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Comment by Nursie | Hacker News Reader

Other than the bluetooth capability - are modern walkmans as good as they were at the peak of portable tape use?

I had one of these in black - https://walkman.land/panasonic/rq-s30

Gorgeous little machine, not much bigger than a cassette in its box, all metal. It felt about as well designed and built as apple stuff does now. It wasn't long after that we got minidiscs (and we know how that went), and then mp3 players conquered the world.

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There was a good video on YouTube that talked about the Walkman resurgence, and why they're so large these days. Almost all of these walkmans are using the same internal mechanism because there was only one place to source them. I don't know if that's still the case now.

https://youtu.be/2DWtkSVNvTg

Tbh, i loved my minidisc player, robust and shock resistant (I guess it buffered ?) rewritable media. Compared to even CD players it was ahead of the game.

Mine was great too, but it just never took off quite the same, maybe because of price. 'originals' were expensive, and so were recordable discs.

There was also (IIRC) built-in DRM, so you could record digitally from a CD or read-only minidisc to a writeable minidisc, but not then from writeable minidisc->minidisc. Even recording from analogue to minidisc resulted in something that would be restricted.

But this is all just rehashing things that have been talked about many times over the intervening years. They were great, but they never quite made it and then mp3 ate its lunch.

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