Slashdot Mirror
13-Year-Old Trades iPod For a Walkman For a Week
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."
About giving him an 8 track cartridge tape ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereo_8
At least, there is only one side to those. I still remember listening to Pink Floyd "The dark side of the moon" and "Echoes" while cruising in my car. Even today, when I listen to it on more modern media, I still remember where the sound track would cut for a few seconds in the middle of a song in order to allow the player to change tracks. They did a fade-out in the middle of a song in order to make it sound more appropriated... ;-)
8-tracks came before 4 track mini-cassette :
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_Cassette
For those who don't know 8 tracks, the tape is arranged in a endless loop so it was impossible to rewind the tape ;-))) I still have an 8 track recorder in the basement somewhere, I used to record my own tapes ;-)
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
Sony's audio cassette devices didn't manage to contain any rootkits...
The sound of, say, Metallica's Garage Inc on tape is way better than on mp3. Cassettes are beautiful. They are durable, unlike CD/DVDs, and I have 25 year old cassettes that still work. They are hardware, tangible mechanical form of music. And there's just something about it that no CD/DVD/MP3s can match. And then there's the cover art sitting on an actual cover. Man I miss those days.
Real men read Slashdot articles at -1, bottom up.
..was there to make my C64 games load faster...
Originally invented in 1956, four-track was ignored due to marketing concerns but was briefly resurrected in the late 1960s as "the next big thing." When I was a little younger than this kid, I received a "Hipster" Four-Track tape player -- same thing as an eight track, but with a cassette-sized tape in a smaller form factor. I got one tape with it -- The Gentrys. I've long since lost that tape deck and the single tape it had, but I suppose it would be worth a wee bit of money were it in working condition.
It comes with a handy belt clip screwed on to the back, yet the weight of the unit is enough to haul down a low-slung pair of combats.
Pull your pants up and wear a belt! You damn kids
I guess they're durable as long as you don't listen to them much. The mere act of playing a cassette degrades it. And then there's the sound quality issue. Comparing cassettes favorably to mp3 is one thing, but to CD/DVD? Seriously?
As I listen to Dëthklok, I marvel at a radio that would have a Metal/normal equalizer preset.
That would be pretty metal.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
I bought a modern sony "walkman" mp3 player over ipods and I am glad I did. It isn't as nice as using itunes to make playlists, but it is drag and drop simple. Plus the unit has an FM tuner which is a plus considering I take off on 5 hour bike rides and need weather updates(tornado alley here) The equalizer is not an apple preset list, so i can actually make it sound right on different little speaker set ups.
Oh yeah, 40 hour battery life playing mp3's. ipods don't do that
and for next week's assignment have him carry around a ghettoblaster ;-)
Either he writes well or I was an idiot when I was 13.
?
I bought a Walkman in Munich in 1981 when I was a tourist and the device was still relatively new. It was so cool! The first versions looked so well made!
Nowadays, the thing's junk compared to my Sansa player, but my memory takes me back to when it was the single coolest single thing I owned.!
Here are the two reasons I liked my first MP3 player better than a tape or cd player. First, even on my primitive player, which I used from a time before the iPod existed until the Minis came out, it was nice to carry hours of music around without having to carry a my 30 tape case, not to mention the player that was huge by comparison. Second, battery life was much better. I would easily go through a set of batteries every day or so on a CD player. The MP3 player was closer to a week.
