In December 1989 Sony released what many still regard as the greatest cassette Walkman ever built. It was called the WM-DD9, though among collectors and audiophiles it earned another name: the Walkman King. To understand why, you have to remember where Sony stood at the end of the eighties. The Walkman had turned ten years old and sold well over a hundred million units yet the format itself was running out of road.
Compact Discs were becoming mainstream and portable CD players were improving quickly. Even inside Sony there were plans for new recordable digital formats that would one day replace tape. But Sony’s engineers refused to let the cassette go quietly. They wanted to show the world just how good a portable cassette player could be when cost was no object and every detail was pushed to the limit. The result was the WM-DD9, a machine built not for the masses but for the purists.
