There’s a specific look to portable media from the 80s, and it probably has something to do with a portable cassette player known as the “Walkman”.
Long before the portable discs gave way to MP3s and eventually the phones we rock now, thin rectangles of tape and sound were wound and unwound next to our ears connected to bare-basic headphones covered in foam.
You may remember them fondly, though these days we’ve largely moved on to larger styles with bigger pads and better sound.
The world has changed a lot for portable audio since 1979, and the technology has improved greatly. But if you miss that retro vibe, the idea is coming back in various ways.
We saw it earlier this year in a pair of retro foam-covered wired headphones from French outfit We Are Rewind, and now the maker of the Walkman, Sony, is also getting in on the action.
In what is possibly the most budget-focused device Sony has released in ages, the MDR-3R is a reinvention of the MDR-3, Sony’s basic portable headphones that were once wired and plugged into its Walkman tape players in the early 80s.
Things have changed a bit, and these aren’t technically the MDR-3 headphones, having been re-engineered to use the approach of the 23mm driver, but with a built-in microphone, in-line remote, and the USB-C connection devices rely on today.
In short, the MDR-3R is a recreation of a retro classic, and a reinvention for folks living with a modern media player — a phone, basically — but after a wired retro experience.
At $89.95 in Australia, the Sony MDR-3R isn’t exactly expensive, but also misses out on premium features such as noise cancellation, focused on the old-style experience of headphones from over 40 years ago.
And even though Stranger Things has been finished for a while, Netflix’s 80s adventure does make sense as a collaborative tie-in, so Sony has one of those for $10 more, set for release a little later.
Australians can expect the standard model shortly, though, with the regular $90 MDR-3R arriving with both orange and blue foam pads, while the Stranger Things edition changes it to black and red.
