Panasonic SL-CT790 Personal CD Player
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Similar in Portable CD Players
- CD-R/CD-RW Playback: CD-R/CD-RW
- Bass Boost: With Bass Boost
- Anti Skip Buffer: 48 sec.
- Supported Formats: WMA
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One Way or the Other, Size Always Matters
Pros
Crazy small and light. Respectable playback. Very durable. Won't skip.
Cons
No pause button on wired remote. Cheesy earbuds. Rip-off prices for replacement parts (remote=essential).
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
A great buy for those wanting to only listen to regular CDs in style.
All I want to do is listen to my CDs. I don't want to listen to the radio. I don't care for having a hundred hours of music using the MP3 format. I don't care in investigating new technology trying to displace CDs in the world of portable audio, namely something called the MiniDisc. I don't want to go jogging on a foggy morning with a CD player securely attached to atrociously-colored athletic apparel. All I want to do is listen to my CDs so that I don't have to put up with Bob yapping to Jane about the weather while on public transportation. If you feel the same way, you should seriously consider purchasing the Panasonic SL-CT790; it's elegant, aesthetic, and has a mid-range price tag that's fairly reasonable.
The first consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was the size of the unit. The clunky junk this SL-CT790 replaces is the NAPA DAV316, a gift from an ex that can read MP3 files – but I don't listen to MP3s. If one compares just the exteriors of the two units, the NAPA DAV316 is ridiculously big. With the huge difference in size, I'd expect the NAPA unit to not only support MP3s, but cook my breakfast and buy my groceries as well. The truth is, once you go ultra-slim, you'll be wondering why the hell anyone would settle for the morbidly obese portable audio solutions previously dominating the markets.
The Panasonic SL-CT790 is about as small as CD players come; basically, if a CD can fit in your pocket, this CD player can fit in your pocket. Without the two rechargeable Ni-MH batteries that come with this purchase, the unit weighs 4.5Oz, or 127 grams. To give you an idea of how light that is, five alkaline AA batteries will weigh about the same as the SL-CT790. The advantages of all this is, of course, that a sense of style and elegance, particularly with the unit's sleek, silver design, will enter your world of portable audio.
The disadvantage of this is that Panasonic had to render the main unit as something just reads your CDs to save space. There are tiny buttons on the side of the SL-CT790 to play, stop, and search through CDs, but they are cumbersome. There is no display of any kind on the main unit and input is heavily dependant on a wired remote. The wired remote is also designed to be as small as possible and Panasonic managed to put play/stop, next track, previous track, increase volume, and decrease volume inputs on the same button on the remote. My first impression was that, because of the extreme proximity of all the commands, accomplishing exactly what you want with remote would be too delicate a task, but this turned out to be not the case. However, there is no pause button on the remote and this exclusion was perhaps the only horrible decision by the makers of the SL-CT790.
The second consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was the battery life; my old NAPA has degenerated to the point where two high quality Duracell batteries would be drained after listening to four or five CDs. What you never do when it comes to electronics is read about how many hours of fun a few batteries will give you and assume that that's the energy-economy you will receive. This is like how you never read about how an automobile will get you so many miles per gallon and assume that that's the fuel-economy you will receive. Such measures are not even reliable for comparison purposes because each machine is tested under its own ideal circumstances; for CD players, that usually means room temperature, Hold-mode on (all the input buttons such as "next track" are locked), and all that gimmicky "super-turbo-hyper-bass" equalizer stuff turned off.
The people at Panasonic claims you can listen to music for up to a hundred hours before your batteries run out. A hundred hours is six thousand minutes and that's a crazy number. One normal CD only holds a maximum of eighty minutes of music. In reality, with just your rechargeable batteries, you'll only be able to squeeze about thirty to forty hours of continuous music, under the normal conditions and normal use relevant to me. The SL-CT790 does come an external case for AA batteries, should your Ni-MH ones or their recharger fail (Nickel batteries aren't as reliable as lithium ones and will be used up after no more than three hundred recharges). If you combine both Panasonic's Ni-MH batteries and your alkaline AA batteries, you may be able to come closer to achieving the hundred-hour playback that Panasonic claims. However, why would you attach something that looks like a vibrator to a CD player that's so aesthetically pleasing?
The third and final consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was that the thing can take a moderate beating without malfunctioning. On the second day I bought the SL-CT790, I accidentally slammed a car door on the wired remote. Needless to say, the remote broke, and I had to buy a new one – it is unreasonable to expect it to survive that. Panasonic, displaying prompt customer service, answered my e-mail within three hours, pointing me to the store where I can order just a new remote. The store, displaying the sickening effects of a monopoly, charged me $85.00 CAN for a new remote – almost half the price I paid for the CD player and everything it came with (main unit, AC to DC adaptor, stereo earbuds, two Ni-MH batteries, a couple of battery cases, and the wired remote).
On that same day (it was one of those ones), I was exiting a friend's car holding my CD player while it was playing; I slammed the car door on the wire for my headphones, violently ripping the CD player from my hands and crashing it against the car door. Not only did the thing not break, the music did not skip a beat. With the SL-CT790's aluminum lid, extreme light weight (the lighter the unit, the less prone it is to turbulence and skipping), and 48-second anti-skip system, you would have to go through some lengths to purposefully damage the unit in order to break it or make it skip.
What the SL-CT790 offers is almost a total package for those only interested in listening to CDs under normal conditions. I say almost because the earbuds that come with this thing are embarrassing; the wire is literally shorter than my forearm and the buds hurt your ears – please, get your own set of decent headphones and never rely on the ones that come with these players. Other than that and the omission of a pause button on the remote, this product has all you could ever want from a CD player from small size, to battery life, to durability, to sound quality, which basically is all the same with CD players at the "luxury" level.
