TEST IMAGE. Portable cassette player.

Sony WM-F10

€340,00
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TEST IMAGE. Portable cassette player.
  • TEST IMAGE. Portable cassette player.
  • TEST IMAGE. On a shelf, in context.
  • TEST IMAGE. Cassette detail.
Sony WM-F10

Sound & screen›Personal audio›No. T-002

1983

Sony WM-F10

Kept by Jan in Rotterdam

▶  Hear Jan tell it, 14 min

TEST DATA. A 1983 Sony WM-F10, serviced, with a new belt.

€340

 In your bag· see the bag
About this one
TEST DATA. A 1983 Sony WM-F10 in silver, the cassette Walkman with the radio built in. Roughly the size of the cassette it plays.
TEST DATA. Playing tapes, and listening to the radio when the tape runs out. One AA cell, about eight hours. It has no recording function and no auto-reverse. You turn the cassette over yourself, which is the whole point.
TEST DATA. Every WM-F10 that has not been opened has a perished belt, and a perished belt means it does not run. Most of the ones for sale are sold untested for that reason. This one has had the belt replaced and the transport cleaned, in August. It runs at speed.
Condition

How it looks

TEST DATA. Light scratching across the silver lid, heaviest around the cassette window. The lettering is complete. The battery door closes properly and the hinge is sound.

How it works

TEST DATA. Plays at speed, both channels balanced. Belt replaced 08/2026 and the pinch roller cleaned. Radio tunes across FM and AM. Battery contacts clean.

Every photograph on this page is of this exact piece.

The facts
Year1983
Made bySony
Made inJapan
Weight280 g
ObjectNo. T-002
In the box
TEST DATA. The player only. No headphones, no case, no box.
The model
The Sony WM-F10 puts an FM stereo tuner and Dolby NR in a metal-bodied Walkman that runs on one AA cell.
Everything about the Sony WM-F10

Kept 1984–2026 · 14 objects

Everything Jan passed on

Who kept it

Jan, Rotterdam

Jan's shelf

TEST DATA. Forty years of audio, one piece at a time, all of it working. Fourteen objects came here in June 2026, each with his name on it.
I never sold one. I just kept buying the next one and moving the old one up a shelf.
In Jan’s own wordsOpens here

TEST DATA. It started with a deck I could not afford, in 1984, secondhand even then. I had a shelf I had built for books and no books worth putting on it, so the deck went there, and that is the shelf this whole thing grew out of.

I was working nights at the time. You come home at six in the morning and you cannot sleep straight away, so you sit with headphones on and listen to a side of something, and after a year of that you start to hear the difference between machines. That is how it happens. Nobody sets out to own fourteen of anything.

Everything after that went on the same shelf, and when the shelf filled I built another one above it. My wife counted three at one point and said nothing. She counted nine about four years later and said something.

I never sold one. That is the part people find odd. The old one simply moved up a row, and the row above that, and eventually up to the loft, but it never left the house and it never stopped working, because a thing that stops working gets fixed. I can solder. I am not a technician and I would not pretend to be, but a belt is a belt and a capacitor is a capacitor, and most of what goes wrong with this equipment goes wrong in the same four places.

The receiver is the one I would keep if I could only keep one. It came from a man in Schiedam who was emigrating and wanted it gone that weekend. It had been serviced properly, once, by somebody who knew what they were doing, and you can tell. Whoever ends up with it should leave it alone and just use it.

I kept the receipts. All of them, in the boxes, with the date and what I paid written on the back in pencil. I do not know why I started doing that and I am not going to claim it was foresight. But it means that for almost every piece here I can tell you exactly what it cost and exactly when, and that felt worth handing over with them.

What I did not want was for this to be sold as a job lot to a dealer who would split it up and put it on a marketplace with a photograph taken on a kitchen floor. Forty years of Saturdays deserves better than that. It does not have to be a museum. It just has to be honest about where it came from.

So take the shelf as well, if you want it. I built it badly in 1984 and it has held up better than I have.

Jan kept these too

Jan's shelf
TEST IMAGE. Record sleeve.No. T-0241964 Blue Note pressing €180,00 TEST IMAGE. Amplifier front.No. T-0221981 Braun Atelier amplifier €540,00

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