Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Review updated December 8, 2022 I now have two of these units, and will comment on both. This is a high-quality compact stereo system. There are 10 watts to each speaker whereas cheaper units come with only 1-3. The manual is detailed. Take care of the remote, you will need it for certain functions. To turn the player on, push the AM/FM button. To turn off, push TAPE/OFF. The sound quality is very good ... however, this player excels in playing music. The vocal audiocassettes and CDs I have require tweaking the equalizer, as the native sound tends to be a bit too muffled. The first one of these I have, via the headphone jack, is connected to older larger Bose powered speakers to excellent effect. There are several presets to tweak for various kinds of sound. The most basic are five equalizer presets: "heavy", "soft", "clear," "vocal," and "off." You can independently tweak the bass and treble. The virtualizer feature projects sound, and there is a "re-master" option, which reproduces the frequencies lost during recording. ... RADIO: You may want to install four fresh AA batteries to back up radio presets in case of power outage. If you do that, diary to check batteries every so often. I found the AA batteries leaking a year before the date they were stamped to expire. I don't use the larger batteries, just the AC cord. There are 16 presets each for AM and FM. Start by tuning to the lowest radio frequency. On the remote, hold the forward arrow button down for a second and it finds the first station. Say you want a preset there; press "program"; then the number buttons to assign a number to it (eg., press #1) and that is your preset. Push the forward button to find the next station you want; press "program" then the number buttons (eg., #2). Alternatively, you can use the "auto preset" button and presets for the strongest stations in your area will automatically be set. To listen to a station, press its number on the remote's keypad. Update on the radio: Now having another of this boombox to use in another room, I've discovered that indeed the radio reception tends toward the weak side. I'd thought it was just the location of the first one (plus that I'm not in the perfect location buildingwise for radio reception), however, trying out the newer Panasonic in another room still fails to achieve strong reception. ... CD PLAYER: This is full-featured. You can start on any track, program the order of tracks, skip tracks, and repeat the CD. Use the remote to program the CD player or the Play button on the unit to just play it. Con: I find it inconvenient that this boombox does not turn itself off after playing a CD. ... USB DRIVE, MAX 8 GB SIZE: The main thing I've used on this unit is the USB port and flash drives to play MP3 music. Back in the day, we could hear about 5 songs on one side of a 33 RPM and then wait for another one to flop down from the spindle. Contrast that with listening to hundreds of songs that play automatically. When you turn off the player, it remembers where it was on the USB drive and takes up in that place, as long as the unit stays connected to power. There are a couple of ways to get music onto the USB flash: 1) Synchronizing with Windows Media Player - In Media Player, you can rip CDs to your computer as MP3s, enhance the quality of the MP3s up to the maximum (320 KBPS) and add to a flash drive. 2) Direct copy and paste of each MP3 - In this method, you insert the flash drive into the computer's USB; open My Computer; open the flash drive; open your Music folder; copy and paste the files - just the music files not the folders and sub-folders - into the flash drive window as you would any other window. Adding Auto Volume Leveling to Music on USB Flash Drive: When listening to music, do you ever find that one song will be too quiet so you turn it up, then the next will be too loud, so you have to turn it down again? Adjusting music volume is called leveling, normalizing, or changing the gain. When it works, the overall volume is similar from song to song without coming in at different volumes. Windows Media Player has Volume Leveling available but these features don't transfer to your flash drive. If you're somewhat "tech savvy," you can use a free program called MP3Gain. Google MP3 Gain for the You Tube demo videos and the website.If you install MP3 Gain, please read the Help file first; I recommend setting it so that your original copy is not overwritten but a new copy is made with the gain adjustment. Or just keep a backup copy of your music library. If you like the program, please make a small contribution to the author. Update on USB Function: After several years, the USB player stopped playing the songs that normally played at the end. Unsure why this happened. To solve this, purchased a San Disk Clip Jam MP3 player and copied my music to it; attached it to the Pana via the 3.5 mm "Music Port", and the result sounds fine, plus, the Clip Jam holds more music and has extra features. ... AUDIOCASSETTE PLAYER/RECORDER: If, like me, you have the older cassette tapes, it is getting hard to find players for them anymore. This unit has that capability. Unlike cheaper players I have, the Panasonic handles even the longer tapes (longest I have is about 50 minutes on each side). ... If you have read this far, thank you for reading, and hope this has been of some help to you. Enjoy the music!