Sony × LEGO

Announced September 14, 1982, at Sony's Gotenyama offices in Tokyo, the WM-L1 System split a personal stereo into four separate modules: a cassette deck, an AM/FM tuner, a battery pack and a small loudspeaker. Each one sat on the standard LEGO 8 mm stud grid and pressed together like ordinary bricks. The project began after Kjeld Kirk Kristiansen, then two years into running the LEGO Group, visited Sony's design centre in 1980 and asked Yasuo Kuroki why a Walkman could not be taken apart and rebuilt.

Kuroki's team worked with Jens Nygaard Knudsen in Billund on the housings. The deck module is 10 by 14 studs and exactly three bricks tall, which put it within a millimetre of the WM-2 it borrowed its mechanism from. Signal and power pass through four brass-cored studs on each module, arranged so that no combination can be wired the wrong way round. Everything else is solid ABS moulded in Billund to LEGO tolerances, then shipped to Japan for assembly.

The launch kit came in four colours: red deck, blue tuner, yellow battery pack and white speaker, with light grey as a later option. Sony sold it through audio shops and LEGO through toy shops, and neither was entirely sure where to put it. Japanese reviewers praised the sound and the clutch; a Danish newspaper complained that its test unit had been rebuilt into a spaceship by the reviewer's son within the hour.

The oddly specific detail everyone remembers is the spacer rule. Because the contacts only sit on the outer studs, a standard 2 by 4 LEGO brick can be placed between the deck and the speaker to raise it, and the system still plays. Sony's manual included a diagram showing a nine-brick tower, noting that above that height the bass response was no longer guaranteed.