Collectors Snap Up Early MP3 Players

An anonymous reader writes "It looks like vintage MP3 portables are the hot new collectible for old radio connoisseurs. On the cover of this month's edition of Antique Radio Magazine is Sony's first DAP, the Vaio Music Clip. The cover article is the second part of a series showcasing the first players by Sony, RCA, I2Go, and Intel (remember the Pocket Concert?). Part one, which was published in the December 2004 edition, covers the first flash unit the Eiger Labs MPMan F10 (the Rio PMP300 was second), and the first hard drive player the Personal Jukebox PJB-100. CNET also wrote about these first players last January, offering more details on the MPMan and the PJB-100"

Collectors or memoribilia? hahahahhahahahhahahaa

[Dancin_Santa]

These nostalgia cycles are getting shorter and shorter. How much nostalgia can you really have for an outdated piece of hardware that appeared and disappeared 2 years ago?

Vintage MP3 Players = Vintage Walkmans = Absurd.

[Beautyon]

Who has ever heard of an original SONY Walkman going for collectors prices?

There are some on ebay [ebay.com], for the princely sum of $11, meaning they are just hovering above junk now.

The same thing will probably happen to these 1st gen digital players.

Re:Vintage MP3 Players = Vintage Walkmans = Absurd

[robson]

The interesting thing is that my first Walkman, a Sony F5, was build like a bloody tank. That is to say, it lasted me a good 10 years before it finally broke down. No [tape-playing] walkman I've owned since has held up as well. It seems that, after a certain point of maturity, many industries settles on a disposable approach to product design and construction.

(Also, I'd like you damn kids to get off my lawn.)

This isn't about nostalgia... YET

[Dogtanian]

I might have missed it skimming through the comments, but it seems odd that no-one's come to the rather obvious conclusion that this isn't about nostalgia- at least, not for most of the people buying them at present.

Put simply, it's about investment. These people have seen the boom in interest in "retro" computing and electronics, reckon that they'll be worth something in the future, so they're snapping them up now, and driving the prices up.

Of course, whether the resultant increase in prices, and people keeping/selling their old players instead of binning them means it is now worth it is debatable. Personally, I think a lot of people are going to be disappointed.

At one stage a few years ago (96-97) I was convinced that 8-bit computers would grow in value as a result of a "retro" nostalgia boom. Well, that was half true, but the simple fact is that, except for the rarer machines (e.g. Sinclair ZX80 in good condition can easily fetch UKP 200.00), most old computers were so widely-produced that they'll never be worth that much. I've seen Sinclair ZX Spectrums in a games-shop window for UKP 100.00, but that's with high-street chain retail mark-up (for lazy nostalgics who can't be arsed getting them on eBay for 30.00). Unless you have one of the rarer models (e.g. short-lived Timex-Sinclair bastardised Spectrum), you're not going to make tons of money without some effort. Ditto the C64.

Back to the subject; is anyone *seriously* getting nostalgic for those silly little 32MB devices that were the first widely-available MP3 players 5 or 6 years back?

Even then, I thought they were rubbish. You'd have been lucky if you could get a whole album at 128Mbps on them, which you had to transfer manually via the (typically?) parallel connection. I was still listening to cassettes back then, and all things considered, they (or portable CD players) were a better bet at the time. The MP3 players were for geeks and "boys toys" gadget freaks.

Re:MPTrip CD MP3 Player - January 2000!!

[SA Stevens]

Be careful. iPod investors (anybody who has sunk all that money into one with it's fixed) get pretty upset when you tell them you can get 7 gigs (ten CDR disks) of removable MP3 storage on YOUR player for a couple bucks. They start rambling about size, etc.

It's a tradeoff, for certain, but there's no clear 'advantage' to flash, hard drive, or CD-based players that means the other formats aren't good too. But don't tell that to people who've bought into a fashion trend.

Re:This isn't about nostalgia... YET

[sootman]

I like significant stuff (might not have been the first, but if I could pick up a Rio cheap, I just might) but I've been finding that as we reach the hockey-stick-shaped part of Moore's Law, "interesting" just isn't enough, especially if you have limited space.

I've wanted an SGI O2 for a while and recently got one, cheap, but I haven't done much with it--as cool as it is, there's only so much you can do with 200 MHz and 64 MB these days. Use it as a test server? No reason to, my slowest machine--an 800 MHz G3 iBook--is faster.

A 32 MB Rio might be nice, but that's, what, 6 songs at 192kbps? It's not like a tube amp that you listen to just to hear what old gear sounds like. I'm pretty sure the first half of "Licensed to Ill" sounds about the same on a Rio as it does on my iPod. The difference being, with the iPod, I can go on and listen to 3,000 other songs.