Sony Walkman WM-EX560
The WM-EX560 is a cassette player from Sony, sitting one rung below the most expensive and coveted ultra-compact models.
Like its more expensive cousins, it is a slim machine with metal body. It can be controlled via a remote control or via soft-touch buttons on the body. It is strictly a cassette player, it has no radio tuner. It has all the essential functions for a cassette player:
- It is reasonably small, with enough metal to feel substantial and expensive.
- It offered good sound quality, when it was new.
- All functions can be controlled via remote.
- If the remote is not available, all functions can be controlled from the player itself.
- Bass Boost provides a nice kick to low frequencies and is the must for everything but classical music.
- Dolby B Noise Reduction is the must if one wants to listen to pre-recorded tapes, almost all of them are recorded with Dolby encoder.
- Song Skip helps finding the next song by scanning tape for pauses.
Unlike its more expensive cousins, the WM-EX560 is powered with a cheap and ubiquitous AA battery, not from “gumstick” rechargeable battery, common for Japanese domestic models.
The particular machine on the photo is more than twenty years old, so it does not work as well as it did when it was new. It does not always start playing form the first attempt, and does not always switch playback direction. Its wow and flutter parameters are way out of specs. This is a device from a long-gone era of analog music, when playback machines must be kept in top-notch condition to reproduce music faithfully.
We are fortunate that nowadays we can listen to digital music, and the playback devices have no moving parts.
