October 2000. Sony drops the WM-EX2000 — and yeah, that model number basically tells you everything. MiniDisc is already eating cassette's lunch, the format's dying, but Sony does the opposite. They stuff this thing with audio hardware anyway. If you ask the Walkman historians, they'll all say the same thing: this is where the line ends. As a portable, serious-sounding cassette player? This is it.
They Built It for Sound First
Sony wasn't messing around here. The WM-EX2000 was basically a sound-quality project. You get a PC-OCC oxygen-free copper coil head, a brass flywheel, a revised F mechanism — all working to squeeze down the wow, the flutter, the signal loss. Everything the format could throw at you gets minimized. Throw in Dolby B, MEGA BASS, REVIVE, MEGA SURROUND processing, and suddenly you've got something that later archivists will point to and say: this is the high-end portable cassette player, full stop.
Charge It Like You Charge Your Phone
Size-wise, you're looking at 78.3 × 109.4 × 21.9 mm, 175 grams. Pretty compact, really. It's got Sony's new W. Walkman branding, and in the box you get a charging stand and a backlit remote. But here's what's not there: no AA battery case. The WM-EX2000 runs on a single gumstick rechargeable cell. One cell. And somehow Sony stretched that to 50 hours of playback. Their whole pitch was "charge it like a phone" — dock it whenever, top it off whenever. Search speed hits 36x, AMS skips through nine tracks at a time, and the cassette door? One-touch opening. The earbuds that came with it weren't the premium MDR-E838s, though. They were MDR-E803s.
Open Pricing and a Send-Off That Didn't Hold Back
Sony went with open pricing on this one. SONY Style had it at 12,800 yen back then. People who lived with these machines? They'll tell you straight — this is the cassette Walkman that got closest to those early audiophile-grade rigs. Nothing came after that had what this had. Sony never brought back that sound quality or that feature set in their cassette Walkmans again. So the WM-EX2000 sits there as something between a goodbye and a final statement. Dignified, complete, and absolutely terminal.
Wrap-Up
The WM-EX2000 doesn't read like a next step. It reads like an ending — a cassette flagship that shipped as the format was circling the drain, built like the format still had a future. And maybe that's exactly what made it matter.
5 comments
Sony never made an 803 model. Around the turn of the century the bundled earbuds were basically all 808s, with a few 838s, and later they switched to 931.
Back in 2000 it clearly couldn’t beat Aiwa and Panasonic.
By 2000, Aiwa had only its legend and barely any breath left, plus the three worst commemorative models.
Cassette players have noticeable hiss that hurts the listening experience, though the sound quality itself isn’t actually bad.
Cassette players were hard to sell, and in the end it came down to sound quality. I had a slim Sony model back then too, but I switched to a Sony CD player later. The jump in sound was immediate, and I never touched cassettes again — I still use that CD player today.