Personal stereo
Encyclopedia
Portable audio player
A portable audio player is a personal mobile device that allows the user to listen to recorded audio while mobile. Sometimes a distinction is made between a portable player, battery-powered and with one or more small loudspeakers, and a personal player, listened to with earphones.-History:Portable...
using an audiocassette player
Cassette deck
A cassette deck is a type of tape recorder for playing or recording audio compact cassettes. A deck was formerly distinguished from a recorder as being part of a stereo component system, while a recorder had a self-contained power amplifier...
. This allows the listening of music through headphones
Headphones
Headphones are a pair of small loudspeakers, or less commonly a single speaker, held close to a user's ears and connected to a signal source such as an audio amplifier, radio, CD player or portable Media Player. They are also known as stereophones, headsets or, colloquially, cans. The in-ear...
while a person is mobile. The first personal stereo was the Stereobelt
Stereobelt
The Stereobelt was the first portable personal stereo audio cassette player. It was invented by the German-Brazilian Andreas Pavel. The Stereobelt was the ancestor of the Walkman and modern-day personal audio devices such as the Zune and the iPod....
invented and patent
Patent
A patent is a form of intellectual property. It consists of a set of exclusive rights granted by a sovereign state to an inventor or their assignee for a limited period of time in exchange for the public disclosure of an invention....
ed by Andreas Pavel
Andreas Pavel
Andreas Pavel is a German-Brazilian inventor who is the 'father' of the portable personal stereo cassette player, better known as the Walkman....
in 1977. Pavel attempted to commercialise this invention but failed to do so. The first commercial personal stereo was the Sony
Sony
, commonly referred to as Sony, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan and the world's fifth largest media conglomerate measured by revenues....
Walkman
Walkman
Walkman is a Sony brand tradename originally used for portable audio cassette, and now used to market Sony's portable audio and video players as well as a line of Sony Ericsson mobile phones...
released in 1979, created by Akio Morita
Akio Morita
Akio Morita KBE was a Japanese businessman and co-founder of Sony Corporation along with Masaru Ibuka.-Early life:...
, Masaru Ibuka
Masaru Ibuka
Masaru Ibuka was a Japanese electronics industrialist. He co-founded what is now Sony....
(the co-founders of Sony) and Kozo Ohsone
Kozo Ohsone
is the Japanese manager for Sony who was credited as one of the main developers of the Walkman. While general manager of the Tape Recorder Business Division he was asked to help develop a portable audio player. Ohsone and his staff modified the existing Pressman device to create the Walkman, which...
.
Further reading
- Erlmann, Veit (ed.) Hearing Cultures. Essays on Sound, Listening, and Modernity, New York: Berg Publishers, 2004. Cf. Chapter 9: "Thinking About Sound, Proximity, and Distance in Western Experience: The Case of Odysseus's Walkman" by Michael Bull.