The time when you had to listen to your music sat in your living room has been left far behind. The Japanese manufacturer Sony was the first company to free the listener when it introduced the popular Walkman in 1979. This product used the traditional cassette, which was listened to via earphones and could be carried everywhere. In the last 20 years, this concept has evolved considerably and you can now find a wide range of formats and portable audio products.

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Cassette
Although only Sony products can use the Walkman brand, this name has spread to encompass all portable cassette players. This is one of the few surviving examples of analogue players that are far less advanced than digital systems. However, its low price, the ease with which you can record a tape from the radio and the number of cassettes that users still have at home have enabled it to survive. The players themselves get smaller, more stylised and increasingly hi-tech, with facilities to optimise audio quality and reduce hiss.

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Portable Compact Disc (CD)
Since Sony and Philips invented the CD in 1982, it has become the audio format of choice. A little while after its launch, the first players were introduced. They were fairly large compared to current models and had very low battery life. They were also very unpractical as any movement caused the CD to jump. The current models, however, have anti-shock systems, a high battery life and are far easier to carry around.

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MiniDisc (MD)
Also launched by Sony in 1992, with the aim of de-throning the then popular cassette. However, despite having a recording quality that was far superior to the tape and being able to reproduce digitally, it never achieved success in Europe. In Japan and, to a lesser extent, in the U.S. it has been a huge success and MD sales match CD sales. The MiniDisc is slightly smaller in size than that a tape and the MD players and recorders currently on the market are supremely stylish machines with fantastic audio quality.

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MP3
This is currently the king of audio formats. Its CD quality and, above all, its high compression, makes it the ideal format with which to carry music everywhere. MP3 reduces the size of a song file up to 12 times, practically without loss of quality. Hence a normal CD can carry up to 200 songs if compressed into MP3s. This means having virtually the entire musical output of The Beatles or The Rolling Stones on a single disk. The vast majority of CD players are now compatible with MP3, although it is more usual to save MP3s dowloaded from the net on small memory cards that are later introduced into MP3 players. The current models are extraordinarily tiny and can fit an ever greater number of tracks in this format.

MUZE128 MP3 player by Sistemas Ibertr�nica
It is the world�s smallest portable audio player weighing in at 27 grams and measuring 6.7cm by 4.5cm. In spite of its size, it can store over 30 songs or can be used as a recorder for up to four hours of conversation thanks to its integrated microphone and its 128 megabytes of memory. It has an energy-saving facility, USB port for easy computer connection and a graphic equaliser that allows you to choose the type of music: rock, classical, pop and jazz.

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