Slashdot Mirror
Collectors Snap Up Early MP3 Players
An anonymous reader writes "It looks like vintage MP3 portables are the hot new collectible for old radio connoisseurs.
On the cover of this month's edition of Antique Radio Magazine is Sony's first DAP, the Vaio Music Clip. The cover article is the second part of a series showcasing the first players by Sony, RCA, I2Go, and Intel (remember the Pocket Concert?). Part one, which was published in the December 2004 edition, covers the first flash unit the Eiger Labs MPMan F10 (the Rio PMP300 was second), and the first hard drive player the Personal Jukebox PJB-100. CNET also wrote about these first players last January, offering more details on the MPMan and the PJB-100"
These nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and shorter. How much nostalgia can you really have for an outdated piece of hardware that appeared and disappeared 2 years ago?
This is about digital music file players, not just MP3 players. The article even mentions that the first item, the Sony, would not play MP3's.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
Damn, that makes me feel old. I guess I should keep my RIO 500 then, which BTW still works great and still has one of the best MP3 player UIs.
-1 (Troll) is antihammer
Im surprised that the first generation ipod wasnt on the list. Will i guess it is a few years younger and it is only part 1.
heck, it might be worth 10.000 someday.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
>>> (remember the Pocket Concert?).
Sure. I have one. Anyone wanna buy it?
We'll see when we get the first article about collectors of the antique first iPod appear by the end of the year.
"Yeah, sonny, when I was young, the iPod only held 5,000 songs. Nothing like the 50 gigasong models we have now, young whippersnapper!"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I laughed when I saw the Intel Pocket Concert was on that list - I still use mine.
Outdated? Maybe, but still jsut as useful as ever.
Tales from behind the Lagom Curtain
I once had one of those MP-Men. Interestingly in germany it was labeled as a Schneider MP-Man". Y'know, the company that brought you the Schneider CPC back in the 80s.
I sold it for 50 a year ago. It was kinda cool, but honestly I don't regret it. It was too big, had too little Memory and couldn't handle any other files except plain old MP3. It was pretty much an early adopters gadget...
"Aah, I remember my first Mac Mini. It was beautiful! All glowy and colorful and nice for the emailing and typing and things. Good times, good times."
"When did you get your Mini, Grandpa?"
"Should be here next Tuesday..."
I'd take that Sony VAIO clip over an iPod shuffle any day ;) It looks miniscule...
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Who has ever heard of an original SONY Walkman going for collectors prices?
There are some on ebay, for the princely sum of $11, meaning they are just hovering above junk now.
The same thing will probably happen to these 1st gen digital players.
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N Sync and Faith Hill on a five year old MP3 player....they deserve each other.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Know what? IPod isn't listed anywhere there, so maybe now you guys can talking about the IPod like it was the first and only MP3 player ever. We're getting sick of it.
- The non Mac world.
Remember this?
No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.
"Hell! I remember when I listened to Mp3's in 64kb!! They don't encode things like they used to."
*ahem* that one is broken, and it says so in the item description.
i bid on a broken ipod the other day (description clearly stated the unit did not work) in hopes of getting the accessories (esp the charger) for a decent price. i maxed out at 50$, bidding finally ended at 275$.
i wonder how much a _working_ walkman would go for.
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Did anyone see the second episode of the new Dr Who series? It was called The End of The World, and the Dr. and his assistant went to the future. WHile there, some future people bring out a jukebox and say "An ancient source of historic music...an IPod!" (or something like that). Kinda funny.
"It is not necessary to imagine the world ending in fire or ice. There are two other possibilities: one is paper work, and the other is nostalgia."
--Frank Zappa
Haven't felt the need for one but I wouldn't mind having a PSP when the prices come down to $150 with a game.
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
They said i was crazy for keeping my old zx spectrum and mocked how i kept the origional box , well last year i sold that thing for a rather large ammount of cash on ebay .
Whos laughing now , mewahahahahahaha
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I'm still using my PJB-100. Right now it plays "Happy the Man" from Genesis.
;)
The player rocks! It even survived changing the HD to a 20GB model.
And you can play Sokoban on it
I betcha a bunch that no collector will ever want one of these.
I got a Rio 300 somewhere around 1999 or 2000, and I still use it fairly regularly. It's only got 64MB of memory, but that's the perfect size for the hour or so trips I normally use it for. It is light, easy to carry, and works great on my Linux machine. If only it displayed song titles like the 500...
