Sony Walkman WM-FX281
In 2001, when analog tape had lost to shiny digital discs, and the shiny discs were about to lose to the iPod, Sony released a cassette Walkman. What Sony’s management was smoking?
Sony’s designers definitely were smoking something, coming with such a look. It looks like a snake head, a larvae, a rotten fruit, a loopy child of a psychedelic trip, not an electronic device. Its appearance reminds me of a scene from Roger Zelazny’s Coils in which Donald, the main character, is hallucinating when flying an airplane:
My drink arrived — a sickly yellow-green in color, with drops of an oily substance floating on its surface. I took it and closed my eyes. I sniffed it. It was Scotch. I took a large swallow and coughed. It was Scotch.
I suggest doing the same: close your eyes and trust your other senses, trust your fingers. Count the buttons — Stop, Fast Forward, Play and Rewind. No auto-reverse buttons on the FX281. Where do I put a cassette? The front panel does not open, but the back panel does: the tape mechanism is here! The tape section is based on a 1994 mechanism, which is made of metal.
The cassette door is made of barely translucent plastic, it is not painted, has no buttons or switches, and its main function is to protect the tape mechanism and a cassette from dust. If it breaks off, the Walkman would still work.
Where do batteries go? It is time to open your eyes, as you will never figure this out with the eyes closed: a narrow cover on the side opens a cavity for two AA batteries.
A small hole on the bottom is not for connecting an external power adapter, it is to adjust tape speed with a narrow screwdriver.
Tape type can be selected from the menu, Dolby decoder is absent. The radio has 40 presets. In addition to good old AM and FM the FX281 and FX481 can receive Weather Channel forecasts and can decode audio track from analog terrestrial television channels 2 through 13. The woman who sold this Walkman to me used it to listen to a TV soap opera. After analog TV switch-off in 2009 this feature became useless.
All in all, this is not the prettiest Sony Walkman, but it is a competent cassette player and radio tuner, and there are tons of these on eBay, so if you want a relatively modern player, that is, one that is less than twenty years old, then the FX281 would be a solid choice.
Just ask the seller to make sure it does not sounds “stretchy” and “wobbly” when playing a tape.
Have fun playing tapes!