But the SL-CT790 is one of the cheapest players at this level and is Panasonic's answer for Sony's DEJ1000, which is even more durable with a magnesium die cast exterior, has 115 hours of advertised playback, and is slimmer by an eighth of an inch and lighter by less than 0.1 oz. But, Sony's unit costs $100 CAN more and at some point you have to ask yourself when you cross that threshold and start paying for too much. Panasonic's SL-CT790 is a nice balance between price and miniscule dimensions, lengthy playback, and durability to remain on the appropriate side of that threshold for people who only want to listen to CDs.
The first consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was the size of the unit. The clunky junk this SL-CT790 replaces is the NAPA DAV316, a gift from an ex that can read MP3 files – but I don't listen to MP3s. If one compares just the exteriors of the two units, the NAPA DAV316 is ridiculously big. With the huge difference in size, I'd expect the NAPA unit to not only support MP3s, but cook my breakfast and buy my groceries as well. The truth is, once you go ultra-slim, you'll be wondering why the hell anyone would settle for the morbidly obese portable audio solutions previously dominating the markets.
The Panasonic SL-CT790 is about as small as CD players come; basically, if a CD can fit in your pocket, this CD player can fit in your pocket. Without the two rechargeable Ni-MH batteries that come with this purchase, the unit weighs 4.5Oz, or 127 grams. To give you an idea of how light that is, five alkaline AA batteries will weigh about the same as the SL-CT790. The advantages of all this is, of course, that a sense of style and elegance, particularly with the unit's sleek, silver design, will enter your world of portable audio.
The disadvantage of this is that Panasonic had to render the main unit as something just reads your CDs to save space. There are tiny buttons on the side of the SL-CT790 to play, stop, and search through CDs, but they are cumbersome. There is no display of any kind on the main unit and input is heavily dependant on a wired remote. The wired remote is also designed to be as small as possible and Panasonic managed to put play/stop, next track, previous track, increase volume, and decrease volume inputs on the same button on the remote. My first impression was that, because of the extreme proximity of all the commands, accomplishing exactly what you want with remote would be too delicate a task, but this turned out to be not the case. However, there is no pause button on the remote and this exclusion was perhaps the only horrible decision by the makers of the SL-CT790.
The second consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was the battery life; my old NAPA has degenerated to the point where two high quality Duracell batteries would be drained after listening to four or five CDs. What you never do when it comes to electronics is read about how many hours of fun a few batteries will give you and assume that that's the energy-economy you will receive. This is like how you never read about how an automobile will get you so many miles per gallon and assume that that's the fuel-economy you will receive. Such measures are not even reliable for comparison purposes because each machine is tested under its own ideal circumstances; for CD players, that usually means room temperature, Hold-mode on (all the input buttons such as "next track" are locked), and all that gimmicky "super-turbo-hyper-bass" equalizer stuff turned off.
The people at Panasonic claims you can listen to music for up to a hundred hours before your batteries run out. A hundred hours is six thousand minutes and that's a crazy number. One normal CD only holds a maximum of eighty minutes of music. In reality, with just your rechargeable batteries, you'll only be able to squeeze about thirty to forty hours of continuous music, under the normal conditions and normal use relevant to me. The SL-CT790 does come an external case for AA batteries, should your Ni-MH ones or their recharger fail (Nickel batteries aren't as reliable as lithium ones and will be used up after no more than three hundred recharges). If you combine both Panasonic's Ni-MH batteries and your alkaline AA batteries, you may be able to come closer to achieving the hundred-hour playback that Panasonic claims. However, why would you attach something that looks like a vibrator to a CD player that's so aesthetically pleasing?
The third and final consideration for me when shopping for a portable CD player was that the thing can take a moderate beating without malfunctioning. On the second day I bought the SL-CT790, I accidentally slammed a car door on the wired remote. Needless to say, the remote broke, and I had to buy a new one – it is unreasonable to expect it to survive that. Panasonic, displaying prompt customer service, answered my e-mail within three hours, pointing me to the store where I can order just a new remote. The store, displaying the sickening effects of a monopoly, charged me $85.00 CAN for a new remote – almost half the price I paid for the CD player and everything it came with (main unit, AC to DC adaptor, stereo earbuds, two Ni-MH batteries, a couple of battery cases, and the wired remote).
On that same day (it was one of those ones), I was exiting a friend's car holding my CD player while it was playing; I slammed the car door on the wire for my headphones, violently ripping the CD player from my hands and crashing it against the car door. Not only did the thing not break, the music did not skip a beat. With the SL-CT790's aluminum lid, extreme light weight (the lighter the unit, the less prone it is to turbulence and skipping), and 48-second anti-skip system, you would have to go through some lengths to purposefully damage the unit in order to break it or make it skip.
What the SL-CT790 offers is almost a total package for those only interested in listening to CDs under normal conditions. I say almost because the earbuds that come with this thing are embarrassing; the wire is literally shorter than my forearm and the buds hurt your ears – please, get your own set of decent headphones and never rely on the ones that come with these players. Other than that and the omission of a pause button on the remote, this product has all you could ever want from a CD player from small size, to battery life, to durability, to sound quality, which basically is all the same with CD players at the "luxury" level.
But the SL-CT790 is one of the cheapest players at this level and is Panasonic's answer for Sony's DEJ1000, which is even more durable with a magnesium die cast exterior, has 115 hours of advertised playback, and is slimmer by an eighth of an inch and lighter by less than 0.1 oz. But, Sony's unit costs $100 CAN more and at some point you have to ask yourself when you cross that threshold and start paying for too much. Panasonic's SL-CT790 is a nice balance between price and miniscule dimensions, lengthy playback, and durability to remain on the appropriate side of that threshold for people who only want to listen to CDs.
