TECH TITANS
SONY WALKMAN
Our chart-toppers from the music box’s first 45 years
[ Words Tom Wiggins, Esat Dedezade ]
01 TPS-L2 WALKMAN
It might seem odd to lead this piece with a Walkman sporting all the charm and elegance of a brick. But this music player changed everything. Although tunes had long been portable by way of transistor radios, Sony’s invention fused that convenience with the ability to listen to your own tapes.
The concept came from the company’s co-founder Masaru Ibuka. He asked for a slimmed-down take on the existing Sony cassette recorder that he used to listen to music while travelling. The snag: this required some serious engineering feats to squeeze the hardware into a luggable form factor. Sony’s boffins eradicated anything they deemed unnecessary –notably recording functionality and an external speaker –and ramped up the audio output to stereo.