“When you use a Walkman all the memories come back”: In love with old tech | Hacker News Reader

“When you use a Walkman all the memories come back”: In love with old tech

theguardian.com

54 pointsbeardyw89 comments

I believe this is not just about nostalgia, or the collecting bug.

It is also about the joy of interacting with tangible things. Touch, feel its texture, feel its weight, get tactile feedback, organising physical objects in a spatial world. This is simply the natural behaviour of the human animal.

I don't collect Walkmans, but I do collect mechanical keyboards. In our community there isn't just old farts, but also just as many young adults who prefer tangible tactile devices in the age of touch screens.

As a guitarist, that's partly why I prefer actual effects pedals to adding a new plugin to an application. Physical cables to plug in and knobs to turn somehow improves the experience for me.

But Walkmen? Nah, give me my MiniDisc any day ;-)

as a synth enjoyer I also love effects pedals, but my bank account doesn't :(

I have an old MiniDisc and a few disks. Every few years I'll load up a few MP3s to make sure it works. Gives me comfort to know it still works.

I have a small MiniDisc collection which I will never sell.

Call it nostalgia but I really liked the process of creating a compilation using those limited 74 minutes (or 120 using SP2).

In recent years I've created my own disk labels for my bare discs, another plus for the tangible nature of the medium.

It is also interesting how the accompanying picture tries to show how current mobile music listening experience is so complicated. I don't think it is. I just have wireless headphones (good ones) and my cell phone (that I would carry around anyway). No mess, no extra device to carry around and mess with.

But of course there might be something in pressing the buttons, feeling different and special.

I thought the pic was impressioning the old way. And obviously not literally and probably not only. Ie it may be also just about "stuff" or getting cought up in caring about physical things. And/or about complication. The new way certainly has as much or even more complication.

> Touch, feel its texture, feel its weight, get tactile feedback, organising physical objects in a spatial world. This is simply the natural behaviour of the human animal.

I would add that there was also joy to be had resulting from the effort, intent and commitment required to interact with tangible things. Nowadays it's just too easy to instruct your assistant to play a song, skip around, move on to something else, etc.

I used to get so much satisfaction from everything that went into listening to music for the most part. The excitement of a new song/album/artist. The time you had to wait for the release or finding a copy due to the initial demand. Going out to a store to buy it. Sometimes on public transportation that would only extend the excitement post-purchase while you sat on the bus waiting to get home so you could play it on the hi-fi. Struggling to get it free from the pesky plastic wrap. Popping in the cassette and fast-forwarding to the hit song, turning up the volume and sitting back to finally enjoy the fruits of you labor. Listening to the rest of the album only to discover an even better track! You get the point...

At the time, I was excited for a future where a lot, if not all of this "friction" would cease to exists. The Walkman was probably the first step in this direction. The CD was next removing the need to ff/rwd. Then mp3s and Napster, resulting in time spent burning/hoarding instead of actually listening. Now Spotify/YTMusic/etc...

These days I struggle to find any new music that gives me the same kind of sensation. A lot of it has to do with just the sheer amount of material available and ease to access it all, but I would also argue has to do with giving the material a chance and really taking the time and opportunity to appreciate it. This is especially challenging if you have trouble controlling your impulses.

Most of the time I just listen to music that I grew up with. I imagine this has a lot to do with trying to rekindle these sensations from long ago.

I felt like the iPod struck a good balance. The collecting was still in-play, since the music was the user’s and not from a streaming service. The clicks were tactile (except for on the 3rd gen), and even the click wheel felt tactile, even after it was only a touch surface.

It never felt the same once it went to the iPhone. The iPod lost its soul when it became an app.

I don't miss those times. Walkmen were expensive, good cassettes were expensive, batteries were expensive, cassettes wore out sooner or later, the player's rubber parts wore out and then it damaged the tape, skipping was a pain in the back, sound quality was limited, recording/copying took forever, etc. Nah. As soon as mp3 arrived, I converted everything and never looked back.

