DIGITAL L.A. : WALKMAN'S GREATEST STRIDE YET.

Byline: David Bloom 

About 20 years ago, a little blue and silver aluminum box from Sony called the Soundabout trickled onto the market for the first time.

It was designed to play the relatively new cassette-tape format, and came with two earphone jacks - so a couple could listen to music together - and a microphone that allowed them to talk to each other at the same time.

Soon enough, however, the name and the double jacks were eliminated. With this device, unlike every other music-making device in history, folks wanted to keep these tunes to themselves. Sony quickly had a monster hit on its hands, and a whole new product genre to exploit with its typical marketing aplomb: personal electronics.

Thus the Walkman was born, and it soon became an essential part of the ``Me'' generation, as seemingly every sweaty jogger or workout buff had the little box strapped to a thigh or waist, bopping to his or her own personal soundtrack.

Hundreds of models and 100 million units later (that's roughly one Walkman for every household in America), Sony still is selling the darned things, but there have been a few changes since 1979.

First came the ``sport'' models, with their water-resistant yellow exteriors, in 1983, as part of a dizzying array of looks that most recently is reflected in the company's way-over-the-top ``Psyc'' designs.

Then came the Discman, the Walkman's equally successful compact-disc cousin. More recently, the company rolled out what it hoped would be a natural successor to those durable formats with the MD Walkman, which uses Sony's Minidisc format.

I recently tried out one of the new MD Walkmans, the top-end MZ-R55, which plays back and records music, and retails for $299. Sony sells other, less expensive MD Walkmans, both with and without recording capability, as well as Minidisc components for your home stereo system.

I do have to say MZ-R55 is pretty cool, with a high Nifty Gadget Factor, though it's not an unqualified success to my hard-to-please mind.

The machine - a tiny slab of brushed magnesium alloy that can be covered by my (admittedly large) palm - is barely larger than the Minidiscs it uses to record and play back music.

The Minidiscs themselves are actually like a tiny hard drive and look somewhat like a really, really small Syquest removable drive.

Sony uses the ATRAC compression method to stuff about 74 minutes of stereo music on the 160-megabyte Minidiscs, the same amount of sound a CD can hold. Switch to monaural format, and you can record twice as much, useful when you want to record speeches and other low-tech sound. Some prerecorded Minidiscs are also being sold (it helps that Sony also owns Sony Music).

The result? Good-quality sound, certainly on a par with a good cassette recording, though it does seem somehow thinner than the original CD.

As with a hard drive, when you want to reorder the sequence of tunes, or ditch a song you no longer want, it only requires a quick trip to the disc's table of contents track.

Once you're in the table of contents area, you can swap or kill the music tracks elsewhere on the disc with relative ease, provided you have electronically marked tracks as you go. You can even zap out part of a track by inserting a track marker and editing away. Cool.

The only downside is for those of us with (again) big hands. Miniature is nice for many things, but when it comes to manipulating tiny buttons, the stubby-fingered among us will have some challenges.

Recording is relatively intuitive, and the MR-Z55 even connects by high-quality optical cables (though at $40 a whack, they're not cheap) to the back of your stereo system. You can also buy a $3 analog connector instead to make your recordings.

I had a blast connecting the MR-Z55 to my Discman and quickly and unobtrusively recording a handful of tracks on my desk at work as I was writing this review.

Given the portability of the device, you can plug in almost anywhere and make a good recording, then tuck the MD Walkman discreetly into its included carry bag and use the ingenious little remote control device to handle most basic tasks.

Despite the Minidisc's virtues, Sony has had a difficult time gaining widespread acceptance for it. Last year, after five years, the company sold 500,000 MD-based machines. This year, it hopes to double that.

I'm guessing a big part of the problem is format fatigue. After transitioning the music business - and its customers - from vinyl LPs to cassettes (with a detour for some into eight-track) to CDs in the space of perhaps 12 to 15 years, adding yet another format so soon may have proved too much for most folks.

And now, of course, the Minidisc faces the possibility of being leapfrogged by technology. The rapid growth of consumer interest in MP-3s, the Internet and a fast-emerging group of solid-state player devices could leave the format as an interesting - but ultimately ghettoized - technology.

Diamond Multimedia's Rio PMP-300, which was released last Christmas season after fending off attempts by the recording industry to block its manufacture, has been the most notable of the MP-3 players so far.

As with all first-generation devices, the Rio was notable as much for its limitations as its features. It only could hold about a half-hour of music, for instance, without having to resort to expensive additional memory cards.

Now, second-generation players such as a new teal-colored version of the Rio (with double the onboard storage capability) and Creative Labs' Nomad are starting to hit the market, offering about an hour's worth of music on tiny devices with no moving parts.

So, which should you choose for your own personal music device? Each has strong points worth considering.

The two compression schemes are roughly equivalent in quality, though I might give it to MD's ATRAC. The prices for the devices are all roughly in the same ballpark of $200 to $300.

The MP-3 players are generally slightly smaller and lighter, though we're talking differences of a couple of ounces and fractions of inches.

More importantly, because the MP-3 players are solid state, you don't ever have to worry about jiggles from movement (the MD players buffer 10 seconds of sound to eliminate those problems, but you can still get a hiccup in your sound if the bump is big enough.

But the MP-3 players require you to have a computer, or they are useless. With the computer, you either download some of the thousands of MP-3 tracks on the Internet (an increasing number of such tracks are even legally made), or create your own with encoding software and your computer's CD-ROM drive.

There are no prerecorded MP-3 memory cards (and it would probably lead to new record industry lawsuits if there were), and the cards on the market are expensive, far more than the cost of additional blank Minidiscs.

Overall, I guess, I'd give the edge to the Minidisc for greater flexibility. But given Sony's history of superior technology that doesn't always win (please see VHS vs. Betacam), the MP-3 Internet revolution may yet win out.

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2 Photos

Photo: (1--2) Sony's MD Walkman, left, uses the Minidisc format. The top-end MZ-R55, which plays back and records music, retails for $299. Since 1979, and hundreds of models and 100 million units later, Sony still is selling the Walkman, right - with changes.