How does a Walkman Work?

The introduction of the Walkman was a great leap towards portable music players. Sony came up with the Walkman in 1979, a portable music player without a record function. It was aggressively marketed among the common masses in Japan and it soon became a rage in public. Walkman, which was originally the brand name used for portable audio video players brought in by Sony, is today a synonym for portable music players.

How does a Walkman Work?
The cassette-based Walkman hit the markets in 1979. It had two headphone jacks and a hotline facility to enable the speaking over a microphone. Walkman Professional, which came to the markets in 1984, had recording level meters and manual control over the recording levels. Towards the end of the 1990s, cassette-based Walkman became less popular with the advent of CD music technologies. To make it possible for a walkman to play CD music, the devices began using the electronic skip protection method of reading the music and buffering it. The Network Walkman became available in a wide range of storage capacities. It made use of flash memory to store data. The very popular MP3 players of today use a built-in active noise control technology, which blocks the surrounding noise, thus facilitating clarity in music. DAPs that support a noise cancellation feature further enable the users to listen to music clearly.

Basically, for a Walkman to play a digital music, the digital signals need to be converted to analog signals. Before an audio player plays back a file, the audio file undergoes digitization and compression. A digital file is a series of 1s and 0s. An algorithm for converting the analog signals to digital ones measures the digital signal to find the sampling rate. The samples are used in the creation of an analog representation of the sound. A small unit of CD quality sound utilizes a fairly large storage space. Hence the digital signals need to be compressed. Codecs are the algorithms used to compress the audio songs with minimal loss of sound quality.

During the process of playing back an audio file, the player brings about a transformation of digital signals to analog audio signal that are an exact representation of the digital ones. The analog signals are then amplified and sent over the headphone wires. The sound signals reaching the human ear are interpreted by the human brain as songs. While ears perceive the audio signals, which are a part of music, the human brain is the one that interprets the melody in the music it receives by means of the ears.

The quality of music depends on the DAC chip in the player, the quality of the digital file as also the distortion that the audio devices circuits contribute. In case of cassette-based Walkman, it is the quality of taping the cassette and the distortion added by the interference of the circuitry, that determine the quality of sound produced by the Walkman.

With the advancements in technology, Walkman brought in the techniques to play video files. One of the latest and most popular developments in Walkman is the inclusion of the Bluetooth technology, whereby connecting wireless headphones has become possible. Walkmans available today have very high memory capacities, excellent voice qualities and brilliant designs.

Walkman, formerly a Sony trade name is today, the synonym of the most popular portable audio players of the day.