Posted from the wireless couch.
I think it still works and it's a cool piece of nostalgia. But what struck me was - it has a digital screen across the top and a large, circular interface across the bottom. So did the iPod draw inspiration from this? Or did Rio just nearly get it right the first time?
Schnapple
player ..
i only wish i could write code for it. it'd be a great synthesis platform.. (or sampler, even..)
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I think I've got you all beat.
I bought my MPTrip CD/MP3 Player back in January of 2000... Went well with my Apex AD-600 (1998) and the collection of MP3s I started in 1997 (compressed my 400+ Audio CD collection).
Don't laugh! If it's on a collector's list, it suddenly has resale value!
You might be able to eBay it now and get enough money to buy a proper iPod!
1. Post bullshit article about suddenly valuable electronic junk on slashdot.
2. Sell your old mp3 portable 'cheaply' on eBay.
3. PROFIT!!!
I don't get it.
I ordered mine on announcement day, and it came a day before the official release date.
Is there somebody out there having a hard time buying a mini?
What jerkwater hole in the ground do you live in?
Still holding onto my white with purple faceplate U.S. Robotics 14.4 external modem till the day it becomes desirable again...
Download Opera 9 (in the BETA forum)
It looks like vintage MP3 portables are the hot new collectible for old radio connoisseurs.
Uh, are we reading the same articles? Part 1 specifically says antique audio collectors do NOT strive to acquire contemporary audio equipment, "but I could easily see how 30 years from now some of these digital music players could be coveted."
What a surprise, a misleading Slashdot summary.
Is this going to be one of those things where audiophiles insist that old, hard-to-get, inconvenient media sound "warmer", "richer", and "fuller"? Like with the vinyl records and vacuum-tube amplifiers?
I keep waiting for somebody to insist that you haven't really heard Nelly until you've heard him on wax disc. Yeah, the click when the needle goes past the seam is kind of annoying, but the sound is harmonically vibrant and more natural.
anyone interested in my creative nomad? i loved that player but then it wouldn't work with windows XP so i had to ditch it.
It's pointless to reminisce about the good old days of MP3 players, when you consider that old player all held less and had lower quality audio than modern players.
Now, old digital cameras, there's something to be nostalgic about! True, they also hold less and take worse pictures, but taking worse pictures is a feature as well as a bug, if you're into artsy-fartsy stuff. Recently, you hear a lot about people using "Lomo" cameras (old Russian camera that produce awesome looking but unrealistic photos) and abusing Polaroids. I myself have gotten some fun out of the Game Boy Camera. What I really wish I still had though is my first digital camera. Now that thing took some awesomely ugly pictures! I really enjoyed how it left funky streaks on all the 640x480 pictures. Plus the color was all clumped up and everything had compression artifacts. It's a shame that it just broke one day.
Anyhow, old MP3 player -> lame.
Old cameras -> awesome.
That's my two cents.
Should have kept my old 32mb Rio..
Damned thing took almost as long to transfer as was the playtime..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But does it play OGG?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am a rich man. :D
Click here to give me 1/250th of an Opera license!
I await any offers.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Along with bronzed and unbronzed porcelain birds.
I still have my 32MB Samsung Yepp I bought in late 1999, though I haven't used it in a while as it has a parallel port interface and my current PC doesn't have one. I remember you could get an optional USB cable, but I can't find one for sale now. It is a great little gadget, displays ID3 tags and has a smartmedia slot for extra storage. Maybe I should put it up on eBay and see how much I could get for it.
The interesting thing is that my first Walkman, a Sony F5, was build like a bloody tank. That is to say, it lasted me a good 10 years before it finally broke down. No [tape-playing] walkman I've owned since has held up as well. It seems that, after a certain point of maturity, many industries settles on a disposable approach to product design and construction.
(Also, I'd like you damn kids to get off my lawn.)
I find your ideas intriguing and wish to buy your comment.
Registering accounts later than some other chrisb since 1997
old quantum computers. The really old, slow ones that only do 7 septaflops/millisecond. Man, I remember the old days when it took a whole 10 minutes to crack a 2048 bit cypher.
What about the Genica GN803 Tavarua? I picked up one of these in 2000-ish, and I think it was one of (if not the) first commercial mp3 cd player. Of course, it was (and is) also a big steaming pile.
I still use one of these.
