3776 you're right. Sony wouldn't be able to use the mechs in these kinds of devices, because they aren't made in the volume a multinational corporation would need. They'd have to make their own mech, and their own chassis, and their own board. It would no doubt cost a few million USD to get production started. It would likely cost about... $20-30 to manufacture. Then, the cost would probably need to be around $40-100 US, and only a few thousand weirdos would really want to buy one. I doubt they'd be able to move more than 50k worldwide in a year. It'd be a major loss for Sony. And I'd be one of those weirdos. I'm installing a 1993ish JVC Digifine tape deck and CD changer into my old convertible next week.
So damn true, I’ve bought manufactured trash a few times - straight to recycle bin - this is the absolute worst part of capitalism, makey money by producing recycle bin material - it’s like paying someone to spill a bucket of oil into the sea
Absolutely sad. I bought an adapter for my car from Wal-Mart several years ago that turned out to spend more time making whirring noises than charging any of my electronics.
Or perhaps several factories, but all working from the same limited number of blueprints. That would explain why there are multiple variations of essentially the same design.
I wonder why they cant just clone sonys mechanism...chine clones everything, and if i were china i would have started from there instead of making my own model.
@@kenmore01 Ouch. I thought a Yuno car would be on the lists. At least the Geo have AC. Sorta sorta like a reverse turbocharging charging a AC, not horsepower. As for me. YAMAHA NS A636 was gold find to get a studio bookshelves speaker. Three way!! It like Godzilla walk into Scorpion concert Live on 97.5 KLT The Rock Station. I love my local station.
@@Locutus Crosley cruiser. Basically, it's a turntable that fits into a briefcase-like shell, with speakers built in. It's really infamous within the "vinyl entuhusiast" community, due to it's laughable sound quality, terrible stylus and overal "bargain bin" feel of the whole unit. It's reputation isn't helped by the fact that factories in china have copied the deign and are pumping out even cheaper and worse copies of the original en masse.
The sad thing about that is that Crosley used to be a respectable name once many years ago, but now it's just a licensed trademark used by Chinese crap factories. Same with old brands like RCA and such.
The last and best Sony Walkman that I ever bought was from around 1989-1990, and it had a digital tuner. It never broke or wore out, and it STILL works! Peace.
@@randomperson7443, it was black, had auto reverse, a digital tuner, and was a bit on the large side. I don’t have access to it right now, or I’d check. Peace.
2 years ago, I bought a new Sony Blu Ray player, but it skips the occasional random frame no matter what disc I play on it! I watched Trolls and The Secret Life of Pets on it, but I could tell when the odd word sounded incomplete! How could this happen? This is SONY! A company whose tech is usually really good!
@@adultmoshifan87 can be a lens problem or maybe pay special attention to the way that you clean your DVDs and BDs Don’t really know, just trouble shooting.
The fact that today's manufacturer's that excels at miniaturization of digital electronics yet have a hard time replicating analog technology from over two decades ago demonstrates the complexity of the technology (both mechanical & electronics) of the Sony Walkman. You can't get Samsung, who makes the best digital electronics today, to try to build a portable stereo cassette player that could rival Sony Walkmans of the 80s & 90s (and early 2000s). Sony's forte was definitely in analog electronics.
SOny still makes decent headphones, earbuds, and bluetooth speakers, and for a lot cheaper than ripoffs like Beats and Bose and so on, but their best headphones are actually 80s designs that are still in production.
"Sony knew what they were doing." So do you, sir. Thanks for yet another comprehensive review, and for your advice and experience. You help us appreciate old equipment even more.
3:40 honestly that's a really neat idea conceptually, modern artists to cover versions of old songs all the time but it's neat to see it made into a bigger project like this that also has some historical significance considering K-pop is huge these days.
They should do it more in general. And obviously release the covers onto the media formats that were common when the original versions came out. Sure, also do all the fancy digital formats, but there is something special about period correct hardware and formats.
You've motivated me to dig out my old Sanyo personal stereo and see how it does. It was nothing too special, but did always sound good. One innovative feature was it came with a "tuner pack", which was a cassette-shaped tuner module that you could drop in and listen to AM/FM stereo. It had contact pins for power and it didn't use the tape head for the audio signal, and the case of the player had cutouts for the thumb wheel for tuning and switches.
