Personal Stereo. History

The scaled-down cassette tape player represents not only one of the most successful audio products of the twentieth century but also a drastic change in the way we listen to music. The personal stereo has become a universal product that can be found in every corner of the globe. It has brought high- quality reproduction of sound into every field of human activity.

The concept of the personal stereo can be traced to two great electrical manufacturers: Sony of Japan and Philips of the Netherlands. Both of these companies created a great new market for electrical goods by reducing the size of their products. Key employees in both companies shared a passion for music and a goal of perfect reproduction of sound.

Akio Morita and Masuru Ibuka formed a company in 1946 to make a variety of electrical testing devices and instruments, but their real interests lay in music and they decided to concentrate on audio products. They renamed their company Sony (derived from ‘‘sonic’’) to emphasize this strategy. A pioneer in developing the pocket-sized transistor radio, Sony penetrated the American market with small, fully transistorized television receivers.

The original marketing strategy for manufacturers of all mechanical entertainers had been to put one into every home. This was the goal for Edison’s phonograph, the player piano, the Victor Talking Machine Company’s Victrola and the radio receiver. However, Sony and other Japanese manufacturers found out that if a product was small enough and cheap enough, two or three might be purchased for home use. This was the marketing lesson of the transistor radio that was successfully applied to televisions and tape players.

The personal stereo was the result of the convergence of two technologies: the transistor, which enabled miniaturization of electronic components, and the compact cassette—a worldwide standard for magnetic recording tape. The latter was devised by Philips as a replacement for the cumbersome reels used in tape recorders. Users found threading tape around the reels troublesome.

The size of the reels (and the power requirements to turn them) made it difficult to reduce the size of tape recorders. Philips’ cassette was one of many similar innovations in the 1960s based on the tape cartridge concept already in use in film cameras. At this point there was no idea that a smaller tape recorder would have applications in musical entertainment; the goal was to develop small, portable recorders to be used as dictating machines. Philips’ executive Lou Ottens played an important part in this project, applying the descriptive adjective ‘‘compact’’ to the cassette.

Masuru Ibuka of Sony initiated the research project that led to the Walkman personal stereo. He wanted to be able to listen to high-fidelity recorded sound wherever he went and instructed his team to produce a player small enough to fit inside his pocket. (Another group of Sony engineers was working on a video recording cassette that could also fit into Ibuka’s pocket.)

The Walkman was based on a systems approach that made use of advances in several unrelated areas, including improvements in magnetic tape, integrated circuits, and new types of batteries (notably the nickel-cadmium combination, which offered higher output in smaller sizes). The problem of reducing the size of the loudspeaker without serious deterioration of sound quality blocked the path to very small cassette players. Sony’s engineers produced a very small dynamic loudspeaker using plastic diaphragms and lighter materials for the magnets. These were incorporated into tiny stereo headphones.

The Sony Soundabout portable cassette player was introduced in 1979. It was initially treated as a novelty in the audio equipment industry. Sony’s engineers, working under the direction of Kozo Ohsone, reduced the size and cost of the machine. In 1981 the Walkman II was introduced. It was 25 percent smaller than the original version and had 50 percent less moving parts. It took about two years for Sony’s Japanese competitors, including Matsushita, Toshiba and Aiwa, to bring out portable personal stereos. Such was the popularity of the device that any miniature cassette player was called a Walkman, irrespective of the manufacturer. In 1986 the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary.

Constant innovation added new features to the personal stereo: Dolby noise reduction circuits were added in 1982 and rechargeable batteries were introduced in 1985. The machine grew smaller and smaller until it was hardly bigger than the compact cassette it played.

Within two years of the introduction of the compact disk in 1982, Sony had brought out a portable player named the Discman.

Ohsone led the development team that had to overcome the considerable challenges of reducing vibration in the unit (which disturbed the optical reading of microscopic lines of data) and reducing the size of the laser reader. Like its cassette counterpart, the Walkman technology was systematically improved while its size and price was continually reduced.

The size of the market for personal stereo systems ensured that many new recording technologies developed in the 1990s would be reduced in size and offered with earphones. This was the case for digital audio tape (DAT), Philips’ digital compact cassette (DCC), and Sony’s minidisc (MD). All these technologies came with the vital advantage of a recording capability—the major commercial consideration in competing with magnetic tape units.

The minidisc has been the most successful digital version of the personal stereo recorder. It employs the same optical technology as the compact disk but in a smaller size. It contains enough buffer memory to overcome the skipping of tracks that caused problems with the Discman.

The ubiquitous Walkman has had a noticeable effect on the way that people listen to music. The sound from the headphones of a portable player is more intimate and immediate than the sound coming from the loudspeaker of the home stereo; the listener can hear a wider range of frequencies and more of the lower amplitudes of music, while the reverberation caused by sound bouncing off walls is reduced.

The listening public have become accustomed to the Walkman sound and expect it to be duplicated on commercial recordings. Recording studios that once mixed the balance of their master recordings to suit the reproduction characteristics of car or transistor radios now mix them for Walkman headphones.