from the next-up-will-be-a-Bluetooth-8-Track-player dept.
The cassette player finally goes Bluetooth
This month marks the 40th anniversary of Sony's first Walkman, the portable music player that would forever change the way we consume music. And while the audio cassette long ago fell out of favor for the CD and later digital music, the format's certainly not forgotten. It may not have the same audiophile cache as the vinyl LP, but a a small and passionate contingent of music listeners are keeping the fire burning.
NINM Lab's latest project occupies that same sort of fuzzy technological limbo as past products like the I'm Fine single use camera. It's also got a name to match: It's OK. In this age of political unrest and global disasters, maybe that's exactly the message we need right now. As for a bluetooth cassette player, it's probably true that nobody needs such a thing, hyper specific products are one of the nice byproducts of late capitalism.
A Bluetooth 5.0 cassette player? Aight.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday July 05 2019, @09:02AM (3 children)
If this is the beginning of the end of the retro-vinyl obsession then I'm all for it.
Now's the time to start trawling the charity shops for old cassettes. Reckon I could pick them up for pennies, but in a year I'll be selling them to idiot hipsters for £20 each. Maybe VHS will also make a comeback.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by epitaxial on Friday July 05 2019, @02:18PM
Nobody buys old cassettes. All the new vaporwave releases are on cassette. Vinyl was always around, it never went away. I bought Ten from Pearl Jam on vinyl when it was brand new.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Gaaark on Friday July 05 2019, @04:06PM
8 track ALLLLL the way, baby!
Actually, I should maybe start hunting for the old wax cylinders in case they bring back the old phonographs.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. I have always been here. ---Gaaark 2.0 --
(Score: 1) by jshmlr on Friday July 05 2019, @05:50PM
VHS Collecting never left, there are quite a few obscure horror movies that got a VHS release, but never a DVD one. There's also a group that pick VHS up at yard sales and thrift shops in the hopes of scoring a lost gem that was recorded at home. Especially the old commercials.
Need nothing, then see what happens.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 05 2019, @09:34AM (11 children)
OK, this story throws me for a loop. Maybe the Sony Walkman didn't happen until 1979, but I distinctly remember having a small, portable cassette player, while I was still in high school. I graduated high school in 1974 - so, what's the deal here?
Searching for history, I stumbled across this video, celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Norelco Carry-Corder in 2013. What I had in 1973 wasn't as small and streamlined as the Sony Walkman, but it was smaller and more convenient than this Carry-Corder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKRIU2VquSw [youtube.com]
Wikipedia claims that the compact cassette was invented in 1962 by Philips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassette_tape#Introduction_of_the_Compact_Cassette [wikipedia.org] That may be a technically correct claim, but I've also read that there were "cassettes" in the 1950's. Perhaps Philips was the first compact, but not the first cassette? This page claims 1962 as Philip's invention date, and 1963 as the release date - http://www.walkman-archive.com/wa/2016/08/philips-el-3302-the-very-first-cassette-player/ [walkman-archive.com]
Another search, to reassure myself that the EL3302 was indeed battery operated and portable - in 1963. https://collection.sciencemuseum.org.uk/objects/co446004/philips-battery-powered-portable-tape-recorder-model-el3302-tape-recorder [sciencemuseum.org.uk]
To be honest, folks, I can't remember exactly what I had in 1973. I know it was a cassette player, and that I could stuff it into a coat pocket, and put the headphones on while I was walking along. I want to say that it was a Panasonic, but I'm not even sure of that after all these years.
In summary, 1979 was not the advent of portable, personal music listening. The Walkman was something special, in a way, but it wasn't as world changing as TFS might suggest. I believe that the Walkman may have been the first cassette that you could stuff into a shirt pocket, but I'm not willing to take bets on even that.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Friday July 05 2019, @09:55AM
A little more idle searching, and I found another video worth looking at. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ns3rPNABdew [youtube.com] In 1958 RCA Victor was offering a consumer quality cassette player. Note how freaking HUGE that cassette is.
“I have become friends with many school shooters” - Tampon Tim Walz
(Score: 4, Interesting) by ledow on Friday July 05 2019, @10:05AM (1 child)
Indeed, the Walkman was far from the first tape player, and Sony were far from the first company to make things like that.
https://lowendmac.com/2013/the-story-behind-the-sony-walkman/ [lowendmac.com]
The Pressman used microcartridges and was years before the Walkman, but was aimed at journalists.
"By 1968, 85 manufacturers had sold over 2.4 million [cassette] players"
I imagine there were lots of famous brand and even more "nobody brand" items that could do what you remember. But like the Gameboy not being the first ever portable games console, it's the one that changed the standards and people remember more fondly (you don't even remember the brand of yours!).