I have the same Sanyo model with the blue tuner pack that I bought when I was a kid with the money I saved from delivering newspapers (couldn’t afford a SONY) lol…
I think Sony Walkmans from the 1980's were even better. Built to last a long time. Fewer plastic parts than the 90's Walkman players, which made them relatively heavy.
It’s a shame that the impressive box didn’t have a impressive cassette player in it. The young generation will never really appreciate what a good quality portable player was like even if they get their hands on one it likely won’t be in good shape.
One might think a cheap motor so close to where the magnetic tape is supposed to loop onto would partially erase a tape, or introduce hum in the recordings that won't go away?
It's a real shame the quality isn't great because I really like the design of this one, boxy with the clear plastic cover. Something about it appeals to me.
Sony made some nice stuff before they went all cheapo.... I presume they also nearly went bust making the nice stuff too... Progress is not always a good thing.
I had a Sony Walkman that was SMALLER than a cassette case. It collapsed down when it had no tape in it (FM radio still worked) and open to accept a tape. It ran for hours on a single AA cell.
@@John_Ridley Yeah, I had a Walkman WM-10 which is the model you are describing. It's still somewhere in a storage box somewhere in the house. It ran on a single battery for many hours, though if you used the Dolby NR the battery life was shorter.
I'm not into K-pop, but I like how you went the extra mile to explain the significance of the special edition tape. I thinks it's cool having something that is a kinda flashback nostalgia.
Seeing an old British man open up K-Pop merchandise is quite a fun thing. And tbh the market they're aiming here which is the K-Pop teens who like the groups that are included in the mix. Most of them will probably not care about quality or even listen to it too much. Most would buy these for the novelty and merchandise factor, like owning the product and supporting their favourite groups. So yeah, the people behind these items know who they're targeting at.
I'm late here, but my sister had this set imported as she's a big kpop fan, and she was really into the blossom era revival they did. The magazine that comes with the Kassette, states that it's for fancy dress use, to dress as a blossom era kpop fan. Even the magazine says its just to look good. They don't expect anyone to listen to it
There are some Western pop artists with casettes, the Barbie movie had several casettes of albums and singles of the soundtrack plus one artist Dua Lipa seems to have casette releases of her albums too. There are different coloured editions of albums to create the collectable factor too.
I just wanted to say that I'm terribly sorry it ended up like this. This wasn't cheap ($104.58) and I naturally thought they must have put a lot of money to the R&D. I can see now it all went to the artists' royalty. How did they got the RWD and FF in the wrong way? Unbelievable. Just so you know, I was the guy who sent this to Mat.
Yes, a well done expose on what basically amounts to fraud. In the pre-globalization markets run the world era this type of crap would have been put out of business
The RWD and FF is actually turning in the right way. The DIR is on side B. (If you Don't know what the DIR is, It is the one that switches to side a to side b with a button
@@stephenmumford9629 I actually bought a couple of cassettes this week in a Charity Shop. The young man on the till, probably doing work experience, had to ask the manager what they were and which category they should be put under.
Despite its quality, it just brought back all those feelings as a kid getting a new walkman through the years as things update. My first auto rewind walkman and then the trolly nice Aiwa silver one that was not much bigger than the tape! I felt so smart on the bus! Great stuff!
My best friend in HS had an Aiwa that made me envy him. It was the only personal cassette deck I ever saw that recorded and came with a stereo mike the plugged in.
@@greendryerlint I still have mine, somewhere. But there was a higher end version that we never got here in the US. And same as you, I was in envy of a friend who got one overseas. Besides the stereo mics, digital tuner, BBE, super bass, all the bell and whistles, mostly, I remember it had such an amazing quality of FM tuner. Looked similar to HS-J880, but I swear it had stereo mics built in, which the 880 doesn't?
The design is not bad, it looks like a cassette player that the Japanese company Muji would sell. Shame about the mechanism, though. Really it goes to show - if you want a walkman, buy a Walkman. Or an Aiwa. Or Sanyo.
Or Panasonic. My elder brother used to own one, but I was the one whom always listening to it most of the time. The sounds were amazing, and I was really impressed!
@@NANCYDREWCHANNEL Yes, I forgot Panasonic - they were also popular and they made a lot of models. There were also some companies which tried to get into the walkman business, but they didn't make many models, like Grundig, Hitachi or Toshiba.
