“Everyone knows what headphones sound like today,” the late Sony designer Yasuo Kuroki wrote in a Japanese-language memoir, from 1990. “But at the time, you couldn’t even imagine it, and then suddenly Beethoven’s Fifth is hammering between your ears.”
The Walkman was certainly a new thing in 1980, but headphones weren’t, I remember, in the ‘70s, listening to a new, previously unplayed, vinyl track of Rainbow’s “Gates of Babylon” in the ‘70s on a high-quality set of over-the-ear headphones and marveling at the sound. Today’s cheap headphones just don’t do music justice.
I was 23 when the Walkman debuted. The only use I had for it was meditation. I don’t like walking around with anything playing in my ears, distracting me from my surroundings. However, I’ve never lived in a large city like NY where it may be necessary to create one’s own cocoon of “personal landscape.” It is the perfect device to keep people from engaging with one another. Definitely not my style.
Sony’s first portable music player the “Walkman.” Sony ended up selling two million Walkmans in less than two years. "Walkman" goes into history as a #SocialDistancing device.
The Walkman was certainly a new thing in 1980, but headphones weren’t, I remember, in the ‘70s, listening to a new, previously unplayed, vinyl track of Rainbow’s “Gates of Babylon” in the ‘70s on a high-quality set of over-the-ear headphones and marveling at the sound. Today’s cheap headphones just don’t do music justice.
Oh, wait, I suppose I was one of them…
I was 23 when the Walkman debuted. The only use I had for it was meditation. I don’t like walking around with anything playing in my ears, distracting me from my surroundings. However, I’ve never lived in a large city like NY where it may be necessary to create one’s own cocoon of “personal landscape.” It is the perfect device to keep people from engaging with one another. Definitely not my style.
Sony’s first portable music player the “Walkman.” Sony ended up selling two million Walkmans in less than two years. "Walkman" goes into history as a #SocialDistancing device.