PHOTO CREDIT: A Sony Walkman WM-2/PHOTO CREDIT: Felicity McCabe/The Guardian
Last year, Ip mounted an exhibition in Hong Kong displaying many of his boxed Walkmans. “This is one of my missions in Walkman collecting,” he says – to let a new generation experience it. At the exhibition, many young attenders were “seeing a cassette player for the first time”, and often had only a vague idea of them from films or their parents. “Most were genuinely curious. They were intrigued by its mechanics.”
Walkman-collecting, it seems, conforms to most tech-collector stereotypes: men in their 40s, 50s and 60s, recalling their youthful encounters with a then-nascent, exciting technology. As Ip says, “When you have a Walkman, and you have a cassette to play on it, you can go out to the street to listen to the music, and all the memories come back.”
On Stephen Ho’s eBay page, he lists old but pristine Walkmans for up to £2,999. Though, he admits, he rarely expects to sell his most expensive wares. They are largely on the site to display the extent of his vast collection and to signal the quality of what he has on offer. Mainly he sells cheaper ones when he has duplicates.
Ho, who is in his late 50s, is also from Hong Kong. He is retired now, but in the 1990s he had a job in Sony’s marketing department, working on the launch of the MiniDisc during the great “format war” between that product and Philips’s DCC player.
“Because I grew up with Sony products and I worked for Sony, I have a passion for their products,” he says. Electronic gadgets from his teenage years in the 80s are his poison. “During those years, Sony was like Apple nowadays. I was a normal teenager. I had Sony Walkman, Sony radio, everything Sony.”
In 2020, he moved to the UK under the BNO visa, allowing Hongkongers to resettle after the Chinese government crackdown on the city’s semi-autonomous status. He brought his collection, which includes hundreds of Walkmans, Discmans and MiniDisc players. He rarely pays more than £500 for an item, but he also owns one of the Tiffany special editions, for which he was willing to go higher (“Less than £2,000,” he says). But he says he’ll never put that up for sale.
He claims to be downsizing and shows me a loft room in his home in Reading, Berkshire, with drawers filled with Sony products. And yet, “I’m buying more than I’m selling,” he jokes. When we speak, he is shortly due to take a trip to Japan to find more at street markets.
There are models that were only sold in Japan, while DIY makers in China are keeping the old products alive. “Since the price of Walkmans has gone so high, people are making spare parts, which makes their lifespan longer.” There are curious ways in which older products can outlast newer, more hi-tech ones. “New things use built-in rechargeable batteries,” he says. “Once the battery is dead, the machine is dead. For old stuff they use normal batteries.”
He also likens it to older and classic cars: the mechanics were simpler, more analogue, so it is easier to tinker with and make spare parts for older models. Similarly with complex modern devices, the tech “is so tiny, so small, you can’t do it by yourself”. But with Walkmans “because of 3D-printing technology, they can print those parts. Which also extends the lifespan.”
Ho puts potential buyers into two categories. Younger people jumping on to a new trend for something old, and, inevitably, an older group that grew up with the technology. “Before social media, it was limited to older generations,” he says. “But since social media –Instagram, Facebook, whatever – teenagers have been exposed to old stuff. Old guys are buying for their memories. Young people are buying to try. They think it’s trendy, it’s interesting. It’s not limited to the Walkman; the prices for CCD [digital] cameras are rocket-high on eBay”.
