Gosh, with all the Canada Day and Independence Day celebrations going on, a somewhat iconic birthday slipped by me.

The Sony Walkman turned 30 on July 1st!

Assuming that you’re old enough, can you remember your first Walkman (or Walkman-like clone/device)?

I remember it being so easy to convince my parents of how the “outrageous” cost of the little cassette player would be outweighed by one HUGE advantage to them:  They wouldn’t have to hear the music I listen to.

I didn’t even have to dredge down to the “everyone-else-has-one” level.

This was the first personal, portable music-listening device and unquestionably was the roots of what we have now in iPods, Zunes, Nomads… etc…  At the time, in the late ’70′s and early ’80′s, the Walkman was THE device you carried around with you.

Remembering the days of the Walkman: the fact that you were listening to something recorded on cassette AND through small headphones meant that the audio quality REALLY sucked.  But who cared that the sound quality wasn’t as good as the LP’s on your Hi-Fi system.  Now, you could take the music that YOU wanted to listen to along with you and enjoy it without bothering anyone else.  Well, you could bother everyone near you if you had the volume cranked…

This birthday twigged my interest after reading a post on Create Digital Music - the site made their own birthday homage, but also brought up a bit of a spin that brought some things into perspective.  The article also reminded me of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”, but I digress…

Those Kids – they’re all Pirates!

For all the whining and complaining that the record industry is making about people stealing music contributing to the end of the world as we know it, it’s no wonder that no one is paying attention.  This predicting the music world ending thing is not new at all – the RIAA furor over consumer magnetic tape machines got rekindled as a a result of the Walkman being released.

MP3 Sound Quality is Horrible!

Again, portability of music isn’t a new thing – even before the Walkman, there was this new fangled thing called the transistor radio.

If you want to complain about audio quality degrading, you have to go way back to the 1950′s and include the transistor radio – arguably the first breakthrough device that would enable people to carry music with them … well, as long as you didn’t get out of range of your favorite radio station that is.

After cassettes, came CD’s and the electronics industry tried to make portable devices to play that media.  CD-based “Walkman’s” were a limited in success – after they figured out how to keep the laser from skipping from every shock and jostle, people got tired of trying to figure out ways of carrying these things around without it looking like they have a small textbook strapped to their hip.

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So I guess the question is:

Will we ever have a portable music option that is convenient, efficient on space AND good sound quality?

I don’t know, file formats such as FLAC are gaining in popularity, but it’s still quite big and unless some consumer-level electronics maker gets behind it and incorporates it in their product, it’s not going to enjoy much more than a audio-geek-cult following.

I sincerely hope so … all our hard work on recording and mixing needs something that doesn’t squash the life out of our magical creations!