I would say the sound is a mater of personal taste. A walkman though a good pair of headphones is likely better than an iPod, depending if the tape was original or a rip. I wonder if music is not mastered differently for electronic playback. I wonder if people have not grown increasingly impatient about content delivery, and a tape playback is simply not efficient enough to be enjoyable. Back in the day we might have had to wait 20 minutes for the next Michael Jackson video to roll around in the MTV queue(kid, MTV stands for Music TV,and they once played videos all the time. It was cool.) Now just get on youtube and get whatever videos you want, without having to sit through damn Tears for Fears mashes.(no offense to the few that liked Tears for Fears videos). And believe me, not matter what your parents say, much more time was wasted watching the primeval cable stations than anyone could waste on the Internet, without the real benifits of the internet.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I didn't read the article yet, but did the reporter give the kid a manual for operating the Walkman? If so, the kid could have resolved some of those issues by reading it. If not, then I understand his confusion. CD's have been the standard for physical media since the early 90's, and manufacturers probably stop making cassette tapes for new albums when he was 3 or 4. CD's are, after all, one-sided.
This is one more example of how kids, left to their own devices, can learn by doing.
I wouldn't try this with a gun or even a car, but for things that have a low risk of blowing up or hurting anyone this is a great way for kids to learn. Well, I say kids, a 13 year old is isn't exactly a kid but you get my point.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I wonder if I'm the only one in the world that still uses Minidiscs. The way Sony handled the minidisc format is unsurprisingly idiotic, but the technology itself is very cool (Faraday effect/magneto-optical). They are also very durable, last a long time on batteries and have removable media which to some people is a feature rather than a bug. I don't use portable players much but when I do I still use my MZ-RH1 Hi-Md. But then again, I never, ever use the horrible SonicStage software that is necessary to access most of the best features of the device. I only use it to record vinyl and play it back, no computer involved. I also used to use it for recording live shows and other audio. The sound quality of the MZ-RH1's internal ADC-DAC is simply amazing...I would record a studio album with this device, and have no problem with sound quality. It's amazing, and depressing, because Sony is so stupid.
... figure out a rotary-dial phone?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
I'd like to introduce to my friend, h|tler:
<h|tler> HOW THE FUCK CAN YOU TELL THAT I'M 13 BY LOOKING AT WHAT I'M WRITEING????????????????
(From http://bash.org/?14207)
The slashdot filter had me remove a bunch of question marks. Yes, there are even more in the original.
I've had no problems getting older iPods to work with gtkpod, but 6G and have cryptographic hashes that still haven't been reverse-engineered yet.
It seems to me that the only thing proven on this exercise is that iPods are simpler to use than tapes only. I say this on the basis that I am only 2 years older, and if I questioned myself or many of my associates, almost 100% would know, and understand about settings and sides on cassette tapes. So the only other conclusion I can seem to draw is that a gap of 2 years was the time it took for tapes to vanish almost permanently.
> "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."
Wait until he finds out his penis isn't really to give his hand something to do.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Scott is starting to look like he needs to trade the double cheeseburgers for something made of soy or tofu. Otherwise he'll be trading the smaller size jeans for larger pants with suspenders in short order.
Cd's and other digital music formats definitely have some advantages over cassette tapes. With that said, cassettes do have some advantages over digital music formats. There is a reason why Nakamichi players still sell for hundreds of dollars on ebay.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nakamichi
But my first two iPods no longer work.
In 20 years those Lithium-Ion batteries will be impossible to find for your old iPod, but grandpa will still be able to haul out the Walkman and drop some AA-sized cells in it and show it off to the grandkids.
the original iPods are pretty antique and impractical because they require a computer to load music into them, and they are not wireless internet enabled, they don't have any sharing features. They cannot play any sort of radio (FM or Internet radio). And worse of all they need cumbersome headphone jacks and wires to be of any use.
In 20 years will portable electronics have still have little rechargeable batteries or will they have a charge good for 2-4 years instead? Or perhaps they will use super caps, and be capable of charging through movement and indirect coupling? Will we bother with having buttons and screens on them? Will people expect them to do more than play music and videos and weakly browse the web?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I'm relieved that the majority of technological advancement happened before I was born..
Aw, that's cute. We'll see what he says when he's forty and he gives his kid an iPod to play with.
Warning: Apple/Nintendo fangirl. Likes her electronics cute & cuddly. May be rabid.