Wearing out of the physical medium makes music more valuable, and your experience directly depends on perceived value.

Startup idea: DRM-locked audio files that can only be played once.

I have used in the distant past DRM music files that counted how many plays I had left, but I remember not much of it. I think it was a Nokia phone. Maybe WMA files with PlayReady DRM?

That’s an interesting point. At first glance, the difference is that DRM-locked audio is not your property (or at least it does not feel like that, due to copying being zero cost) whereas the physical medium being worn down is.

That makes sense from a psychological perspective. People generally don't take kindly to artificial scarcity, while natural scarcity (such as number of plays being inherently limited by an otherwise good-enough medium) is much more acceptable, and sometimes even valued.

An interesting anecdote that feels relevant is Wu-Tang Clan's album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which was only released as a single physical copy, and no accompanying download or streaming option. That's an extreme form of artificial scarcity, but that became a part of the artwork itself.

> Wearing out of the physical medium makes music more valuable

In what way? It adds an extra monetary cost to replace the playback medium, and an environmental cost to produce that medium, but does it actually make the music itself any more valuable?

I'll bite even though I don't feel the same as the parent. Imagine a long time ago when you needed performers to get any music at all. Listening to a great musician was an unique, perhaps once in a lifetime experience. Having a limited number of playbacks is similar, makes every instance of playing more valuable in the emotional sense.

But I agree ultimately with your environmental argument.

Yep, would definitely rather see a return of musicians than plastic cassettes.

> In what way?

The answer is in your next sentence. Cost = value.

In fact, the cost can even be infinite if you know that once its fully worn out no equivalent replacement can be obtained for any amount of money (often the case if that cassette/disc issue is no longer manufactured, or if you have an emotional attachment to a particular issue).

> The answer is in your next sentence. Cost = value.

Is it though? I think music had value before we invented money, and will surely continue to do so long after society has collapsed.

I mean cost in utilitarian economical sense, if you don’t use money there’s still cost.

The worn out music may no longer be produced, and may be unlikely every to be produced.

Even if it is produced again, that is a later edition and some people like to own the first edition.

My dad's old car (a 1978 Chrysler New Yorker - beautiful vehicle) has two Dark Side of the Moon 8-tracks in it. When I asked him why he had two copies, he told me "because I wore the first one out!"

Hell of an endorsement for an album!

I went to a latin jazz show this weekend, and Arturo Sandoval played the flower song, from Carmen. He improvised a few blue notes into the melody, it was subtle, and the effect was masterful.

I wishef that they could release to music to YouTube or something, because I'd love to understand the changes that were made to the music.

If they could release it as a limited-time piece, or limited play price, thena lot more people could listen to it.

I know, I know, it's just not that simple, piracy, enshitification, and all that. But it would be really cool to hear it like that again, and a temporary release from the venue would let a lot of other people experience it, and also maybe side step some copyright issues.

Or if they released it on a cassette, and we all collectively agreed that digital music sucks…

I'll the grey beard here but I think that painful skipping (that was present also in vinyls even if a bit differently) forced people to listen to full albums . You cannot really know an artist or judge an album/period if you didn't listen also to the less good songs.

But is it really important to really know them?

Probably not. But some great songs take quite a few listens to gel (this might just be me) and I find if I'm listening to streaming music I am skipping songs and missing out to a certain extent.

Certainly a lot of artists put out albums with a lot of "filler" material, but if I was a new listener trying to pick up (say) David Bowie or Steely Dan or Sufjan Stevens I might miss out on a richer experience by not listening to the whole albums and just skipping to the hits and familiar songs.

Some of my favorite songs are ones I would have missed if I was only listening to the singles or top track list from a streaming service.

