The Walkman...Good Times

i had an aiwa portable tape player and then an aiwa version of the discman. they were pieces of shit, but they were cheap, so when they broke at the same rate as the discman/walkman it was much cheaper to replace.

 

Man, that yellow one worked well for me for a long time.

I remember slipping in an Ice-T "Fuck the Police" tape a few times until Dad confiscated it. Then my buddy hooked me up with another copy.

 

Can't agree with this one, Beej.

I didn't deal with Walkmans, but I was one of the first with a Sony Discman. Paid $140 for it during my senior year in HS ... lasted me through college.

It also explains why I've had many of my CDs for more than 15 years and, combined with compromised sound quality with mp3s and iPods, why I haven't bothered with anything else. When the technology allows those downloads with less loss of sound quality, I'm probably in.

 

Dude, like three of those damned Sony's broke on me...and they were no good for XC either, except at those interminable Yale indoor meets (as you well know).

 

I remember when Aerosmith's "Pump" got the scratch treatment at Yale in 1990. I was so fucking pissed. I wasn't going to run for another 18 hours or so and now I couldn't even listen to the CD player. I'd like to blame my pisspoor performance at that meet on the Discman, but I think we all know the truth.

I think that was it for the Discman, honestly. I bought tapes for the next couple years, even after I got that reconditioned CD player a few months later, because I hated dubbing CDs and trying to hear them on the Walkman. The sound quality was always crap.

Lots of good memories, though, of filling up a bag with tapes and trying to figure out the best order in which to listen to them. Always wanted to end the bus ride to the meet with a tape that pumped me up. And yes, back then we used terms like "pumped me up" with no sense of irony. And we liked it!

 

Good stuff. I can tell you for sure that the discman had no positive impact on my performance. I tried to use it to pump me up--though in my more recent day, it was probably "get psyched" or even "get stoked."