Two headphone jacks, I'd be surprised if he wasn't hauled in for a public performance of the music, frankly I'm surprised we can play music in the car with more than one person....I miss my walkman and the days when Sony didn't suck.
The original article is obviously not written by a 13 year old. The vocabulary and writing style is of someone much, much older. Even the brightest and most articulate 16-18 olds have much less mature writing styles.
TFA was written by someone else.
Must have been a REAL cheap walkman, even my low end version had auto-reverse. ( and AM/FM + bass boost )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Dolby S FTW!!!
Media Monkey?
This sig left unintentionally blank.
It's only to score on your behalf that beautiful lady that's riding shotgun in your rocket wagon Trans Am.
You can't score with Pop. Maybe techno metal, maybe jazzy grunge, but not thrash and black metal. There is more that Metal never was, and SaTanacious D is just a couple fat LSD tards that would try to convex everything evolved out of folk strings into a single druidic rhythm they call heavy Metal.
If you need a Switch or button on your player, then you're not listening to music. The doo-wop thrash performed by all the likes of Iron Maiden and Judas Preist extending to Metrollicais nothing short of queer irony.
Do you get me? Send Jackfag Black back to Queers NY.
Give the kid the USB drive version of the cassette. It would be a cassette with a bunch of numbers written on them that tell how far you need to fast forward the cassette to get to each program. Of course I was stupid enough to save my vic 20 programs all on one 90-minute cassette (that is all my mom would buy.) So to fast forward and rewind to get to a game in the middle usually ended up taking like 90 minutes.
Anyone remember the Fisher-price cassette camcorder? I still remember seeing the commercial on nickelodeon (probably while watching Mr. Wizard's World from the 80's -- the one that had a graphic of the challenger each time he had a science challenge) and thinking how much I wanted one. I seem to recall the camcorder was in black and white and the movies were stored on cassette. I had no concept of band-width back then so I was blissfully ignorant of how much the picture quality must have sucked. Anyone actually have one as a kid?
They do realize you can just buy a 2 person earbud right?
http://www.amazon.com/Macally-PodDuo-Headphone-Splitter-iPod/dp/B00065XSWG
Those are handy on a plane or on a long car drive.
Oh yeah, all that I ever used was Maxell chrome tape. Everything else was just not as good. Plus everybody wanted to be like the Maxell Guy in the ads.
Three Squirrels
...and trade it in for 20 years ago's model, and you have a story. VCRs, golf, bowling, tennis, cars, etc. etc.
I hate being bipolar; it's awesome!
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."
Wait wait wait. They had actual METAL cassettes? Like, made out of metal?
The scary part is that I'm being completely serious. I'm only 21 but I had a Walkman for a few years before I got my first CD player, I always wondered about that switch but since I never saw a cassette made out of metal I assumed the same thing he did, that it was being genre-specific.
Now one of the great mysteries of my life is solved.
Being a musician myself, I can tell the difference between various types of recordings. You, being a violinist, are used to hearing what a violin sounds like recorded via analog, and are probably happy with the way it sounds, since you like playing violin. Something that sounds new or different, might not sound as familiar, or pleasant to you. The opposite would be the warm reminiscent feeling of listening to an old scratchy recording of a Louis Armstrong record - there are emotional feelings attached to the scratches and pops, because it evokes other memories.
A fairer test would be a neutral tone, such as pink noise, and to see which was more "faithful" in reproducing it. Then again, in any study, you will have some people who will prefer the analog recording (let's call them acoustic luddites ), because it is what they are used to, and not necessarily the most accurate.
..........FULL STOP.
Damn kid... or whoever wrote the article... now i feel so old. and I'm just 28. If you don't want to drain the battery while rewinding, you can use a pencil to rewind the tape yourself. Dammit I'm so old.
When in twenty to thirty years, the study will repeat, with a comparison between whatever is coming in the future, and an iPod!
