1979 in Hi-Fi

On July 1, 1979, Sony released the TPS-L2 in Japan — the original Walkman, though it launched under different names in different markets (Soundabout in the US, Stowaway in the UK). Built from the body of an existing Pressman cassette recorder with the recording circuitry stripped out, it was the first portable stereo cassette player designed purely for private listening on headphones rather than public playback or field recording. Sony's own sales projections were modest at first, but the Walkman sold far beyond expectations and, within a couple of years, changed the basic assumption of what "listening to music" meant — something you could now do anywhere, alone, on your own terms.

It's worth noting the Walkman sits a little outside this archive's usual focus on full home hi-fi systems, but its impact on the audio industry as a whole in 1979 is hard to overstate — it opened up an entirely new, enormous market for personal audio that hadn't really existed before.