It is also quite satisfying to put on a cohesive album that can be enjoyed from start to finish.

i'm still basically a kid but i absolutely feel the pull to just skip through playlists, its like a compulsion and when i do it i find i dont actually enjoy the music as much, even as hard as it is to stop. it feels sorta like doomscrolling on social media feels yknow? i've started putting on albums and forcing myself to just not skip through them and i don't know what it is but it just feels better. i think the difference is that listening to the whole thing is more deliberate

You should try a concept album.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_album

They're like a movie; they have a story to tell. Try Pink Floyd - The Wall.

see also: * Frank Sinatra - _In the Wee Small Hours_ (1955)

* David Bowie - _The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars_ (1972)

* The Who - _Quadrophenia_ (1973)

* Pink Floyd - _The Dark Side of the Moon_ (1973)

* The Streets - _A Grand Don't Come for Free_ (2004)

"as soon as mp3 arrives, i acclimated and cannot look back"

I first started listening to mp3s in the last 90s, didn't fully transition away from listening on CD until 2012, last bought some CDs just a couple months ago, and up until 4 or 5 years ago the vast majority of my music purchases were on CD.

I tell you this to emphasize that my views on digital music are the result of a long drawn-out process, which are: I've got no interest in looking back.

You don't add the electrical motor noise to all your music like an instagram polaroid filter?

I just miss listening to full albums. I know I can, there's nobody stopping me - but something changed in me I think. When I was a kid we didn't have a TV at home so evenings were sitting together and either having discussions or listening to music together (Opeth's Damnation and Deliverance were a staple). We had a room with a beamer that we explicitly used for movie nights. Now I've got a TV show on in the living room while checking stuff out on my phone and still feel like I should be doing more stuff.

Getting off of Spotify has allowed me to switch back to album listening. Buy a record/cd player or for the more advanced rip CDs and use Plexamp (or purchase flac albums if available).

I listen to full albums on spotify all the time. Why would i need to buy anything to do that?

Some people prefer the minimalist approach and avoid all the disturbance from streaming websites, especially playlists or podcasts or just the ability to bounce from an album to another as they make links between artists or period or whatever. I also prefer listening to my mp3/flac collection on an offline player. It helps focusing.

You don't have to, but it does often feel like when you use Spotify that isn't what the app would like you to do. The initial load in heavily steers you towards using a playlist instead and whilst it will occasionally list albums on the home screen it's often broken and will give you a single instead. I'm a huge Spotify user and listen to a lot of albums on it, but there's definitely merits for a more focussed experience like physical media or a digital player.

The audio quality from CD (or FLAC rips, no audiophile voodoo here) is better than what Spotify has to offer.

You certainly can but everything about the UX seems to redirect you to their algos. I also find it really painful to navigate and organise albums on Spotify (maybe there is a way, but I gave up on it a long time ago). Plexamp / playing vinyl works brilliantly for me.

Albums, especially concept albums, are something that I really appreciate. My current (digital) playlists consists of various albums scheduled to play in random order (albums are shuffled, not the tracks themselves), which makes it random enough but still allows me to enjoy the album on it's own.

Talking about concept albums, have you listened to Queen of the Murder Scene by The Warning?

A Rock masterpiece composed by 3 teenage Mexican sisters, in English!

Both Damnation and Deliverance are classic Opeth albums!

I've been trying to get back into the habit of listening to entire albums and have been mostly successful. Even when I search for a single track on Spotify I view the album first and listen all the way through. It's been enriching.

Start by turning the TV off. That's your problem.

It's why I listen to a lot of vinyls. During the day/at work/gaming/coding I generally go for Spotify, but when doing chores, cooking or hanging out with the missus we listen to whole albums a lot.

I think there is something to be said for an album’s native format, eg vinyl for Dark Side of the Moon, cassette for Metallica, CD for Britney Spears. To some extent the artist/production was optimized for the medium.

Unrelatedly, I switched to collecting tapes because a) collecting is still fun and b) tapes are a lot cheaper than vinyl these days.

When I record a vinyl album, I'll often leave in the needle drop and pickup noises.

