The Necromancy of a Walkman EX 50
At some point, on a tiny local website in the country where I live, I stumbled across an online auction for a Walkman EX 50. Metal body, slim build — I fell in love instantly. Or at least I thought so.
Photo from the Walkmanland website
The seller wrote something like “didn’t test it, just put in batteries — turned on — it buzzed.” The exterior wasn’t exactly A+, but acceptable. And the description promised joy. There were no photos of the inside, but the site itself isn’t built for proper communication or decent listings anyway.
What it looked like at the online auction. Not great, but not terrible.
I won the auction. I paid. I waited.
When the player finally arrived, my mood went from “I’ll just replace the belt, no big deal” to pure rage in about 0.0004 seconds.
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I truly didn’t expect that. I still have no idea where this specimen of humanity supposedly “inserted batteries,” and what exactly was “buzzing” in there.
It was bad. Extremely bad.
The entire player was rusted through. I almost managed to remove the back cover before realizing that one of the screws had fused into the frame. Thankfully, the back cover was plastic, so I did manage to break what could be broken. It wasn’t pretty. The whole thing stayed in this half-mangled, half-resurrected form throughout the entire repairs, but I really had only two options:
either “break it to fix it,” or “leave it alone and just stare at it.”
So, as a very pissed off and very determined woman, I had to fix it myself. It took about a month of slow, late evenings. I’m pretty sure I took this Walkman apart in places its creator never even touched, and trying to make sense of the service manual (which covered two different models at once) taught me swear words I didn’t know existed.
I even had to solder a tiny plastic gear that decided to crack out of spite.
Overall impression: 3/10. The path was fueled solely by anger.
Posted Dec 5, 2025, 3:15 PM UTC