Yeah, players from the mid-80s up to the late-90s from japanese manufacturers just have that quality. And some early 00s also did fine, but that was already when the medium was starting to be phased out and quality was less important. Pretty much the same timeframe as with floppies. The old ones are often better than the newer ones.
The cassette deck is performing perfectly. What you are hearing is the tremolo effect popular in cassette and turntable players these days. It gives your old, dull music that new, hipster sound.
I recognize that mechanism as the ones you can buy on eBay for about 15 quid that look and feel like somebody has slapped them together with cheaply moulded plastic
How is it the I haven’t owned a tape or vinyl for 20 years and haven’t played a cd for 10 years yet I watch at least 3 Techmoan videos a day? Love it, keep up the good work
Cos this isn't really a review channel. I mean he does reviews of both modern and vintage tech, but the vast majority of people aren't watching the videos for that. We're watching them because they're fascinating, he writes scripts in a way that convey loads of information yet are very easy to understand for a layperson, and he's a good speaker, and be throws in enough humour too. It's like how there's plenty of channels I watch that review movies, or video games, but I'm not watching them because I want to know which movies to watch and which games to play, most of the time I already have seen/played the thing being reviewed. The point is that they're entertaining to watch. And some of them go so deeply into the fundamentals of movie/video game development that it's almost like film/game school or something. Like how Folding Ideas reviews mainly movies, but he's a guy with undergrad and postgrad degrees in film theory and has worked in the film industry for years. So he thoroughly explains why certain techniques are used and why they're effective at getting across a feeling or a plot point without the characters needing to even say a single line. He's not just like most film review channels that go "I like this movie cos this happened in the story" or "I hate this movie because this happened in the story" etc. He actually goes deeply into the film theory of framing and cinematography and editing and screenwriting etc. Like this video on the Kuleshov Effect that he made: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-Vy2Vhnqtu8I.html Techmoan is the same kind of thing. People don't watch his videos because they want to know which record player or Walkman is the best. They watch them because he's more of a tech historian, who really goes into more depth about these things than nearly any other channel. And he takes them apart and shows the insides and explains how every little piece works. I've never bought anything after watching any of his videos. But I've watched all the videos multiple times because they're just so fascinating There's a handful of other tech channels that are as good as Techmoan like Technology Connections. But the vast majority of them don't even come close to how good Techmoan videos are. He really has a knack for making just about anything fascinating
FYI, regarding the “We are rewind” Walkman, they claim in their recent newsletter that it will be based on the Tanashin mechanism that they are trying to optimize for better sound quality. However the mechanical parts they want for a good record functionality are not manufactured anymore so they will ditch the record functionality in the first version of their device (which is yet to come). So it looks they’re just not trying to fit one of these crap mechanism into a new case.
Meanwhile in Sony HQ, "Oh no we are missing on 20k euro supercontract to Tanashin q_q" Dunno what “We are rewind” team were thinking launching KS campaign without checking available tech.
@@ChristopherHallett there are different versions of the tanashin clones (since tanashin does not make them anymore since a decade). For instance the mech in the
Another manufacturer that cannot manufacture. You don't go looking for mechanical parts, your MANUFACTURER them. In other words, avoid this 'we are rewind' crowd, they are clueless.
My 2001 Honda HR-V came with a Sony Cassette player. Instead of replacing it, I bought a 90's Cassette recorder and a few cassettes (choice partly because of this channel). The joy of making mix-tapes, selecting the songs you don't want to skip (skipping takes forever), the fidelity ... It makes the 90's driving experience all that much more.
Finally! My insomnia is good for something! It is 4:09 AM in the Central Time Zone, and I am wide awake, and ready for an awesome video. As usual, Techmoan does not disappoint.
Every Saturday morning at the same time he drops a new video. It works out for me that when I'm about to leave work after Friday night there's a new techmoan video to watch.
Thank you for this video. I still listen to Classic FM with a 90s Sony Walkman with headphones through the night. The sound quality is streets ahead of the DAB radios around the house, and is amazing that it all runs off a single aa battery. The cassette still player still works, which is a testament to Sony’s quality. A shame this one tested does not come up to scratch. Thanks, once again Mr T.