How often do you record from vinyl to another medium?

Not the OP, but if your taste in music (at least partially) flies under the radar of the streaming sites, you'll find yourself doing it on a regular basis.

Doubly so if whatever music tickles your fancy was released a few decades ago.

I've lots of albums at home which simply aren't released in the digital domain. Both classical and bossa nova, for the most part, but also the occasional pop/rock album. Many of those I've recorded to FLAC so that I can listen to them when anywhere but in front of my turntable.

I have a lot of vinyl that was never released on CD.

Things like the soundtrack to the Kirk Douglas movie "The Vikings".

Also, it's sometimes difficult or even impossible to listen to the original mix of an album on streaming websites, if there's a remaster available.

This annoys me so much! Some artists like The Beatles who have so many different mixes I just have to resort to using YouTube instead of Spotify.

I wanted to listen to Please Please Me last week but Spotify gave me some horrible stereo remix that didn't even sound like the same music. I knew there were already two or remasters issued in mono, one from the 80 and two from the 00s, so figured I'd just append "mono" to my search and they'd all come up. Nope, just the most recent stereo remaster optimized for playback on phone speakers. Went to YouTube and I had the choice of every mix that had been published as well as a rip of the original vinyl pressing and a compilation of the outtakes.

They're all published by the same company too and have the same rights holders so I don't understand why they choose to hide so much of their work.

... Because Spotify is an app to consume music, not to listen to it. They don't want to disturb the casual user who just want to listen to "that tune from the beatles". FLAC and Ripping groups/individuals is where you have to go if you care about mixes or little differences from a medium to another. It's such a joy to dig into an artist and find perfectly crafted rips of early 80s Japanese CDs of Michael Jackson and compare it with the vinyl releases, for example.

I feel your pain, and it's partly why I'm more and more moving from those platforms. It was very useful at first but useful is not how we want to deal with our music.

I guess I just thought of it as an alternative to buying the CDs and that the same variety wouls be available. Back in the day I could go into my local CD shop and choose between the 2009 mono or stereo reissue. Now I have the 2022 stereo mix and nothing else. The album was produced with mono in mind so it seems perverse that it's not available that way. I guess in a few years from now we'll only be able to get the AI enhanced versions that correct the guitar tuning to concert pitch or whatever.

I know I could go to "ripping groups" and everything but Spotify came with the promise of getting the catalogues I wanted with minimal work on my part, in exchange for a monetary payment.

I just searched for "please please me mono" on Spotify and I get a bunch of different versions, including a 2009 mono master.

https://open.spotify.com/track/473McZs08uo5AIimJyAelZ

That's the version from "The Beatles 1962-1966," so remasters of a 1973 remix of the incomplete album in a jumbled up order.

This is a market that piracy serves well.

On a good music tracker, each of those album mixes and each pressing of those mixes are a separate download so you can pick the release that you want to listen to and get to keep it after the fact.

It was also a market served by CD shops. I know I could pirate it. I turned to Spotify because I thought it was offering me a way to exchange money to legally access the same catalogues that were in the physical stores I used to visit.

What I also find annoying is when I try to make mix based on the year the songs were released, and the remasters screw it all up. I’ll play a 00s mix and get a song from the 70s, and the 70s mix will be missing it.

I tried to manually go through my music library and correct this long ago. I only made it into the B’s. Looking up every song was painful, and the discrepancies in when it was released sent me down far too many rabbit holes.

I left the 80's cassette stereo in my 80's car, and only play 80's mixtapes in it.

I need to get my car's cassette player fixed, but can't find someone to do it.

I don't think there's much of a market for repair anymore. If I were you I'd buy a few replacements on ebay and take them to a car stereo place. Ask them to keep swapping until one works

My primary way to play music is from my self-hosted navidrome[1] server with my collection of albums I've mostly purchased from bandcamp. I can stream it to many different devices at home or on the go.

