The Disc & MP3 man. Review on Panasonic SL-SV550

Once upon a time, long time ago, Somebody at Sony came up with an idea of Music on the Go. That was when the Walkman was born. It became a huge hit. You could listen to your fav music on the go, whenever you wanted, wherever you wanted. Time flew by, tapes became cumbersome to use once they got old. Scratches on them, getting stuck between the head and its limited capability of songs were soon visible. By then CDs were already making the rounds and Discman arose out of this scenario. Now you could hear top quality music from your fav CDs, on the Go.

Among the many companies offering Discman, Panasonic is one among them too. In the consumer electronic market one has not only many different companies, but plenty of models to choose from too. My requirements were to listen to CD quality musicon the go. I needed a Discman which could play both Audio CDs and MP3 CDs. If coupled with this, the player had an FM Radio, then nothing to beat it huh. I scrouged the shelfs of my neighbourhood electronic stores.

Prominent products in this category were from Sony, iRiver, Grundig and Samsung. Sony & iRiver had units which could play ACDs & MP3. This alone costed upwards of Euro 120. They had higher version of these models too, with AM/FM Radio. Cost: Upwards of Euros 170. My stomach didn't stop churning. Samsung, Grundig and Aiwa had sleek good looking players (ACDs & MP3 only) for upwards of Euro 80. I smiled now, but not enough.

What about my fav FM Radio (city 91) feature. Then my eyes with spectacles chanced upon the Panasonic SL-SV550. This plays Audio CDs, MP3 CDs and receives AM/FM too. The price was also comfortable on my wallet at Euro 120 and I bought this. How well does it do its job, which it is supposed to do well. All about this follows...

The Package Contents

1). The Player

2). A set of earphones

3). A 4.5v DC Adapter

4). English Language Manual (phew!!! thank god)

The Package Dissected

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The Player is well designed and is about an inch thick and not heavy even with the battries. The top is silver coloured lid, coupled with a dark blue bottom. Not too flashy, not too plain vanilla. The top has all the functions buttons and the display LED.

Function Buttons on the lid are for Play/Pause, Stop, Volume, Power Off, Bass and the radio function buttons of Band, Tuning Mode, Memory & FM Receipt. Some of the buttons have two pronged functions.

1). The button which skips track (back/forward) during CD Play, also doubles up as the radio frequency tuning buttons.

2). The Stop button for CD Play, when pressed during Radio play, switches off the unit.

3). The FM Receipt button, when held for 2 secs or more changes the receiving power of the signals from the City Mode to No-City Mode (I've made up this name. They don't say anything for this mode :-). During the CD Play, this same button does a double act of toggling between 'Track Repeat', 'Random Repeat' or 'Repeat All'. Getting to learn all the functions is pretty easy.

The manual and the UI are plain and simple enough. Ten minutes on them and you shall know all about it.

Earphones and Audio Quality

The earphones are pretty good. Bass and treble are reproduced well. At high volumes it does strain and break. Audio quality is decent too, even the minute beats & jingles are heard clearly. The earphones also act as the radio antennae. Long use of them does tingle and pain the insides of the ear a bit.

Battries

This unit runs on 2 AA battries. The manual claims a long run of 35hrs with Bass turned off. 3 to 4 hours of Radio and CD for the past one week and the battries are still on. Am Pretty impressed with this.

The DC Adapter

Pretty long wire for this one. Gets a bit hot after long periods of use. Nothing much to ink-in here!

Radio

It receives both AM & FM Radio. A single 'Band' button toggles between the two. No auto-tuning is provided. So one needs to scan for the stations manually and then store them. 30 FM Stations and 10 AM stations can be stored in memory. The radio reception is pretty good too. Placing the unit a bit far from the antenna improves the reception sometimes.

Display LCD

1). Shows the Battery Power Indicator.

2). Shows the tuned frequency and the memory in which it is stored.

3). Shows the track number being played and the time lapsed.

4). Increasing/Decreasing the volume, shows the volume loudness (between 1 & 25).

5). Shows the MP3 indicator, if MP3 disc is in play. However the major drawback is, there is no backlight for the display. A big minus for night time travels and music.

Music CD

When you feed a CD to it, it takes a bit of time to recognize. The play starts automatically from the first available song. For MP3 discs, it can read into deep folder levels too. But the manual recommends that there be no more than 4 depths of directories. Haven't tested out this myself yet. CD-R and CD-RWs are played too. For the regular jogger, it also comes with anti-skip and the hold button too. This button prevents any accidental pressing of buttons while during play or otherwise. Another huge and disappointing drawback is, it does not read and display ID3 Tags of MP3s. So you are stuck are seeing only the track number instead of its title!

Overall, the Panasonic SL-SV550 is not such a great unit. Big minuses are its lack of backlight, no support for ID3 tags and no auto scanning of radio stations. But for a decent price of Euro 120, its an ok package.