13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week 354
BBC Magazine convinced 13-year-old Scott Campbell to trade in his iPod for a Walkman for a week and see what he thought. Scott thinks the iPod wins when it comes to sound quality, color, weight, and the shuffle feature. The Walkman, however, offers two headphone sockets, making it much easier to listen to music with a friend. My favorite part of the review is, "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equalizer, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
Re:And I though that switch.. (Score:3, Interesting)
ActionReplay with the fastload. Man was that good. Especially with the 1541 (3mins to 10 secs).
Re:Hehe he ain't seen nothing yet... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:But could he... (Score:4, Interesting)
A friend of mine had to teach their kid how to use the "phone without buttons", recently. Let's just say that it's non-obvious, and much more so than I expected.
Your points are good, but leave off one interesting bit about cassette players -- not all of them were especially good at matching the same tape speed. I had a sony that would play just the tiniest bit faster than it should, mucking up the pace and tone of the recording. Oddly enough, the sanyo it replaced had a speed control so that you could adjust for that.
Finally, he never got to listen to two of my favorite cassette bands -- "de-magnetizer" and "head cleaner" -- what's a cassette experience without 'em?
Re:Surely you are trolling. (Score:4, Interesting)
Just curious, you didn't write up your experiment, did you? My old prof [wikipedia.org] would probably be interested in reading.
Also, are you sure that the CDs were "worse" at reproduction on absolute terms, or that the analogue recordings simply induced distortions that you found pleasant, like tube-induced second harmonic distortion? It's almost impossible to do double-blind audio analysis with analogue v digital, because analogue always gives itself away with noise, and I've read that subjective listeners often cannot tell the difference between analogue and digital for most program material if the digital is noised up, or if needle pops are added, or if programs like string-heavy orchestral programs are given even-harmonic distortion.
Re:Was that really written by a 13 year old? (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't really uncommon practice in the journalism world. My sister was interviewed by an Isreaeli reporter shortly after the rocket attacks a few months back, because of her status as an American and her proximity (she was a few blocks from where the rockets struck). The reporter synthesized all her answers and thoughts during the interview and wrote the article as though it had been written by my sister. It gave the whole article a sense of first-person immediacy, instead of the dry descriptions of a reporter who wasn't there.
Re:Wait, what? (Score:3, Interesting)
Vegeta99 is right about the sound quality. (I don't know about the chemical composition of the tape-- it's probably on Wikipedia, but I can't be bothered to look it up. ;) The cases were always plastic, of course.
Metal tapes were a lot more expensive than regular tapes, and you could only buy them at specialty stores, such as Musicland. If you were going to create a master mix and then duplicate it on a cutting-edge dual-cassette deck, you would create the master on a metal tape ($4 to $5 each in mid-80's currency IIRC) and then duplicate it onto a normal tape (either something like a decent mid-level Maxell or, if you had no money, cheap POS tapes [made from recycled scraps] which were sold at Walgreen's). The normal tape would go into the Walkman; if it chewed that up, you were OK. However, if you were a poor student, you made do with what you had. Rule Of Thumb: the cheaper the Walkman, the more likely it will eat your tapes.
If your tape did get eaten, you had two choices:
1) toss it
2) get out a screwdriver, take the case apart, and try to respool the tape without twisting or pulling too hard. [The more you paid for your tape, the more likely this option was.]
Tapes were also _the_ way to listen to your music in a car. And a professionally recorded tape played for the first time sounded almost as good as a CD does, so it's not as if we were total philistines! ;)
All that said, we Walkman users would sometimes look despairingly at our 60-cassette case of tapes and dream of the day when a small, lightweight object would hold all of those songs at once. And now it's here!
It will take someone older than me to explain that whole 8-track thing, though...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)