(Score: 4, Insightful) by kazzie on Friday July 05 2019, @10:47AM
Likewise, the Iphone was far from the first smartphone, but the popular brand names often swamp their predecessors.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @10:17AM (1 child)
In fact, the walkman is not an invention. Just like the smartphone isn't. It is something that would have come out one way or the other, eventually. Portable music players were common for 45 rpm vinyl singles. headphones were also known. Combining is not inventing. Not to detract from the engineering effort, but the engineering effort might be notable even in well established fields (car analogy here) so it's an independent aspect.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @01:14PM
By this logic, the light bulb was not an "invention." People had fires and candles and oil lamps and even gas lamps: they knew and wanted light sources. And electricity had been used for various applications in the 1800s already. So, there was clearly a market, and the combination was obvious. An electric light bulb "would have come out one way or another."
Except it took tens of thousands of hours of human experimentation to produce one that was efficient and useful for the average person.
Speaking of car analogies, your logic reminds me of Ford's argument when they stole the practical implementation of the intermittent windshield wiper from Robert Kearns [wikipedia.org]. When he sued them, they later claimed his invention was just a few simple electronic components -- capacitors, resistors, etc., strung together -- i.e., that there was no "invention," just a bunch of previous stuff thrown together. They too basically claimed the intermittent wiper "would have come out one way or the other, eventually" too -- especially as Ford and other companies had entire teams of engineers working on solving the problem at the time, but Kearns actually came up with a simple and effective solution.
Thomas Edison is credited with the quotation: "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." I don't know whether he actually said that (as Edison is credited with all sorts of stuff he likely never said, and I haven't researched this one), but his point is clear. It's easy to say, "It's obvious to combine X and Y, and it will come out one way or the other eventually." Except the implementation of combining X and Y is often difficult and requires a lot of effort and insight.
Or, to put it another way, it's incredibly easy to spitball an idea -- "We should have flying cars! I mean, everyone likes cars, and airplanes are convenient, so why not combine them?!" It's often much harder to make a practical implementation. In effect, your post is cheering on people like patent trolls -- who often come up with some vague idea and patent it, only later to want to charge money to folks who actually make the product practical, since they had the "idea" first. (I'm not saying you'd necessarily approve of patent trolling -- just saying that's the sort of person your post seems to value.)
To me, a true inventor is someone who has both and idea and solves the engineering problems necessary to make the idea practical. Coming up with ideas is easy. Making something work in the real world, even when combining existing technologies, is where the true creativity often lies.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @01:30PM (3 children)
As others have noted, the iPhone wasn't the first smartphone either, but it redefined what a smartphone could be. It changed the industry.
I honestly don't know enough about the history of the Walkman to say it changed the industry. But what I do know from my recollections of the 1980s was that the Walkman was a defining product that changed the public perception and consciousness of portable music players. Once knockoffs became popular, people still referred to them as a "Walkman," just as a copy machine became a "Xerox machine" even if not made by that company.
Perhaps even more crucially, it became a symbol of youth that the older folks of the 1980s could rant about. The transistor radios of a generation before were something to rant about too, as young people were walking around wearing headphones. But cassettes made it possible to have your own personal music experience -- not just what was broadcast on the radio. The Walkman became a symbol of a generation of young folks absorbed within their own auditory world.
For a standard example, note the following from Allan Bloom's classic rant The Closing of the American Mind (1987):
Bloom was arguing for the benefits of learning about "classical" liberal arts education and the "canon" of great works. As Bloom later writes:
Whether or not the Walkman revolutionized portable music players, it was the iconic model that came to symbolize things that were new (and, to conservatives, what was wrong) with young people in the 1980s.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 05 2019, @05:11PM (2 children)
Wow. Allan Bloom sounds like an ass. Did he also yell at clouds?
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @08:05PM (1 child)
Note that this is a significant digression from the topic of TFA, but since you brought it up...
Oh, I don't know. The older I get, the more sympathetic I become to many of Allan Bloom's points. I meant to link something about his book [wikipedia.org] in the last comment, for those who may not be familiar with it. It certainly made a big splash in the 1980s in terms of discussion of culture, the changing of higher education, etc.
I should say that I don't agree with his "doom and gloom" stance on the Walkman, or about teenagers or students or whatever in general. For most of history, there have been older folks complaining about the "damn racket kids are listening to these days." But Bloom does make a larger point about what educated folks were doing, or rather how the supposed education that intellectual students were no longer getting in college. Such arguments always suffer a bit from the "good ole days" nonsense; the past was never quite as wonderful as most people making those arguments tend to portray it.
However, there has been something significant lost culturally in the past few generations, at least among the educated populace. Maybe it was a waste of time to study Latin, but the goal wasn't generally just to master a dead language -- it was to open a door to other historical cultures which wrote in that language, to engage with them more directly than in simple translation, to confront other ideas, to learn from history so we might realize "there is nothing new under the sun" and also not repeat the bad stupid stuff of history.
