analog

at thanksgiving my cousin asked if i had seen the movie "super 8". i had not. she then told me how much it reminded her of me. curious, i got around to seeing it over the weekend, and though i wasn't crazy about it, i did enjoy taking a little time machine trip through the landscape of my youth. seeing a walkman in the movie reminded me about all of the "personal stereos" i had picked up over the years. back in the day sony was the gold standard, but there were others. i once picked up an aiwa because the sales guy said "s' got sony guts".

but my finest purchase in the field was undoubtedly back in '84 when i somehow managed to drop a hundred bucks for the wm-10, the world's smallest cassette player. without a tape inside it was as big as a cassette cover. and as i thought about this little marvel of the age, and all my fond memories of sporting it on ski trips and walking to and from school listening to big country and duran duran, i wanted to geek out a little more and went looking for any information i might find on the world wide internet.

and of course the triple w did not let me down, as i uncovered some great archival sites deicated to all things pre-digital. chief among them is walkman central, an exhaustive portal to some fine sony machinery. and as i perused my new found love interest, one thing leapt out at me. sony was the apple of its day. as i read some of the more technical achievements for each model i really got this sense that these guys were pushing the envelope wider and wider with each successive model. as problems occurred, they looked for ways to solve them and they did, again and again. and even as the shift from cassette to cd began, sony was still at the forefront of development and technology.

sadly then, it is difficult to understand why they were so soundly defeated once the shift again moved us from cd to mp3 technology. i mean they had it all. the design and manufacturing departments, research and development, marketing, even a solid link to the music business through their publishing label. so why did little apple which had never before delved into the music market become not only the spoiler, but the only dominant force in making these little music sticks that we all carry around now? in a word, simplicity. as sony added more and complexity to their devices, apple just made it simple. but looking at that old wm-10 reminded me that they once knew how to do that really well too.