~# su -
fluffybunPassword:
According to http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&cate gory=15053&item=5765975874&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW (another broken one), $350, if it's in new condition with accessories.
That's a lot.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
I might have missed it skimming through the comments, but it seems odd that no-one's come to the rather obvious conclusion that this isn't about nostalgia- at least, not for most of the people buying them at present.
Put simply, it's about investment. These people have seen the boom in interest in "retro" computing and electronics, reckon that they'll be worth something in the future, so they're snapping them up now, and driving the prices up.
Of course, whether the resultant increase in prices, and people keeping/selling their old players instead of binning them means it is now worth it is debatable. Personally, I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed.
At one stage a few years ago (96-97) I was convinced that 8-bit computers would grow in value as a result of a "retro" nostalgia boom. Well, that was half true, but the simple fact is that, except for the rarer machines (e.g. Sinclair ZX80 in good condition can easily fetch UKP 200.00), most old computers were so widely-produced that they'll never be worth that much. I've seen Sinclair ZX Spectrums in a games-shop window for UKP 100.00, but that's with high-street chain retail mark-up (for lazy nostalgics who can't be arsed getting them on eBay for 30.00). Unless you have one of the rarer models (e.g. short-lived Timex-Sinclair bastardised Spectrum), you're not going to make tons of money without some effort. Ditto the C64.
Back to the subject; is anyone *seriously* getting nostalgic for those silly little 32MB devices that were the first widely-available MP3 players 5 or 6 years back?
Even then, I thought they were rubbish. You'd have been lucky if you could get a whole album at 128Mbps on them, which you had to transfer manually via the (typically?) parallel connection. I was still listening to cassettes back then, and all things considered, they (or portable CD players) were a better bet at the time. The MP3 players were for geeks and "boys toys" gadget freaks.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Anybody want to buy my ultra-rare, highly collectible Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox with its 6GB hard drive?
I'm not sure what makes it rare or collectible, but the article says it will be some day.
Weighs a bit under one pound with the four AA rechargeable batteries.
I don't even know where to begin.
Ah, now I've found the way. You're an idiot.
My first "walkman" was a Sharp model. It sucked batteries dry faster than a hooker can... well... you know. It also broke in about a year.
The replacement was a Panasonic. It's still going strong, though the spring on the tape door went dead after 5 or 6 years.
I did go ahead and buy another one, since I wanted one with an LCD tuner readout. It's a real Sony that doesn't get much use, though comes in handy at times.
More recent purchases in this area are:
- a Panasonic SL-162 CD player, built in 1995 (according to the sticker on the bottom), and still working, flawlessly.
- a Creative 6GB Jukebox player. Uses crappy 1.2V AA-sized rechargable batteries that die if you aren't careful (after one charge, even!). And do you know how long it takes to transfer 6GB over USB 1.1? Jeez...
- an iPod, 4th generation (click wheel), 40GB. This is the one that gets used most.
I'd give Panasonic kudos for the same reason you liked your Sony F5. It's built to last. And those damn kids need to get off my lawn too... and turn down that "music"!
You might want to look into a new CD player. What kind of battery life does that Panasonic get you? (I'm actually genuinely curious) Newer CD players can get 30-50 hours on 2 AAs, even more if you use MP3 CDs (only on compatible players, of course) since it doesn't have to spin as fast to fill the buffer sufficiently to avoid skipping. If you use the CD player enough, a new one might save battery money in the long run, or at least the annoyance of having to change batteries as often. Plus the players are barely bigger than a CD these days.
Honor Among Slackers. A veri
There was another one, whose name I don't quite recall, which was truely the first hard drive player.... became available around the time I was starting my second design (the one you see now). It was an in-dash car player, selling for approx $1100.
PJRC: Electronic Projects, 8051 Microcontroller Tools
I bought one as soon as it was available. I was going on a summer trip to England and I wanted to bring my own tunes with me. The damned thing cost me $750 USD, but I'm still using it today with the same battery that came with it. I had to replace the headphones, though, as the batting crumbled to dust. TCO so far comes out to $100/year, but it's getting cheaper by the day!
I have one of them, the 20Gb version. Plays any and all MP3, as nice as you'd expect. As one of my friends once said, it truly looks like a pre-perestroika iPod from the USSR.
Curiosities: hidden games of mine-sweeper and sobokan. 5v charger, which is difficult to replace. (4.5: yes. 6: yes. 5: no.) The only annoying things are the USB1 interface, which is dog slow, and the inability to get songs off the thing.
