Thread by @jhamby

Here's an article from 2013 about the rise and fall of cassette tape: Total rewind: 10 key moments in the life of the cassette theguardian.com/music/2013/aug…

This article mentions the Sony WM-D6C, which added Dolby C to their professional Walkman tape recorder without increasing the size. They packed an incredible amount of mechanical and electronic wizardry into something they don't make like they used to. walkmancentral.com/products/wm-d6c

Portable DAT and MiniDisc recorders, then MP3 players and now smartphones made the original Walkman and its knockoffs obsolete, and now you can't buy anything of equivalent quality at any price (except pre-owned). Dolby won't license their analog tech (the patents have expired).

Here's Sony's corporate history on how the Walkman and the compact cassette came about because of a partnership with Philips, although Sony forced Philips to waive patent royalties they otherwise could have asked for. sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

"Despite protests that the name was a strange mixture of Japanese and English, Morita praised it. Most buyers would be young people, and Morita believed that the young staff members who had come up with the name were in tune with their own generation." sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

Sony had made plans to call it "Soundabout" in the United States, "Stowaway" in the United Kingdom, and "Freestyle" in Sweden, but Morita met parents in France and the UK who had been told by their children, "When you meet Mr. Morita, please ask him where I can get a #Walkman."

"Despite some initial resistance in certain regions, it was later recognized that this strategy had been correct. The name "Walkman" became virtually synonymous with "headphone stereo" products and it even appeared in respected dictionaries abroad as well as in Japan."

"In 1981, Walkman was listed in Le Petit Larousse, a well-known French dictionary, and in 1986 the name was included in the Oxford English Dictionary. Morita said that nothing made him happier than the fact that "Walkman" had been accepted around the world as an English word."

But even in the 1970s, engineers at Sony knew that digital audio would become a reality in the future, and that digital technology would be valuable. sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

There were several arguments between Sony and Philips engineers over what would become the digital audio CD. 💿 sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

Sony said: "The CD will become the next generation medium in the audio industry. Let's go with it."
Labels said: "We've taken so much trouble to develop standards for the LP, we're satisfied with it. Don't make us spend money on this new medium. Don't give us what we don't need."

Last two quotes from the chapter of Sony's corporate history about promoting the newly-developed audio CD to a skeptical music industry. sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

Oh wow, the next chapter in the history explains how early CDs were mastered. Sony sold something called a PCM adaptor that used 3/4" U-matic format VCRs to hold the digital audio data for mastering. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PCM_adapt…

Here's the Sony history link: sony.net/SonyInfo/Corpo…

And the mathematical reason why CDs are mastered in 44.1 kHz has to do with those early PCM adaptors that reused videotape technology, and how 44.1 kHz was a convenient sampling rate that worked with both NTSC and PAL video recording formats. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/44,100_Hz

"44,100 is the product of the squares of the first four prime numbers (2*2 * 3*3 * 5*5 * 7*7) and hence has many useful integer factors."

When the DAT came out and set the pro audio standard of 48 kHz (and multiples), it originally presented a barrier to quality digital copies between the two slightly different sampling rates. But now it's easy to do in software (link via Wikipedia cite). larryjordan.com/articles/under…