The Techmoan Army: 1. Should 'get together and make a proper, good cassette mech' (per CBits Tech), and 2. After we succeed in that monumental task, we must gather together and build Mat a large studio with ample storage space.
The solution is really simple, they just need to improve the cassette mechanism and bring it back to a decent quality. I like the idea of having bluetooth in a cassette. In the meantime, I am using a bluetooth transmitter on my WM-D6C so I can use my bluetooth headphones. That said, i hate built-in speakers on portable cassette players. That is one feature that I don't mind them not bringing back.
The idea of modularity joining different generations of gadgets and tech is appealing, but after decades of observing tons of ideas, I have to say: Mostly it doesn't make sense or the border between different devices was drawn in the wrong place = via an interface that doesn't make sense. Sure, the D6C was a gem of its generation, but what's the point of a BT cassette? This idea introduces 10x more problems than solutions. Btw - they DID improve the cassette, in various ways (DAT, VHS HiFi, and in this case: DCC) but all failed being a followup the the compact cassette for one reason: price or price/performance ratio compared to upcoming solutions like the CD / CD-R and the first MP3 players. I miss the feeling and haptics of older tech, too, but on the other hand: we forget the drawbacks, that were blown away by the digital era, like poor sound quality, noise, wobbling sound of vinyl and tapes, poor handling, dropouts when shaking, battery lifetime, no random access, many media to take along in the car or bag, .... Anyone could go back, but just as small number of people does, for a reason. And yes: current devices should develop back to better haptics and usability, and also connectivity (analog, digital, wireless), but that one, too, is a decision of the buyers.
It's worse. The motor is very sensitive to voltage as the flywheel is basically non-existent due to price cutting it to virtually weightless plastic. What it tells me is, if a cassette deck has adequate voltage regulation, it would have more consistent speed, but yeah, it looks like this pos couldn't even do that correctly.
Conclusion: Don't bother with portable cassette players in general. Use a proper home deck (an old, high quality one) and digitize any cassettes you have into a high bitrate lossless format. Then you can have your entire library on your phone, your computer, your home audio system, your car, or anywhere else you want. Ditto with vinyl. People think that any differences, real or imagined, between records and CDs are because CDs lose information. That is false. CDs are lossless. However, the tonal balance is often different because vinyl has compensating equalization that is (because it is done with analog electronics) not identical even between identical models and batches of turntable. Then there are differences between cartridges, styli, and the list goes on. Bottom line: vinyl is a long, long way from being "superior" to digital, especially lossless formats like CDs and FLAC, but if your personal taste prefers vinyl there's nothing wrong with that, just like there's nothing wrong with somebody who likes to turn up the bass or down the treble. The truth of the the matter is that an audio recording and playback that was truly "accurate", with absolutely flat frequency response and zero artifacts introduced by equipment, format or media, would sound "flat" and "lifeless" to most people. All that is to say that audio is extremely subjective and while there are some things that would be universally perceived as bad, what constitutes "the best" is very different for different people. So if you like analog formats and fiddling with all the huge, clunky mechanisms and media then be my guest, but you can in fact take the audio quality with you in a digital format for use on the go. Don't get me wrong, I'm as nostalgic as anyone and do enjoy fiddling around with old audio equipment and media, but when I'm serious about quality and portability I go digital. And yet, I admit that I still really want one of those Sony "professional" Walkmans from the 1980s that I could never afford at the time. 😉 They were only slightly larger than a cassette without the box. When there was no tape inside they collapsed quite a bit smaller than any of the ones Mat has shown us. They had autoreverse, recording, metal tape compatibility and Dolby B and C. They were absolutely amazing, and extremely expensive. Of course, by the time I could afford to buy one of those, there were high quality portable CD players that had IR remote controls and were only slightly larger than a CD, and I got one of those instead. I think I may still have that in storage somewhere.
11:37 there on the left side, that blue Sony device - that was my first Walkman! And *boy* did that thing sound fabulous with it's original "open" headphones!
It's too bad it sounds terrible cause it's simply beautiful imo. I love the see-through door, colors and just the all around design of the whole device.
@@1pcfred imo Aiwa did end up making the absolute pinacle of personal stereo systems with devices like the hs-jx505 and variations.. but that was in the early 1990s, just before they completely stopped making anything worth having. Your early 1980s AIWAs were probably relatives of the 'real' Sony walkmans which would appear a year later.
