December 1, 2004

Walkman's Close Shave

Some consumer electronics products have had such an impact that it seems their invention was somehow inevitable. Every time you see a person walking down the street with headphones on, lost in some musical reverie, they are paying homage to the first miniature portable player, Sony's Walkman, which hit the shelves in Japan some 25 years ago, on July 1, 1979.

It's difficult now to remember just how much the arrival of that little box with the big sound shook up audio. I was in Japan almost a year after the Walkman launch, and Sony's competitors still didn't have anything remotely comparable. What is more unusual, demand was so high that even the usually cutthroat discounters in Tokyo's Akihabara electronics bazaar were selling the Walkman at full list price.

The little Sony player, along with its eventual competitors, was responsible for the evolution of the cassette from a rather scorned minority medium to a major factor in the marketing of music. But it all happened somewhat by accident.

The story, which is related in a book called Breakthroughs by P. Ranganath Nayak and John M. Ketteringham, begins in the labs of Sony's tape-recorder division. The company's first viable product had been a tape machine, and this area was one that had seen considerable innovation over the years. One recent product was a small portable recorder called the Pressman, which was popular with journalists, who used it for taking notes and conducting interviews. In late 1978, a group of engineers set to work developing a stereo version of the mono Pressman.

They soon discovered that, when they fit the extra circuitry for stereo into the box, there was no room for the recording electronics. It never occurred to them that anybody would want to buy a recorder that didn't record; rather than improving an existing product, they considered that they had in fact made it worse. They kept a few prototypes, however, and used them occasionally for playing tapes.

One of these was spotted by Masaru Ibuka, co-founder of Sony and, at that time, its honorary chairman. According to the book's authors, "It is the province of honorary chairmen everywhere, because their status is almost invariably ceremonial, to potter about the plant looking in on this group and that group, nodding over the latest incomprehensible gadget."

Ibuka saw potential in this playback-only device, especially since, in his pottering, he had become aware of developments elsewhere in the company the tape engineers could know nothing about.

Specifically, the headphones division was developing a new style of lightweight ‘phone. Certainly there were other light ‘phones in those days, although audiophiles tended to prefer massive units that blocked ambient sounds, but the Sony contribution was the adoption of new, powerful magnetic materials that would make the new ‘phones much more efficient, thus reducing battery drain. Ibuka thought that the new ‘phones and the tape player were a natural combination.

While headphones had always been considered a useful adjunct to a tape recorder, the notion of a machine that only played through ‘phones was almost as heretical as that of a recorder that didn't record. Nevertheless, Ibuka approached his partner, legendary Sony president Akio Morita, with the idea. The rest of Sony management was decidedly leery of this project, and Morita might have been as well, so Ibuka is reputed to have made the simple suggestion that they put one together and see how it actually sounded.

And they discovered what the world would find out not many months down the road: it sounded terrific. Morita immediately made it one of his pet projects, and by the end of February, 1979, the tape recorder and headphone engineers had a final working prototype. The name Walkman seems to have come about somewhat absentmindedly but, although initially rejected by Morita, it stuck. The first batch was to be ready for shipment in the incredibly short time of four months.

Conventional wisdom was that the Walkman was merely a presidential whim that would surely bomb. So ingrained was that idea that, although the first production run was supposed to be 60,000 units, the manager responsible for actually making them decided to produce only half that, to save money on materials.

Initially that probably seemed prudent, as the first month's sales were almost non-existent. The reason, according to the book, is that Sony had originally targeted an adolescent market, but that Walkman was too unfamiliar for conformist Japanese teenagers. Soon the yet-to-be-named yuppie market discovered the device, and sales began to boom. And, because of manufacturing conservatism, the supply ran out.

The shortfall was quickly made up, and by the middle of 1980, just a year after the launch, the factories were cranking out 200,000 Walkmans a month.

As they prepared to begin exporting the machines, Sony ran into some opposition to the name from its distributors in English-speaking countries. They felt that "Walkman" was just another of those Japanese names cobbled together from English elements, which would sound peculiar to native English ears. At first, Sony permitted its North American distributors to call the player "Soundabout" and the Brits to call it a "Stowaway."

But the Walkman name had already become entrenched, largely because of the number of visitors who bought the machines on trips to Japan and took them home. There didn't seem to be much virtue in having three names for the same thing so Morita ultimately decreed that, however funny it might sound, Walkman it would be everywhere.

Now, it hardly sounds strange at all.

...Ian G. Masters
ian@mastersonaudio.com