If you spend some time, for example, reading the writings of the Founders of the U.S., you realize how much perspective they had historically, philosophically, morally because of their deep knowledge of the history of Western culture and civilization. And these weren't the great minds trained at the centers of learning at Oxford or in Paris for the most part -- still, they had amazing perspective. And if you read the speeches and even listen to orations given by politicians in the early 1900s, you realize that something was different in their knowledge and perspective and training compared to the crap that passes for public rhetoric today. (Note that I'm not claiming that there wasn't just as much crap in politics in general back then -- there certainly was, but those who could rise above it really rose higher than I think anything we tend to hear today.)
I know that the types of knowledge we teach and value today has changed somewhat -- emphasizing science and engineering and technology, trying to cram much more math and science into the brains of kids than the Founders could imagine. So I'm not quite a pessimist like Bloom. But I will agree with him on some points that something of significant value has been lost culturally in recent generations. If anything, Bloom failed to take into account the fact that the audience of college had grown significantly compared to what it was when he was educated. The "classical liberal arts curriculum" was never really intended for mass consumption. Yet he has a point that the elite intellectuals among college students also lost out on something.
And the self-absorbed teenagers of the 1980s that couldn't be bothered to stop listening to their Walkman (which Bloom was complaining about) gave birth to Millennials. Need I say more to prove that maybe he had a point? (I'm kidding about that last point... sort of.)
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday July 05 2019, @08:18PM
And perhaps the overriding point that Bloom discussed was the lack of respect for learning that shifted from previous generations. THAT, I think, is perhaps a much broader point about culture. There were all sorts of good things the 1960s intellectual revolution did about overturning bad stuff, but part of the legacy also seems to be a general suspicion of learning that has now permeated American culture. Sure, "geeks" and "nerds" were picked on before, too, but the legacy of that revolution is only now bearing fruit. Questioning authority and even questioning knowledge has now given way to "post-truth," serious doubts in culture about accepted science, etc. I remember pointing out nearly 20 years ago that the relativism from that legacy would come back to bite the liberals who championed it; tearing down "knowledge" and even "truth" has its dangers, and conservatives have now weaponized that relativism. They learned the lessons of the 60s revolution very well.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Friday July 05 2019, @02:10PM
I had a Norelco Carry-Corder. The carrying case had a long strap on it designed to go over your head to the opposite shoulder. When worn this way, it resembled a Star Trek tricorder.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday July 05 2019, @02:17PM
We had that Norelco Carry-Corder. It was so much more convenient than any tape unit we had before (all reel-to-reel). The Walkman's radical change was shrinking the unit into a vertical brick with footprint barely bigger than the compact cassette itself, rather than stretched out, and it partly did this by eliminating the speaker and relying on headphones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday July 05 2019, @10:27AM
Such device is an obvious necessity in age when corporate control freaks are removing audio connectors from all devices.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Friday July 05 2019, @12:49PM
It just goes to show that any device can be profitable as long as it includes spying, telemetry, usage metrics, and some way to play advertising.
That said, are they actually manufacturing these new or just retrofitting some old stock? Typically once manufacture stops on something, all manufacturing equipment is intentionally destroyed, requiring impractical investments in re-engineering if one wanted to get things going again. I've read that this is the case for floppy drives/disks.
(Score: 2) by Osamabobama on Friday July 05 2019, @05:31PM (2 children)
How does one choose a specific Bluetooth device without a screen to display the options? Typically, one side of the connection has a method to display detected devices and satisfy security requirements, if any. This looks like it only has the traditional pushbuttons of a cassette player.
On another note, this would probably be a cheap way to make tape backups, if anyone cares to do that anymore. Maybe it would need new firmware to escape the limits of audio-encoded data, or maybe that's not an issue. (I am assuming it can record already; the ecosystem of used cassette tapes is dwindling, and practically nobody has a functional cassette recorder already.)
Or maybe this is the device you need to finally get all that rare music off your cassette collection and into a useful format, before trashing the originals.
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(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday July 05 2019, @07:13PM (1 child)
You might be able to accept/enter pairing with just a button press. No screen needed.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday July 05 2019, @07:24PM
That's how one of my headphone sets work. It's no big deal to pair such a thing.
There's also the default bluetooth pin...
...if the device uses such a pin, then it can be automatically paired without any particular fanfare. When these things are set up to only broadcast "pair with me / available for pairing" when prodded by a button or similar, the user has semi-decent physical control over the process. I've never had it fail... but I do live in a rural environment.
--
Dog thoughts: what if the tail is actually chasing me?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday July 06 2019, @03:51AM
Stuff for going the other way around seem a lot more popular/common:
https://www.radioshack.com/products/radioshack-bluetooth-cassette-adapter [radioshack.com]