I have my mom’s old Walkman, a WM-FX425 from approximately 1988. While its original belt had failed and had to be replaced, it works incredibly well. Additionally, I bought one of those cassette-to-MP3 machines before I knew it was just the belt in the Walkman, and it was defective. It would just play regardless of what you did with the buttons.
Yep, that's the same mechanism used in all the current "tape to USB" clones with auto reverse. I took one apart and was actually amazed at all the parts used in the mechanism. You'd think it was a solid little machine..... Nope unfortunately...
I still can't believe that when they skimped on everything else, they even put in a 4-track head, which is a luxury part in a personal stereo and wasn't even found in most auto-reverse 'desktop' decks. If they'd just used a normal 2-track head they could surely have put the cost saving into a slightly better motor. But again, it's if any such motor in the required form factor is even made.
That Sony Walkman still sounds like a gem, almost as good as the day you bought it probably. The Sony I had took enormous abuse but always sounded great. They always strived to get it ‘right’ for sure
I still have my Sony Professional Recorder Walkman, from about 1993. I haven't used it in years, but it's rock-solid. For digitizing my old cassettes, I gave up on USB walkmen, and got a used 1990s JVC stereo cassette deck for $25. Works beautifully.
I also had a Sherwood home theatre received from Richer Sounds. I was well impressed with it and it’s features. It may not have been the greatest unit out there at the time but it was well worth the money and with the speakers and audio sources I owed, it sounded exactly how I wanted it to do. As far as I’m concerned, it impressed the most important audio critic on the planet….. me.
It's been such a long time, I'd completely forgotten how cassette personal stereos almost never came with a rewind button. I'd love to see one of those 'Kids try old tech' type videos, see how quickly they could figure out how to rewind a tape without a rewind button. It may seem like simple logic to those of us who grew up with Walkmans, but I wonder how the uninitiated would cope?
So the fact that I listened to this on a crappy mono only work phone computer headset didn't really take anything away from the experience? That's almost sad :D
to be fair it's hard to compete with Sony at the height of their hi-fi powers. Manufacturing something high quality at scale is no simple task. Best bet is Sony or Panasonic or someone just doing it themselves once again, and probably at a premium price
The problem is these days even buying name-brand doesn't guarantee you anything. I bought my mother a small Panasonic radio alarm clock couple years ago, just a small AM/FM bed-side thing and it's completely crap. Difficult to get tuned to the right station and when you do get rid of the crackly noise, you get muffled voices and background hiss. It's so utterly depressing. And it's not the fault of bad reception / placement because I also bought her a small hand-held radio to carry out to the garden and that works just fine. I paid extra for Panasonic wanting a half-decent device without odd user-interface quirks that would be hard to explain to an elderly parent in her 80's - but for what I got I would have been as well going to a discount chain store and picking up their cheapest $5 unit.
Yup, bought a pair nuggetphones from Grunding and they sound awful compared to the pieces of plastic that came included with a recently bought mp3 player. Seriously, how can you own a known and trusted brand and mess up that bad in comparison with a freeby from a 20€ player that doesn't even has internal memory and needs a microsd to play anything. On the other hand I have a blutooth speaker for around the same price as the headphones from a company called "JAY-tech" that is really good for a small wireless block and beats the brand name headphones in every regard.
@@chocolate_squiggle my mother had a Panasonic VCR and TV and they were awful. I had to go to reset things in it all the time. Remote was horrible - tiny buttons. Launch nuclear weapons right next to the lights on type stuff. When she upgraded to a DVR and LCD TV, and went and bought a .... Panasonic. Same sorts of problems. They don't seem to want to work together at all. I used to have Sony. No problems with it. Easy to set up and use, VCR was easy to program etc. Now I have a Samsung TV. Next I'll get Sony. Pricy, I know, but never had any problem with any Sony product i've owned.
@@donrobertson4940 I guess it depends on the model, my parents bought a Panasonic VCR from the NAAFI in the early 80s and we never had a problem with it though I don't remember what TV set we had as it wasn't the same manufacturer. When I left home my mother had a more slimline model and I took the old one till it expired around 2000 and I had to use the controls on the mechanism as the remote had long since been lost. I get you had problems with your set up and yes Sony was and is high quality and pricey too but you get what you pay for, cheers.
