WM-24

The WM-24 was a standard playback Walkman that took the familiar WM-22-style chassis and improved it in one meaningful way by adding Dolby B noise reduction. Powered by two AA batteries, it retained manual tape selection, automatic shut-off, and a compact plastic shell with only light cosmetic revisions, but the addition of Dolby made prerecorded tapes sound noticeably cleaner by reducing background hiss. The whole machine remained mechanically simple and easy to use.

Better sound quality was beginning to settle into the everyday middle of the range. The WM-24 was not feature-rich, but it quietly corrected one of the obvious weaknesses of lower-end players. It is a very characteristic mid-1980s Walkman: familiar, incremental, and better in the way most listeners would actually notice.