But sitting next to my bed is a Walkman (actually a $10 Jensen version) with a few of my favorite cassettes in the nightstand drawer. Granted, I listen to raw black metal, so the format fits the music well, but I really enjoy just popping in a cassette and hitting play. When I "metaltate", I listen to full albums and do not want to ever be interrupted or have skipping audio due to bluetooth or anything else. It is a really simple and great experience.

Would I ever take my walkman with me or want to carry around a bunch of tapes on a trip? Of course not! But it does have a time and place that is valuable.

When friends come over, we use either vinyl or my custom built RFID cards. There is more of a ceremony to digging through a physical stack of albums and being forced to listen to the album front to back.

[1] https://www.navidrome.org/

Okay, I'm intrigued. Are the custom built RFID cards physical manifestations of albums which you can use to select and play a given album hosted with Navidrome? I'd love to see your setup/some examples.

Yes, exactly! The goal was to make my digital collection physical. So a bunch of cheap RFID cards and a label printer. You can browse through cards and place them on an RFID reader hooked up to a raspberry pi (and my stereo) and it plays the full album.

I have found it is great when people are over as everyone gets to dig through a huge collection of cards and take turns playing their favorites.

I wrote some customer software but it is pretty basic. Basically read the ID of a card and play the corresponding album.

I experienced the joy of ‘old’ technology recently when I bought a Game Boy Micro and Nintendo DS Lite. For hardware that came out in like 2006, it was so expertly designed. It gave me a lot of respect for Nintendo - now, I did sell them like 2 months later because they are total luxuries and unnecessary, but the DS truly brought back some great memories.

In 30 years, people will be nostalgic for TikTok.

I can't imagine that future but it will exist.

It's not that they're nostalgic for tiktok, they're nostalgic for the interactions with other people that they had on tiktok.

Any place where people can interact with others, chat, make jokes, memes and have fun together, will be a source of joy and nostalgia.

In 10 years I think there’ll be nostalgia for the TikTok of today (the early 2020s), even if it still exists.

I feel nostalgia about things from 2014 already.

I'm in love with some of the old tech, but I would not want to go back to those days.

I'm more in love with the advantages of new tech.

The only thing reminding me of the old days is my Miyoo mini+ where I play old SNES and GBA games.

I wonder if we have collectively worse memories than in the past partly for the fact our devices are constantly upgraded and replaced. Likewise fast fashion etc.

As someone who have barely been exposed to these technologies (it's already outdated by the time they got mainstream in the country, and the old is always competing with the new), I can agree with you. Right now, there is a firehose of options aimed at people and I believe we don't have the necessary framework to cope with these. I have some strong memories associated to particular tracks just because they were the only one I've been exposed to at those point of times. With streaming, everything kinda fade into the background, because everything new is instantly available (and there's something new every second). You can watch anything (so you watch nothing because you skip and switch when it's got a bit boring).

It's gotten to a point that I'm restricting myself to a few options filtered some strict criteria for any media. I refrain myself from switching with a combination of friction and self discipline. My music listening is almost always from local media and album centered. I read fiction books only from my ereader and when I switch (slow because of the interface), that means that I don't intend to finish this particular book. This means that I have to either focus on the current item to consume it, or not consume it at all. And for those I do consume, it had lead me to a greater appreciation of the item, just because of the attention I've devoted to it.

I just made the decision to opt out of devices.

All my computing devices are linux PC's (except one Android phone) - despite the UI churn linux in 2024 is much the same as linux in 2004 underneath and I have a reasonable chance of properly troubleshooting any issues.

With Linux you are always the `user` and not the `consumer`, it's a different paradigm.

Despite been a life long nerd, Gadgets have never been a thing I liked so it was easy to just not buy them.

Bro you aren’t running Ubuntu on a Pixel 3a?

Phone makes calls, runs firefox and author.