Trouble is there is no real name-brands anymore. They're just logos pasted onto whatever rubbish you'd get from a no-brand. The expertise and will just isn't there anymore. It's like a hundred years of technical development has already become as buried as archaeological fossils, with the youngsters relying on new-tech understanding as much about what was possible 30 years ago as they do about the Palaeolithic period. I'm even amazed that these days they even know the tape has to go across the playback head. I've seen dramas and adverts where open-reel tape machines are depicted, and the tape is just threaded from one spool to another, not touching any of the tape path - and even laced from the top of one reel to the bottom of the other. People growing up today can't even see the physical, mechanical cause-and-effect of objects now, their 'learning ability' doesn't hone into such things if it's not something that helps them make TikToks, RU-vid Shorts or other way of constantly branding their futile lives, and there's nothing in the media or publishing to encourage people to step out of the digital narcissism cycle, as long as they can program.
When you get that level of wow and flutter, ff to end, then rewind to beginning, this puts the whole tape into the correct position for this particular mechanism. I sometimes had to do this if I took tapes to a mates place and played my tapes on his mech
I had this same discussion with my mom today, only it was about a new mystery-brand pressure cooker she ordered to replace the mystery-brand one that broke (it only lasted about two years). Different "brand," but the exact same components. Buttons were in the same place, albeit a different overlay. Even the old lid connects. And I'm sure in another two years, she'll replace it with another mystery-brand variant...
I never understood any of these format comeback devices. Formats moved on for a reason, they're never going to go mainstream again, they just seem like cheap cash grabs at nostalgia with devices that will almost instantly turn into e-wsste. More puzzling is this habit of manufacturers in these nostalgia fads are obsessed with adding Bluetooth to everything. It's this strange gimmicky tosh that cheapens the whole thing and confuses the experience. You can own a genuine piece of that era but you can't ever bring back a time that once was. They don't build things like they used to anymore and there's good reason for that, it's unaffordable. Collectors and the nostalgic should look to own pieces of history, not attempt to recreate it.
In the 90's as a kid I never was lucky enough to get a portable cassette player with a rewind function. I always rocked a humble JVC with Play>FFW>STOP. It's all good, it made me into the boy I am today.
13:22 that player probably has the most honest brand name of any of these junk piles. Shame about the main focus of the video though because I really like that aesthetic.
Thanks for the vid, Matt. I always respect your opinion on this type of thing. Surely the resurgence of CC's will lead toward someone making a decent mechanism at some point. My guess is it would sell like hotcakes!
Another great video as always, I enjoy watching how you critique stuff and showing how everything works. I think this Walkman is more for a piece of nostalgia then actually Play ability. Here in the United States We do get cassettes made but they’re more for anniversaries of a bands album single etc . I like that they come out with these things from time to time to show kids of today what we grew up with from yesteryear But that’s all there worth. Instead of bringing the past back work on the future maybe bring CDs back but smaller more compact then 5 inch discs I’ll be up for that.
I think the take-away from this video is this: If you're in the market for a portable cassette player, do yourself a favour and find one on eBay that was made in the 1990s by one of the recognised brands of the time, and preferably Sony. You won't get a shiny new deck that will be pleasing to the eye, you won't get any fancy Bluetooth stuff, but your ears will thank you.
It depends from many factors. There was budget products back in the day that sounded like this korean player. And if we talk about old devices it depends how worn is mechanism.
@@panadolf2691 Except you had mid line options back then that had very good quality and very reasonable prices, today it is all poor quality with cheap and cheaper prices, that is China for you.
@@watershed44 And nowadays the only mechanisms produced are the cheap ones. So every new player will sound bad compared to even affordable ones from 20 years ago
Sadly, it would seem the industrial base to produce high quality cassette tape transports is gone. However, if wow and flutter is the main issue, it should be fairly easy to add in an inexpensive microprocessor based motor speed control circuit to at least address that.
It's kind of unreal, some executives at Sony could be sitting in a boardroom right now with one of these on the table and say, "Gentlemen, this is our competition." .. and after they all finish laughing, they would say, "How about we re-release an old design we came out with in 1992, make it look 80's retro and sell it to that market?" .. "What a great idea!" .. There's so much tech that Sony is sitting on that they could re-release with very little cost, since all of the R&D has already been done, they'd just have to re-create the tooling and put something back into manufacture again... and they'd completely wipe the entire market.
