What was the first-ever portable music player?

(Credits: Far Out / Wikimedia / Jon Tyson / Lee Campbell)

Fri 8 November 2024 14:30, UK

In the modern age, the ability to carry your musical library around in your pocket is often taken for granted. With the colossal rise of smartphones and streaming services, music fans have instant access to an unimaginable quantity of musical material from across the globe, going back hundreds of years. Clearly, though, this has not always been the case. So, when did music, as an art form, become accessible enough to carry on your person from day to day?

To understand the rise of portable music players and personal stereos, it is important to acknowledge the changing history of music formats. There was once a time when music listening was relegated almost exclusively to the home for people who could afford expensive hi-fi systems and enough space to store stacks upon stacks of vinyl records, shellac discs, or even wax cylinders; if you go back far enough. 

While some efforts were made to make vinyl records more portable, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s, with the rise of the 45 rpm single, the delicate nature of the format meant that it could never be a truly portable format – nobody was ever going to walk around with a 12” record in their pockets. The advent of tapes birthed the first instances of portability in music. Reel-to-reel tapes were relatively accessible to the general public and small enough to fit into a bag or fairly sizable pocket, but the equipment used to play them was not exactly up to scratch.

Tape reels and recorders first became a consumer item during the 1950s, giving the public a chance to record their own tapes and play them through portable recorders. However, these recorders, at least in the early days, were so expensive that few general music listeners could afford to buy them. What’s more, the portable tape recorders of that era had pretty terrible sound quality, resulting from tinny in-built speakers.

In 1962, Philips created the compact cassette, an audio format which would completely revolutionise the music industry. In contrast to reel-to-reel tapes, cassettes were cheap, abundant, and accessible enough for the general user. In the first decade or so of cassette tapes, users were still confined to portable recorders or expensive home stereos. However, that all changed in 1979 when Sony introduced the Walkman. 

The Sony Walkman was the first-ever truly portable music player, and it took the world by storm. Given that it used a headphone jack instead of in-built speakers, the sound quality of cassettes played on the portable machines was much better, and the stereos themselves were fairly cheap in comparison to hi-fi systems and some portable cassette recorders. The Walkman sold incredibly well and led virtually every other technology firm to get in on the idea that Sony had pioneered.

In the years that followed its initial introduction, the Walkman was able to adapt to the changing landscape of music formats. When the cassette tape was replaced by the CD, Sony, along with a variety of other companies, introduced portable CD players in a very similar vein to the original cassette Walkman. The next major development in portable music players came with the rise of MP3 and digital downloads, which, in turn, gave rise to MP3 players and, of course, the iPod.

But do cassette tapes sound bad?

It is a common misconception that compact cassette tapes have inherently poor sound quality. While the sound quality of a cassette pales in comparison to, for instance, a CD or an MP3 file, certain cassette tapes are capable of sounding just as clear and crisp as any other format. The issue with cassette tapes usually lies within the machines that are used to play them. Particularly during the cassette’s 1980s heyday, the most common cassette players were cheap, low-quality boomboxes and personal stereos.

In contrast, if you listen to a cassette recording – particularly one of those sought-after Type IV metal tapes – on a high-quality, audiophile hi-fi system, the sound quality of the cassette can be truly incredible. Plus, its cheap nature and customizability have never really gone out of style, as can be seen with the recent resurgence of tapes as a format. 

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