Cassette players make a comeback in 2024
instant cameras like Instax. Chinese electronic company Fiio came to CES in January 2024 with the CP13 – a portable cassette player with a sleek design and a few retro touches. James Chunge, CEO of Fiio, said he wanted to pay homage to the original Sony Walkman that came out in 1979.
Battery-operated reel-to-reel tape recorders were introduced in the 1950s and produced by Uher and Nagara. In the 1960s, Phillips introduced a compact cassette recorder, mainly for recording speech. Cassette tapes entered the scene in 1963.
They were invented by Dutch engineer Lou Ottens, the head of new product development at Philips. Ottens was trying to find a way to shrink reel-to-reel tapes to a size accessible to the common man. The two-spool cassette tape debuted at the Berlin Radio Show.
But it remained an expensive and specialised gadget till the late 1970s, when everything changed. Also read: Insta360 X4 review: Is this the best 360-degree action camera you can buy? Sony co-founder Masaru Ibuka wanted to be able to hear music on long flights. Specifically, he asked for a way to listen to opera.
Sony designer Norio Ohga built a prototype from Sony’s Pressman cassette recorder, which Ibuka took on his next flight. That paved the way for the first-ever Sony Walkman model, the TPS-L2, released on July 1st, 1979 for $150. Here’s a fun fact for your next dinner table party – the Sony Walkman was not Sony’s first-ever product.
That honour goes to the electric rice cooker! Despite the first month seeing sluggish sales, the Walkman became one of Sony’s most successful brands of all time. From cassettes, it went into CDs, Mini-Disc, MP3 and then streaming music. Out of the over 400 million Walkman portable music players sold, 200 million
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