I love my old Aiwa "walkman" style personal stereo. Digital AM/FM tuner, station presets, EQ, bass boost, Dolby Noise Reduction, Auto reverse and full auto stop.
Its a shame- there's actually been a few kpop releases that came with casette and its really a fun merch option for big fans, its a shame theres no decent player on the market
There's still thousands of good, working old players, and many at a decent price, so I don't think it's too much of a shame. If you want it, you can get it, and not by breaking the bank.
@@SilverSpoon_ that is debatable, but I assume they mean that the quality of the recording and playback is nice. Afaik in Germany they still sell audio dramas for kids on casette
At the 80s/90s i also had a Sony Walkman. When I was at school, I used it almost every day. It also ran on two AA batteries and was extremely reliable. Well, I also cleaned the Pinch rollers and the tape head regularly myself. I can also confirm that Sony knew exactly what and how to build something. I don't know if I still have my old Walkman lying around somewhere. In any case, I still have some old cassettes lying around and a Sony TC-WE505 cassette deck that is still working. I'm actually using my old and first FM-Stereo/FM-AM Receiver (Sony STR-DE205) every day. I'm using it mainly as a real Amplifier sitting on my Desktop for my PC. I even bought extra spare parts (amplifier chip, output stage transistors, transformer) in case something should break after all these years. So I can bring it back to life if necessary. I will use it for as long as possible.
These videos really makes me curious to how difficult it would be to actually make something that sounds decent. Ignoring the size constrains (which is surely not the issue for the boom boxes), could you hack something together yourself? I'm actually tempted to try it out, not as a serious attempt at creating something, but just as a learning experience (ambition level: something which moves the tape and produces a sound).
Cassettes always had a kind of "bad" reputation for quality even when they were popular. I imagine the market for them is mostly nostalgia. As such I am not so optimistic that there is a market beyond these cheap devices. High Quality Blank cassettes are only available as new old stock as far as I know. I'd like to be proven wrong. Maybe an enthusiast will reverse engineer an old design and find a way to manufacture it well enough on DIY equipment. That is the only real avenue I see.
@@timseguine2 sadly, reverse engineering old mechanism probably wouldn't cut it. It was designed as simple mess of plastic gears and stamped aluminium, cheap in mass production, but pain in the butt with replicating with reasonable price in small series. But i bet that you could slap some nice but chunky direct drive mech using off the shelf electronics and cnc cut parts for a reasonable price...
@@paveloleynikov4715 Yeah, modern brushless/stepper motors and controls _should_ make brute-forcing a consistent and steady tape speed a pretty simple affair.
The problem is that a turntable is fundamentally a simpler piece of kit, so new affordably-priced ones could be created from nothing once demand for them picked up again. It's "just" a steadily rotating platter and a tonearm with smoothly operating bearing. Walkmans aren't like that. A good one relies on a large number of precision mechanisms that are expensive to engineer and assemble. If you do it badly you end up with a tape destroyer instead.
You know what? I've read my last "I kind of like wow and flutter for aesthetic purposes" comment; I'm done with it. Not because I think it's an invalid stance to take or way to feel, but here's the actual answer to that, and not just someone insisting that it's not the way it's meant to be played. Build a system with as little wow and flutter as possible under normal operation. In a recessed bay of controls under a hatch, include an extra switch and some roller wheels that lets you manually add and adjust irregularities to your liking. Everyone wins. (There's probably a music player program out there somewhere that can digitally simulate the effect as it is, and even add some hiss and dropout if you're feeling frisky.)
I routinely add a little vinyl surface noise to some of my own songs for aesthetic purposes, but I do it with a random flexidisk that has no groove on the B side, an old stylus, and I let it skate all over the place so it never sounds like a 1.8 second loop.
Some people were conditioned earlier in life to feel that music has to have wow/flutter/dropouts/crosstalk in order to sound "right." It's a nostalgia thing, though for some younger people, the retro aspect is cool and makes them feel uber-clever to be into it. I'm pretty sure that over time that will fade away, except as an intentional special dramatic effect.