That’s all I require from it so I just left it alone

> despite the UI churn linux in 2024 is much the same as linux in 2004 underneath

How can you say that? There wasn't any systemd in 2004. You could read the logs with more/less/vi/whatever, ffs!

The devices and media might change more often, but the important stuff -- the content -- is much more persistent than it ever was.

Between 1924 and 1974 the primary format for listening to music only underwent minor changes (78rpm to 33 1/3 rpm; 8track showed up but my understanding is that it was still generally secondary) and new hardware was at least sometimes backward compatible with older media.. Between 1974 and 2024 there have been at least three major primary format changes (vinyl to cd to mp3, four if you count cassette).

But here in 2024 if someone actually wants to listen to music from 50 years earlier, it's incredibly easy. For example, per wiki fifty years ago this week "Boogie Down" by Eddie Kendricks and "Rock On" by David Essex both entered the Billboard top 10, and amazon's willing to sell me digital versions of their containing albums for, respectively, $8 and $9. In 1974 if someone actually wanted to listen to music from 50 years earlier, such as seen here: https://rateyourmusic.com/charts/top/single/1924/ then good luck. Maybe they were re-issued, but you'd probably have to do some legwork to discover that, maybe your grandparents kept their copy and it's still listenable, maybe you've got a really good secondhand record shop nearby, but it'll take effort, gumption, and luck.

Memories for sure, but the Walkman still beats any modern ~7" smartphone with a USB-C jack adapter in terms of usability.

Nostalgia is just another form of depression -Abbie Hoffman

It's interesting in the sense that there are people that like these old things(walkmans/film cameras) even if they were born in smartphone era. I don't think we can call this nostalgia since they haven't even experienced all these things in the first place

Due to work I have to sometimes go fishing in development sites/garage sales/etc related to PC hardware from a couple decades ago (think DOS/win16 era). My experience is that I almost never see anyone who actually experienced those things: almost all these "retro" revivals are caused by young people being hyped by devices they _never_ experienced. So there's zero nostalgia.

I don't know what thrill they get from it but I suppose it's "fake" nostalgia in the sense that they want to go back to a past that they have only heard about it (and thus idealized) in writing or in TV series.

IMHO the people who actually experienced those devices for a long-time know to avoid them like the plague they are.

I’ve felt for a long time that everyone is probably interested in the period of their birth, and particularly the years just before. There’s something uniquely weird feeling about that time — you were technically alive for some of it, and yet it’s totally alien to you.

That’s why I think, for example, twenty year-olds today are interested in early 2000s fashion and computers.

for me for example it's the tactile feedback. Smartphones are boring in tactile sense. On the other hand, taking a photo with a manual film camera is completely different: you must load/unload the film, be careful to not rotate the film too much when getting it back into container, manually adjusting focus, advancing the film and hearing all of this or even manually developing the film for bigger nerds. With walkmans it's probably the same but with cassetes - loading/unloading, connecting headset, all the mechanical sounds, different buttons, wheel volume controls, weird designs and colors. We just don't get this kind of tactile&sound feedback with modern laptops&smartphones and their colors are usually boring too, esp in recent years

My 15 y/o daughter loves CDs and has a small CD player. Why? She can record whatever she likes on them, do custom artwork and give them to friends. Even if they never play it, they have something tangible and interesting.

Sending playlists to friends using iMessage just isn't the same.

So cool!

I used to live in a college town while in my late 30s. I went to the drug store to pick up some things around when kids were moving into the dorms. The place was packed with kids picking up photos they wanted prints of. I thought photo labs where becoming a thing of the past, and would soon be removed, if they hadn’t been already, but no. Turned out they wanted the photos to decorate their rooms. As someone who has never printed a digital photo, this concept never crossed my mind.

there's something about older technology like tape and old CRT displays where the fundamental inner workings are so different to how they're done now but are still totally understandable, sometimes it feels like modern hardware is just magic rocks that make have electricity go in and lights come out, but looking at the older stuff feels more interesting because it's easier to understand without having to abstract it as much

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