Episode: 3471
Title: HPR3471: The Sony Walkman WM-F41
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3471/hpr3471.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 00:03:19

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3471 for Monday 22 November 2021.
Today's show is entitled, The Sony Walkman WMF41.
It is the 90th show of John Colp, and is about 9 minutes long, and carries a clean flag.
For summaries, a quick talk about one of my favorite legacy audio devices, a genuine Sony FM-SASH-AM cassette Walkman.
Hey everybody, this is John Colp in Lafayette, Louisiana, and right now I'm playing music to you from the device I'm going to be talking about.
The music is by JS Bach. The device is a Sony Walkman FM-AM cassette player.
I'm going to press the stop button now. Listen to this wonderful analog stop, hang on.
Oh, how great is that?
So, let me turn off the CD to tape mix.
I tried recording this a minute ago, and it didn't work out too good going through the sound board into my Zoom recorder.
So now I'm trying to record it straight to audacity. We'll see if that works any better.
The levels look kind of low to me, but hopefully it will be okay.
So, the device that I wanted to talk about is this wonderful Sony Walkman.
Now you might say, why would you talk about a Sony Walkman?
Because that's old technology, nobody needs that anymore, cassettes are lame.
But, you know, I'm an old geezer and a geek for legacy audio.
And so I have all kinds of old stuff around the house that most people would consider junk and probably take it to a rummage sale, but I treasure it.
And this is one of the devices. I happen to get this one at a yard sale for a dollar.
It was a few years ago, and it had... I seem to recall that it even included some random cassette that was left in it from whenever they abandoned it.
I think it was an exercise tape, like Jane Fonda workout or something like that.
So, I think whoever owned this before used to use it to listen to tapes while they're working out, right?
And that was one of the cool things about the Sony Walkman was that you could take it with you.
And you wouldn't bother anybody else because the sound was all in your headphones.
That was a fairly disruptive technology at the time.
I brought this into my music history class the other day to show my students.
And I don't think some of them had ever seen a cassette player before.
And they were pretty impressed that it still worked for one thing, because it's what, 35, 40 years old.
But also that it sounded really good.
Right now, the sound I was playing for your moment ago sounded a little bit wobbly.
I'm using rechargeable batteries in here.
And I think they don't have quite the oomph that the alkaline batteries have.
And so that might be one reason why it sounded a little bit shaky.
But when it's powered properly, it sounds really, really good still after all this time.
If I recall right, the Walkman was invented to try to solve the problem that certain people had on the subway in Japan,
which is that there was no room to move.
And so like, if you wanted to read a book, you couldn't even have enough room to pick up your arm and hold a book in front of your face.
And so they invented this thing, which was a portable stereo that would allow you to stand upright without having to lift your arms or anything,
and just listen to music.
And that would make your commute less boring.
And the killer feature of it was the fact that it sounded really, really good.
Because before these things, if you listened to a cassette player with this kind of form factor,
you know, the small thing that can fit in your handbag or something like that or your briefcase,
the sound was terrible.
There might be an earphone jack, but if you've ever listened on one of those old earphones,
man, it is one of the worst sounds you could ever hear.
And so to create a device, this size that had the sound quality that it had was really a game changer.
And so, although the initial price was very high, they came out with models later that were cheaper.
This is one of the cheaper ones here. This is not a really nice one, but I still value it.
Just because of the novelty factor nowadays.
What else can I say about it?
Well, when I bought it at the yard sale, it didn't work.
And I don't know if you know anything about me from having listened to previous podcasts of mine,
you know that the fact that something didn't work is actually a feature for me, not a bug.
Because I like to take things apart and try to fix them.
And so I was really happy that this didn't work, because that gave me the opportunity to fix it.
And so I opened it up, and what I found in there was that the belts, there were two drive belts in there.
And they were both messed up.
When I tried to pull them out, they broke and had, and then I could see that they are kind of turned to goo.
And so I had some cleaning to do with cotton swabs and alcohol to get all the goo out of there.
And then I ordered some replacement belts on eBay.
And once the belts came in, I installed the belts and powered it up and found that it worked just fine.
Now the last thing to do though was to calibrate it for speed.
Because there's a little bitty, what do you call a potentiometer in there to adjust the speed.
And so I used my 3000 Hertz megahertz, I don't know, my 3000 cassette tape that I used to calibrate cassette decks.
And I played that and then I generated a sound on my phone at the same frequency and then just kept adjusting the potentiometer
until the sounds matched, until the little one, until it got steady.
And then I stopped adjusting and the speed was considered set at that point.
And since then, I haven't used it a lot, but I do like to get it out every once in a while and play a tape.
And it's not as convenient nowadays as using a phone because it's kind of bulky, it doesn't fit in your pocket.
But I still like watching the reels of the tape spin around and I like being able to push actual physical buttons to make things happen.
Like I can push the fast forward button here.
And off it goes, I don't know if you can hear that, I'm going to put it up next to the mic.
That's the sound of the reels going and going.
And then I can press the stop button and it stops and I can press play.
And I think I forgot that I had turned off the...
I'm using this little mixer right now.
It's a Baringer Zenix 502 mixer. It's a tiny little thing. It's got one microphone input, a couple of other quarter inch inputs.
But it's also got a CD slash tape input where you can use RCA cables to put some other sound source and mix it in.
And so that's what I was doing at the very beginning. I'm going to turn it back on now and then press play.
And we should hear the tape.
I think there's some problem with this cable though. I was having trouble getting a good steady sound.
Hello. There we go.
I'm sorry. I'm having cable troubles.
This is not the fault of the tape machine. It's not cable I think.
Anyway, I don't know if there's a whole lot more to say about this, but I hope you enjoyed hearing about this legacy audio technology.
The Sony Walkman FM-AM. What is the model number?
This is WM-F41.
And I think I'm just going to let the music play.
And I will see you guys some other time. Bye.
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