My Walkman Clonies & Clunkers....................

Been meaning to find some of my clonies & post them for ages!!

Those that are familiar with me will know I am a lover of all things generic & cloned in the boombox world - Well I'm the same with walkmans or personal cassette players as we called them in 1980

I have nothing special at all, just some great oldies I remember & of course my first ever player, a Harvard LMR-1 AKA as seen here the Unisef TU1, identical in every way!!

£27.99 in 1981 from Argos (of course) & supplied with the worst ever pair of headphones - they were junked & I toddled off to the Southern Electricity Board shop in town & spent the remaining £15 of my birthday cash on a pair of Audio Technica Walkman style headphones which were a massive improvement!! Think about what those phnes would cost now

Wish I could remember the model..................they were amazing for the money

The lesson I learnt straight away is that the 'Orion' built Harvard was actually pretty damn good!! A Sony was way out of my reach at the time, however what I had was all metal cased with a decent (if a little noisy) tape transport but it was stable even on the move & had no 'extras' just cue & review, autostop in all modes & it went loud!! Think the headphones helped as they had a high sensitivity level unlike the mickey mouse phones supplied!!

I will always treasure that machine as it was my first & I loved it!!

The others here are all machines I owned or wanted to own through the 80's & all of these work just as they should, all have their 'leather' cases still lol which helps keep them presentable!!

The only oddity here is an Auritone travel clock radio cassette recorder - These were sold exclusively through mail order & ridiculously overpriced too

I had to save this one - it is 100% mint & came with it's suede carry case & instruction book!!

I paid peanuts for it too lol & it's a real piece of 80's nostalgia & works perfectly I doubt it was ever used as it is in BNIB condition!!


That's all for now until I dig out some more clonies & the odd clunker

Those are beautiful, Nick. I especially like that Auritone with the LCD clock. And where in the world did you find that WH Smith walkman??

Both on Ebay in the vintage radio section - Always wanted an Auritone like this one - extremely rare & clear memories of seeing this in the sunday magazines around 1980!!

The WH Smith player sounds better than the rest by a long way...........Not what you would expect at all...............both tape & radio are very good!!


https://youtu.be/gEeZGs7X-Bk


https://youtu.be/3bG9nRx11Ps

Nice work, I like the fact that these are all 'regular' shape with non of the cheapo blobby things that appeared later. The one and only new Walkman I ever bought was a silver Sony WM-7 in 1983 which has long since departed my hands but I'm determined to get another of these. In the meantime I have three other Walkmans that I'd say would fall into the category of halfway between 'regular' shape and outright 'blobby'.

I have the Unisef one in the box. I had and Audiosonic version BITD. Looks like they brand manufactured the ass out of it!

sir, don't you want to swap this WH Smith ?