A What-man? Ipod vs The Walkman

[Enuff Stuff]

The BBC asked a 13-year old to put away his Ipod and try using a cassette Walkman for a week. Among his comments:

It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape.

To read more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8117619.stm

[Ketou]

Weird....the story was written as if by the 13 year old....."genre-specific", "impromptu"....."plethora"....

[AssKissinger]

This is the function that matters most. To make the music play, you push the large play button. It engages with a satisfying clunk, unlike the finger tip tap for the iPod.

When playing, it is clearly evident that the music sounds significantly different than when played on an MP3 player, mainly because of the hissy backtrack and odd warbly noises on the Walkman.

The warbling is probably because of the horrifically short battery life; it is nearly completely dead within three hours of firing it up. Not long after the music warbled into life, it abruptly ended.

Good cassette quality still blows mp3 and especially m4a out of the water.

[6810]

Good cassette quality still blows mp3 and especially m4a out of the water.

I'm with you. But then, I find even to this day, the same as when I first made the switch, that CDs are harsher than tapes. It's that thing with tape compression at loud volumes and the limited fidelity (which isn't really that limited once you compare it to human adult hearing ranges). Tape is just smoother. That said, I currently have 34.48 days of music on my ipod...

[AssKissinger]

I'm with you. But then, I find even to this day, the same as when I first made the switch, that CDs are harsher than tapes. It's that thing with tape compression at loud volumes and the limited fidelity (which isn't really that limited once you compare it to human adult hearing ranges). Tape is just smoother. That said, I currently have 34.48 days of music on my ipod...

I like my iPod as well. It's got over 100 days in it (with less than half of my cd collection in there and none of my cassettes and lps). Along the same lines as you're saying, people who scoff at the sound of earlier mediums have their heads up their asses.

[GuyJean]

I always remember tapes having a lot of hiss, but could've been dirty heads from the dirt road home..

GJ

[Yokohammer]

There's no doubt that compressed digital audio still has a long way to go, but no portable tape player even came close to the instant random track access our beloved iPods provide!

For listening in noisy environments where the ambient noise masks musical details anyway, even a crummy 128 kbps mp3 is good enough for me.