A BRIEF DESCRIPTION

When AIWA released the HS-G08 in 1985 it was a revolution because of the many advanced features that they achieved to fit in a small player. No other player from SONY or other brands could offer such a huge amount of features at the time; it was far more advanced than any other player in the world, except for it's bigger brother, the J08 (this was the most advanced walkman on 1985).

Features like feather-touch buttons, remote control, music sensor and a 5-band EQ put it on a superior step over the rest, and the auto-reverse, Dolby B, hard case, new small earphones that doesn't have upper band and a body made almost full from metal, complete an incredible set of features for a player at the time. The G08 is the same as the P08 with the addition of the graphic EQ.

The G08, a sort of P08 plus a 5-band EQ.

AIWA released their players in the asian market under the "CassetteBoy" brand, which they are basically the same, except that they don't have the "0" before the "8". So in Asia they are called "P8" and in the rest of the world, "P08". Most of my units are from Asia, so you'll see the CassetteBoy logo in their front door.

CONTEXT

80's was a very particular years and in 1985 many manufacturers were trying to offer an idea of breaking the old rules, to bring fresh ideas. And walkmans helped so much to that idea by allowing the user to listen to music everywhere, but with not so much quality and comodity. The G08 was AIWA's first player with a remote control, to allow the user to take the player inside (for example in a very cold environment) and fully control it. The autoreverse brought the user the ability to not to take it outside to flip the tape, and the 5-band offered a quite good sound equalization, so I think it was a huge step ahead that set a new level of quality and sophistication, although the SONY WM-7 was the first to have autoreverse, feather touch and a remote, but in a pretty bigger size.

At that time SONY had the WM-101 that focuses in size, as it was a very small player, a succesor of the ground-breaking WM-20 released two years before.The WM-101 and the G08 have some common features, like: auto reverse, Dolby B and small earphones. It also has an external compartment for an AA battery. But it didn't have IC logic control, remote control, music sensor, two outputs or 5-band EQ...
SONY had also the WM-60 which features also a 5-band EQ, but in a budget walkman with older technology and lower price.

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Looking at this graph we can see a pretty good curve, specially in mids and highs. Without having any sophisticated HX head, it delivers very good performance in highs, with a clean and detailed sound. The sound is also open and well balanced overall... except the lack of deep bass.
The output is powerful, perfectly capable of drive my Sennheiser HD280Pro, but adding my CMoyBB gives my the addition of bass I usually like.
The unit I'm testing has a slightly high playing speed (when testing a 3kHz recorded signal, I measured 3030Hz), but itsn't annoying at all.
Overall a good player with slight lack of bass.

The nice EQ of this G08 offers one of the best EQ available in walkmans, with 5-band and a effect of +/- 8 dB (although 10 dB announced). It's well balanced and adds few noise when pushed to the limit. However, it lacks a deep bass control (about 50-60 Hz), but this is my personal opinion.

Although powerful, the integrated EQ allows very few improvements when linearizing the FRC, specially because of the lack of deep bass control.

Original FRC*	FRC* | -0 dB Treble loss
Background noise (-58 dB)	Background noise (-70 dB)

Move your mouse over the buttons to see the animation

*: The original FRC is measured with a recording without Dolby; the one with Dolby was measured with a Dolby-encoded recording.

This is undoubtely one of the best features of this walkman: very good performance with Dolby B: with super-low noise and a pretty good FRC with almost no loss of highs. It's very surprising to say, but this cool AIWA can offer sound performance close to Dolby C ¿?!!

0,186% (RMS)

So finally I listen to my reference recording (already explained here) and combined all data into a single graph, to let us quickly see all the measurements about it:

AIWA HS-G08 final rating.
NOTE: * Indicates a subjective rating.

Overall score: 8,7/10

This AIWA G08 is very well built: heavy, almost full-metal body and it has one of the coolest designs. If I have to pick up one design in the '80s era I'll probably choose it. I love the diagonal lines.

It offers a really good performance with Dolby B. The combination of strong construction, cool design and a complete list of features (including one of the first Music search function and a remote control) blowed away the competition back in 1985.
It's really one of the coolest walkmans ever made IMHO, definitely a milestone and a must-have for any serious walkman collector.