The Last Walkman
Ten years ago the announcement that Sony stopped producing the Walkman in Japan made the WM-FX290/WM-290W the last cassette Walkman sold in America.
Nowadays personalized music is firmly associated with smartphones and streaming music services, but back in 1980s it was about listening to your own mixtape while navigating city streets, riding subway, exercising or doing homework.
The 1980s was the decade of the fierce development of the Walkman, but by 1990s it became an every-day appliance, and Sony started removing features from mass-produced models, not adding them.
The FX290 is definitely a mass-produced model, more than 2 million of them have been made, priced at $30. For comparison, the original TPS-L2 Walkman was sold for $200; adjusted for inflation, it was about 20 times more expensive than the FX290.
The FX290 was originally released in 2004. After a mild refresh in 2008 it remained the only Walkman sold by Sony in the U.S. for the next two years until Sony finally has pulled the plug.
It is is smaller than the TPS-L2 in every dimension, it is lighter, and uses just one AA battery instead of two.
Like the TPS-L2, the FX290 has no tape type selector, no auto-reverse, and no Dolby noise reduction system.
It is a rather handsome machine compared to some hideous designs that Sony have made. The front panel is adorned with an LCD screen that shows settings for mega bass and the volume limiter.
The playback pushbuttons are upside down, an oversight uncharacteristic for Sony. It is because technically the gray side is the top side.
This may look a bit unconventional, but there are benefits to this arrangement. The cassette door has no buttons or switches, it is barely more than a dust cover, and because it is now on the back, it does not need to look fancy.
A huge issue with the last generation of cheap Sony Walkmans is that the cassette door on most of them is made of transparent plastic painted silver or bronze or gray, and when the paint rubs off, it looks like this:
On the FX290 the cassette door is made of barely translucent cadet grey plastic and is not painted, so it handles scuffs with dignity. The other side tightly integrates the rubberized buttons and the screen into the circuit board. The door for a single AA battery is on the bottom. There is no socket to connect external power adapter.
Whether you listen to a regular ferric tape, or a chrome tape, or a prerecorded tape with Dolby noise reduction — you cannot adjust the playback to match the tape type, because there is no tape type selector and no Dolby decoder. On the other hand, after listening to two dozen tapes on this Walkman I felt that I was not losing much in the audio quality department.
I don’t know what Sony did here, but normal or chrome, Dolby or no Dolby, most tapes produced pleasing, not overly bright or overly hissy, sound. I must say that the Walkman generates its own hiss, probably because of insufficient shielding or noisy amplifier. The hiss turns into growl when mega bass is engaged. And it does not like when its nemesis, a smartphone, sits nearby, letting through clicks and pops.
Speed and pitch stability, known as wow & flutter, is quite decent for a $30 Walkman: about 0.17% WRMS. The tape speed is accurate within 0.1%! Few component decks are that good.
I suppose that Sony marketing people decided that radio is more important than noise reduction, so instead of installing a Dolby decoder they outfitted this Walkman with a digital radio tuner. The 2008 version has AM, FM and Weather bands and stores up to 33 presets total. The original 2004 variant could in addition tune to audio track from terrestrial television channels 2 through 13, and could store up to 40 presets. The radio cannot receive digital radio programming, despite that HD Radio standard has been adopted by 2002.
All in all, I am surprised by how much I liked it. It nicely fits into the palm of my hand and is almost as small and solid as more expensive all-metal Walkmans with soft-touch buttons and remote control. If you are looking for a Walkman to play your tapes — or your dad’s tapes — this would be a stylish and inexpensive option, there are many of these on eBay and in thrift stores.
And because this is the last Walkman sold in the U.S., its internals, in particular, the rubber belt that drives the capstan and the spools, will likely be in better shape than on older models from 1990s or 1980s.
Have fun playing tapes!