Also the strange lineage. Digital Labs came up with it, and Compaq had it sold to a Korean company that didn't do squat with it.
Right now it's sitting unused with 15Gb of music on it, for want of a charger and a new battery. MP3 blogs and Internet radio have taken over my soundscape. Still, I got four years of good use out of the thing.
I'm still using my AVC Soul Player DMP-01, which is a MP3-CD Player with one of the best UI's prior to the iPod. Although you could only fit 700MB per disc, you had the advantage of being able to carry multiple 700MB discs since CD-R's are cheap as snot. Can't do that with a hard-drive or "most" flash based MP3 players.
If someone could come up with a player that is essentially identical to the Soul Player but can read from DVD-R's... it might really have a chance to compete with more modern hard-drive and flash drive players.
... and in the DRM, bind them.
I bought my first MP3 player almost 10 years ago, and still have it. What it lacks in features it makes up in durability and battery life (20+ hours on a pair of cheap nimh AAs, 40 on lithiums).
I bought my first MP3 player almost 10 years ago, and still have it. What it lacks in features it makes up in durability and battery life (20+ hours on a pair of cheap nimh AAs, 40 on lithiums). It is a MP3 CD player that also plays audio CDs. When I got it I was having trouble deciding between a cheap mp3+cd player and an expensive mp3+cd+*VCD* player with video out (still in discman form factor). if VCDs had been as common then as now the decision would have gone the other way.
Flamebait? Parent actually hits on a subtle point of audiophiles, which can explain part of the collectability, and is rather amusing.
My pick:
Laplink cables
Serial Ports
10Mbits Hub
Aureal Vortex
USR 56K Courier Modem V.everything
CRT monitors(with lcd prices dropping)
Zip & Jazz drives
Floppy disk and drive
Quantum Bigfoot TX(3,600rpm 5.25" drive, 15ms seek 8GB or so)
HP calculators
and maybe Creative Jukebox 1
Wikipedia Article.
There are still many users hanging out at the Yahoo! forum here, and there's even work still being done on the PC software for it here.
I bought a Pontis flash based player in August of 99. $215 and it had 16 megabytes of storage.
Only player at the time that worked with Macs(worked with linux boxes too).
Anyone want a deal? Still have mine with original box and receipt.
ya know not all countries use periods and commas for the same things the u.s. does.
If You seriously want an old camera you should get a camera phone, hell you better be quick though I seem to recall hearing that some company has realised a 5 megapixel one.
Haven't used it in years, though.
As much as I've tried it, I just don't enjoy portable music. It's still a combination of too cumbersome, too easily lost, and too repetitive.
I don't listen to music on the mountain bike (I ride around 100 miles per week during the summer), hiking, jogging, or even going for a walk. It would be nice to have portable music when I'm waiting for an appointment, but that's once per months tops. When I was in the habit of carrying the device I got about an hour or two of use every month.
I listen to music at home and in the car. No need for portable devices in either place.
Maybe when they have a wireless music device the size of a nickel with millions of songs, pea-sized earphones, and voice commands so you don't have to fiddle with controls, it will catch on with me. Then it could usefully fill time I'm on the bike dodging traffic, for instance. For now, MP3 players are just toys that take up shelf space collecting dust.
Think about how often you use your MP3 player at home or in the car, where you're putting all of that expensive audio equipment to waste in favor of a tinny pair of headphones.
I'm still keeping my eye out for a portable music player that'll play my .ogg files - They must be around but I sure don't see 'em at Best Buy...
That's a lot
They were £100 new in 1980. This says in 2002, £100.00 from 1980 is worth: £263.54 using the retail price index. Hmmmm... better investments somewhere else? I wonder.
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The only price that means anything on ebay is the final selling price. That auction still has 1 1/2 days left.
Hmmmm... You say you bought your first MP3 player 10 years ago, but the MPman, which was the first flash based MP3 player, came out in 1998, 7 years ago. What media did your 10 year old player use? (and no, your computer doesn't count as an MP3 player).
I still have a Pine MP3/CD player. I used to use it in the car with a cassette adapter. It was one of the first players to read the ID3 tag and display it on a small screen on the top of the player. The songs would skip if someone farted too loudly but I thought it was the coolest thing out there. I don't get out much.
-FEITCTAJ
Goddamn I loved my Pocket Concert.