They put it in records now to add that retro feel. It’s all over the latest pet shop boys album which is infuriating. It adds a sort of seasick feeling to otherwise beautiful songs
The mechanism for that tape player reminds me of the last portable cassette player that I had but the one that I had didn't have the auto-reverse. It was a very cheap one that I paid like $20 AUD for back in the early 90s and it sounded OK to my early teen self - I mainly played tapes that I recorded off the radio so the audio quality wasn't exactly great to begin with. Perhaps they took that crappy design, added in the auto-reverse functionality and have been selling it in mass quantities?
I have always been impressed with the relatively low numbers of Dislikes on your videos. On the few occasions I have bothered to search out and read the negative comments, I have also been impressed with the vehemence some have expressed what appear to be a dislike of you disliking a product! If I wanted to nit-pick any video I certainly wouldn't dislike the fact that someone reviewing a product didn't like it - after all, isn't that the point of a review? Its like spewing hate on a banana split because it doesn't contain toast and its cold. In any case, thank you for doing what you do, and for doing it the way you do!
I remember having an Aiwa personal cassette player /recorder/ AM/FM stereo tuner , metal case unit , pricey around $300.00 back in the 80's. Probably a little smaller than the Ksette unit on review ,but it was a workhorse. Auto reverse, you could record lectures or directly off the tuner.
i got 1985 Aiwa ad-f 770 highend deck. Also Aiwa walkmans were premium guality back inaday. Looks cooler than sony ones. Before when sony bought aiwa away.
never in a million years did i think i would see iz*one in a techmoan video lol but i do appreciate this review. i wanted to buy it as a collectible for the group and was actually wondering how it stacked up against various other walkmans
I have to say that during the audio tests, the Korean Walkman did remind me of one of those old 80s foreign cartoons they used to re-run with that choice of music lol I imagined a frog walking down a country lane talking to butterflies with a voiceover by Brian Cant or someone.. That lovely wow and flutter, it's quite tolerable if your imagination takes you back in time lol :)
I'm quite surprised that, considering there is a market for audiophiles who would like to play cassette tapes with a modicum of quality, or even fans of new-retro novelties, no manufacturer has stepped in with a decent product.
Probably that market is not big enough. And frankly, it is just gimmicky at this point. If you have an old cassette collection you probably have a decent player. There is sites that help you fix it if something wrong with it. Even in these videos you can see when Mat ordering parts for their old machines.
Once you develop such a mechanism and set up manufacturing, troubleshoot it to where it actually performs as-engineered, you have to do one of two things. Either you sell it for like half a grand a piece, and then all those people would be like "see you should have just bought an old one, this new stuff is pointless"; or you have to hope that it sells for YEARS in decent amounts, and that just isn't likely to happen. I don't think the niche market is deep enough. The thing with record players really is that they never went away. There are for one DJs and there's a massive crowd of them who need simple, dependable players which don't perform too badly; and for other it was also the mainstay among audiophiles, with manufacturers charging an arm and a leg, and with a few pillars present, the ecosystem could also support more niche manufacturers. Tape fell into a void where it doesn't have a dedicated userbase, just blips of popularity, plus the devices are several orders of magnitude more complex and need much more tooling and assembly. I think best case would be to take an existing mechanism and rework just the motor to be brushless and fully electronically controlled.
Well made cassette decks tend to last quite a long time - due to them being quite well made - and any audiophile with any interest in cassettes will have found a very good second hand one, probably fairly cheaply. I have a friend who is an audio archivist, the sound library he works for has every kind of machine for getting the best out of every kind of recording medium, and they're all routinely checked and maintained and will probably outlast everyone who works there. Hence the market for new professional grade machines just isn't that big, and if anyone wanted to put in the time to make a decent one again it would be so expensive as to put it out of the reach of the common consumer anyway.
They won´t sell many of them. There is a market but it is small. Those mechansisms are very complex anf therefore expensive if not produced in large quantities.
There won't be a decent personal cassette player made until a quality mechanism is manufactured such as the mechanism in the 80s, this is actually a great video which really highlights the terrible awful attempt these mechanisms make at playing back cassettes
Nice video. Thank you! I visited Japan in 1993 and saw some Aiwa Walkman models that where quite the same size a the cassette box itself. I didn't have the money as a engineering student to buy one but it made a lasting impression on me. Maybe some of the Japanese viewers could provide you with one ;-P Best, Job
