Walkman

The Walkman became one of the most successful audio products of the postwar period, and like the Victrola before it, any personal portable cassette player was called a "walkman," regardless of manufacturer. The portable personal stereo was the most important electronics product of the 1980s. Bought by millions of people worldwide, it dramatically changed the way people listened to music. Its convenience and small size dictated the shape and function of the next generation of digital technology. Manufacturer Sony's hunch was right: Americans did buy them in the millions, and the walkman became one of those products that everybody owned, like a television, radio, or VCR.

The introduction of the Phillips compact tape cassette in 1963 was an important technological step in the reduction of size of talking machines. The machines that played them used transistorized, solid-state amplifiers that took up far less room than vacuum tubes. The size of the cassette tape recorder was continually reduced in the 1960s to about the size of a paperback book. This was considered small enough for a portable unit.

Masuru Ibuka of Sony wanted an even smaller stereo unit for his personal use, one that he could put in his coat pocket. The company he cofounded had made a profitable practice of reducing the size of electronic consumer goods; starting with reel-to-reel tape recorders, radios, and then televisions, Sony had managed to find an unexpectedly large market for scaled down versions of appliances that most families already owned. Sony's engineers took the path of a battery-operated cassette player that used highly efficient earphones instead of a loudspeaker. All the parts of the player were improved and reduced in size. Ibuka and his partner Akio Morita were the leading proponents of the miniature tape player within Sony, where there was considerable resistance to the idea. Why would anyone want to own a tape player that was just slightly larger than the cassette tape it played? Ignoring the advice of their marketing department, the leaders of Sony took a chance with a product that the experts expected would never sell.

In 1979 Sony introduced its Soundabout cassette player, which was later called the Walkman. Although the innovative elements of the Soundabout system were praised, it was initially treated as something of a novelty in the audio industry. Priced at $200, it could not realistically be considered as a product for the mass market. Although it sold very well in Japan, where people were used to listening to music on headphones, sales in the United States were not encouraging. Sony's engineers reduced the size and cost of the machine and introduced the Walkman II in 1981. It was 25 percent smaller than the original version and had 50 percent fewer moving parts. Even more enticing to consumers was that its price dropped considerably. The Walkman opened up a huge market for tape players that nobody knew existed. Americans were enjoying a more active lifestyle and embraced the concept of portable music, even if they had to sacrifice sound quality for portability. But as Sony developed the product, especially the earphone speakers, its fidelity and stereo reproduction improved drastically. It took about two years for Sony's Japanese competitors, including Matsushita, Toshiba, and Aiwa, to bring out portable personal stereos. Sony remained ahead of the competition by constant innovation: Dolby noise reduction circuits were added in 1982, and a rechargeable battery feature was introduced in 1985. The machine grew smaller and smaller until it was hardly larger than the audio cassette it played.

In the ten years following the introduction of the Walkman, Sony sold 50 million units, including 25 million in the United States. Its competitors sold millions more. They were manufactured all over the Far East and came in a broad range of sizes and prices, with the cheapest model selling for around $20. By the 1990s the market for personal stereos in the United States was around 20 to 30 million units a year. Those who doubted the appeal of a personal tape recorder were silenced by the variety of uses that only a walkman could provide. Waterproofed walkmen were marketed to those who enjoyed watersports, and there were special durable models for tennis players and runners. While sitting in a crowded subway car or jogging through a park one could enjoy high fidelity recorded sound.

Although a tribute to the semiconductor and the ingenuity of Japanese engineering, the walkman is not purely significant in the way it works but also in what it represents. It is an evolutionary step in a process that began about a hundred years earlier when pioneers of recorded sound began to reduce the size and cost of their machines. It is a significant product of portability resulting from the demands of an on-the-move, industrial society. It established a one-on-one relationship between people and their machines that changed the way that we hear recorded sound, having a noticeable effect on the way that people listen to music. The sound from the headphones of a portable player is intimate and immediate compared to the sound coming from the loudspeaker of a home stereo. Recording studios even began to mix the balance of their master recordings to suit the reproduction characteristics of walkman headphones.

Gould, William. Sony. New York, Contemporary Press, 1997.

Millard, Andre. America on Record: A History of Recorded Sound. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Morita, Akio, E. Reingold, and M. Shimomura, Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony. New York, Dutton, 1980.

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