I find it disturbing that, according to the article at least, this particular kid had problems working out for himself that a cassette tape is two-sided and what half of the controls on the Walkman do.
As a kid, I can remember taking some bits of machinery apart to clean or service them, and just to see how they worked. (For example, my parents were in the clothes-making/tailoring trade and I frequently messed about with old sewing machines to fix them or clean them.) I also got into electronics at a fairly young age and knew some basics about car mechanics.
It seems a shame that kids these days don't get the chance to (or are just not interested in) take things apart just to see how they work - from my perspective, I developed an "engineering brain" from a really early age that has served me well throughout my career.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Here in the UK, we're enjoying some of the hottest temperatures for many years.
This means that the pale-skinned Apple fanbois are all indoors today for fear of burning to a crisp.
This in turn means that they're spending more time on Slashdot today.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusion as to why a perfectly reasonable post like yours gets modded down - just because you have the blatant audacity to criticise their beloved company.
Bring it on, fanbois, I've karma to burn at the moment...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
This is the exact same "funniest part" quote that I've read in literally 4 other places, including on boingboing. http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/29/13-year-old-kid-revi.html
What gives?
Associating walkman with something that big and that old. My tape walkman was much smaller, nearly of the size of the tape. Modern walkmen are superior to ipod nano-s in all ways (except, maybe, design, which is a matter of taste): price, features, kit earphones, no itunes bundling,
It's awkward from you to jump to conclusions from a single testimony. Human nature does not change. Because of technological evolutions, today kids may be more apt to write, say, homebrew software for a handheld device than to hardhack it, but this does not mean they lack an "engineering brain."
While this is a cute kind of a story, I at least would have given him the more 'modern' walkman which is about double the size of a cassette - not that lunchbox size thing he's got.
And to be fair, though this looks bad on me, I had walkmen for half my life and just today learned what that metal/normal switch was for.
The coolest thing about the Walkman (and subsequent clones) was the spaceship-like cassette door opening, with a nice ejecting sound. I can't see the iPod doing that :-)
Listening to a walkman with a friend constitutes a public performance. You have not acquired the proper license for for said performance. You now owe the RIAA $80,000 for infringement.
Oh the joys of making a mixtape for the special lady friend. If you judge wrong you got dumped via a written note passed through friends and made its way onto your 3rd period desk, but if you judged right then you were riding high on that horse tonight... maybe necking on the swings after school.
In my teen years, acquiring music was a big deal. i had to either buy it, borrow it or steal it. And by steal i mean 5 finger discount, not the two click discount. i never actually shoplifted (music). i had to wait until the album came out, ride the train into town/have my parents drive me to town, and fork over the cash out of my allowance. That's assuming i KNEW the album was out. i was an American kid growing up in Germany, which meant that sometimes a new CD could be very expensive if i couldn't buy it at the BX/PX.
For my brother who is ten years younger it was... search on BT, download, listen. There's no need to prioritize which album you'll get, get get them all. It doesn't cost anything in money or time to acquire.
What does that mean for the power/specialness/significance of music for our respective generations? If he can acquire the Depeche Mode discography at the cost of letting it download while he plays TF2, vs. saving my pennies and making several trips to get it piece by piece while choosing to forgo something else.... To me, getting rid of music means getting rid of the effort that went into acquiring it and knowing what it would cost to get it back. For him, it's trivial.
Will future generations have the passionate response of us old coots? If your collection is effectively [anything you or your friends have ever heard of] what is the value of any of it? If you never stood in line in the snow to be the first to have the new album....
i'm not saying it's wrong. It's just weird to me.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
I still used a walkman when I was in college in 1999-2003. MP3 players were either too expensive or could only hold 45 minutes of music. I had a few portable CD players, but they skipped too much in order for me to take them skiing; so I spent $25 on a tiny walkman and used about 10-15 tapes that I had left over from high school.
No, I will not work for your startup