These are my obsolete portable music players. A post-1985 cassette player, a 2000 minidisc player and a 2002 iPod whose sole means of communication with the outside world is a firewire socket. In the 90s I didn't listen much to music while on the move. Since 2006 I use a smartphone as my mp3 player.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Since getting a smartphone, I never use my iPod anymore. (I handed it down to Junior who is now getting a psychedelic musical education. He's into the Marbles.) But the switch of course led to a huge drop in the ease of use. Here are the steps I have to go through to get my phone to play my mp3s in…
If your face is regularly complimented with goggle rings and you spend hours every week following the black line, this review might just interest you. If don't know what I'm talking about, it won't.
I like to swim. This is a good thing, since I'm currently employed as a head guard, and spend…
Steve Jobs is dead, an unfortunate victim of cancer and quackery. I never paid him much attention while he lived. Nor did I ever care much about Apple's products. "Aha", I hear you say, "this is one of those 'PC is better than Mac' screeds". Not so. Because I have been an off-and-on Mac user since…
The Royal National Institute for the Deaf, the largest charity representing the U.K.'s 9 million deaf and hard of hearing people, warns that two thirds of youngsters using MP3 players are at risk of premature and permanent hearing loss:
The charity used decibel meters to test the volume of 110…
No 8-track deck?
Were there even portable players for that? I was born in '72. My first albums were on cassettes and vinyl LPs.
8-track never caught on in Sweden or in Europe in general; I don't even know if any company attempted a serious launch of that technology. The cassette took that position in the market, probably since Philips pushed it so hard, and once one technology dominates, it is hard for others to get any significant share.
Looking forward, do you think you will continue to replace your players at the same rate? Or do you think that ten years from now, you will still use your "communications device" (perhaps with additional functions) to also listen to music?
Finally, I read somewhere that if development of memory capacity keeps improving during the next few years as it has up until now, it will be entirely feasible to create a portable device containing all the music humanity has ever recorded. (The "problem" is that humanity probably keeps creating new music faster than we can play it...)
My current idea is to replace my smartphone every two years while each one still has a reasonable second-hand value. But now that I have such a multi-capable device in my pocket, I find it highly unlikely that I will ever go back to carrying a dedicated music player.
There were portable 8-track players. They were the size of ghetto blasters (the suitcase-size cassette players popular in the 80s) and ate D-Cell batteries at an astounding rate.
I have my 2nd gen iPod Nano, and it is fine for me. It is the first player I bought (about 2 years ago) since a Sony portable CD player I bought in the late '90s. Which is the first one I bought since the cassette player I acquired in the late '80's. I'm not exactly an "early adopter".
Here are two tangentially related items. I made a lot of mix tapes on cassette that I used 20 years ago while jogging. I don't jog much any more, and I haven't listened to those tapes in years, but I still associate the end of one song with the start of the next, based on the mix I made. So whenever I hear "Red Rain" by Peter Gabriel on the radio, I immediately think the next song they play should be "Funk 49" by the James Gang.
When I first joined the Columbia House Record and Tape Club, at about age 12 in 1977, the format choices were LP, cassette, 8-track, and reel-to-reel! I chose LP, but it's interesting that I could have a reel-to-reel copy of "Rumours" lying around somewhere. I wonder, did they make portable Ampex machines?
Wow, that's my iPod right there! It's great. Not only does it store my, rather limited, music collection, but it can boot and repair my Mac. Then again, I remember my first transistor radio. (I gather that the first portable semiconductor radios in Europe didn't use transistors but another kind of semiconductor switch.)
Great post, but don't forget about the notorious Walkman and Discman! Here's a list of other obsolete music devices:
http://blogs.riverfronttimes.com/atoz/2011/07/shuttle_launch_last_space…