*SLAM* *SLAM* *SLAM*
"Hey look, even after I slammed it against the wall it's still playing, skip free!"
"Wow!"
My abuse actually broke the thing a few times, nothing some blu-tack and a soldering iron didn't fix. Ahhh... the heady days of user-serviceable consumer electronics!
Crap, I only just sold it after the volume control stopped working; I could have been rich!
I was thinking of making certain alleys, wooded areas, and houses into Foley Prank zones.
Say someone is walking along at night thru a certain area and a shriek or a moan comes from a dark corner. Even with a flashlight nothing is visible. Simple really, just use a battery, a old mp3 player, and a speaker. Put on a bunch of dead air tracks and a single creepy sound, set to random and once you've hidden it your done.
I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Makes me feel old...
sulli
RTFJ.
To make nonskip, all they do is have a memory buffer, and a speed slightly above 1x to refill the buffer if anything goes missing from it. 'A speed slightly above 1x' is clearly not that incredibly high speed.
What MP3 playback does to save power is spin up the CD, pull a few megs in (The same buffer that's used to stop skipping.), and spin it down again.
Now, it'd be nice if they could spin the CD at the 0.2x or whatever that's required to read an MP3 in real time (1x is 150K/s a second, MP3s are around 128k/s, or 16K/s.), but I know of nothing that does that.
Although it'd be really obvious to see, now that I think of it. Just get the same types of CD-Rs, put a single mark with a sharpie on them if they do not have a clear pattern, and fill one with audio and one with mp3s. Play the first and last track on both.
The spinning will differ between the first and last track, but will it differ noticable between CDs? A five times slowdown should be pretty noticable.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Not everyone has cash for your super expensive iPods. Everyone else gets to use the "old stuff". Not everyone needs 40GB of storage. Those of us with only a few favorites at one time can use an older player to store a couple dozen songs.
Anyone wanna buy my old PMP300? =)
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."
http://images.google.com/images?q=apple+personal+m odem
Granddaddy to the Airport Express.
Going from these sites http://pocketcalculatorshow.com/walkman/history.ht ml t m
http://ecen.com/eee41/eee41e/economical_indexes.h
and using Pe^(rt), I get that the real price increased from $70 to $115, while it goes for $350, giving it an investment value of 4.8 percent, which isn't great for a collectable, but if you used it and had it sitting in your attic a pretty decent return.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
What's that worth? Made before you could get an MP3 CD player everywhere and nowhere for $50 or less. Made when Compaq was actually a company. Oh, about 5-7 years back in ye olden days.
Can't play MP3s worth a damn, without skipping, if you ummm, look at it funny, or do nothing at all.
But it's gotta be worth something.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Could he be referring to a cd-player that plays mp3-CDs?
When did those come out?
"Yes, son?"
"Have you been taking your medication?"
I have a Rio Volt (original MP3 CD player) in my car... Can I get $100k for it at auction?
Humph. In my experience, Sony Walkmen hover just above junk until the warranty expires. Then their hovering ceases and they start eating tapes.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
A broken iPod for $275? Can anybody say "Tulipmania?" Somebody ought to track down the high bidders and sell them the deed to the Brooklyn Bridge.
"OH SHIT, THERE'S A HORSE IN THE HOSPITAL!"
MP3 players from 1999? Riiiight...
The iPod wasn't released until November of 2001, and EVERYONE knows Apple invented the MP3 player.
I mean this article would have you think that Apple not only didn't invent the MP3 player, but wasn't even the first hard drive based one. It almost suggests that Apple just decided to "me too" in a growing market, rather than innovating on their own.
And we all know none of that is true...
I WOULD still be using mine except some bastard stole it. The Pocket Concert was really a gem. it had great music quality, a well-amplified output (drove my larger headphones with ease), and large amount of memory (for the time). It seemed to take a hit pretty well too. I dropped it about 4 ft onto a concrete floor and thought it was a goner - nothing happened to it.
I did by an iRiver 390T later and have been very pleased with its performance, I just wish it had a little more memory (only 256MB). Oh, well, time for an iPod (although if iRiver makes a larger HD based model I would get that).
Urr had a bad thought ... just like the movies, I can forsee free music downloads but you have to listen to an advert first. Bad 'Wheel. Bad!
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
iTunes on MacOSX manages the Rio500 like a charme - you might want try whether iTunes on Windows does it, too.
k2r
But only 500,000 active users.