Panasonic SL-CT 7000 Review

Ooo an independent review. Yes Which eat your heart out because our reviews are independent too. Due mainly to the fact that the manufactures won’t bribe up with free samples. Anyway I’m looking at the Panasonic SL-CT700 personal CD player.

Its not exactly a budget player at £100.00, its one at the top end of the personal CD player range and about the best Panasonic do in the UK. Its not as if you get much for your money but that’s a good thing. Its very small at just bigger than a CD and only about 18 mm deep so it manages to fit in my fleece pocket nicely.

The main unit has buttons which light up so you can see them in the dark and there are another set of controls in the inline remote control. One problem there is no pause on the inline but you can skip, search (although only on CD’s), stop, start, change mode and more.

You can then connect any headphones to the inline as the supplied in ear headlines simply slot in if you don’t have any others. The inline ones are a decent quality although the cord from the inline to the short headphone is only about 18” so if your tall you won’t be able to use the headphones with the inline on your belt.

The player also handles MP3’s so you can burn MP3’s as a data CD and play both CD-R’s and CD-RW’s on it. If you have MP3’s, each folder on the disk is treated as a separate album so you get the album and track number when skipping through the tracks as well as the ability to use ID3 tags such as artist and album title. These are displayed on the dot matrix display.

There is anti skip technology for 100 seconds on MP3’s (or 45 seconds on normal CD’s) which is Panasonic’s CLAM technology. According to the Argos catalogue its jog proof so can withstand constant movement and we experienced no problems when moving with it although we didn’t take it out for a big run. It was fine when walking though.

The batter is also something special as opposed to normal AA batteries it comes with 2 Nicad batteries which offer no less than 80 hours playback for MP3’s. When we tested it, it seemed to live up to its claim and plus there is an external battery back so you can slot in some AA batteries if your main ones die. They recharge in 2-3 hours as well.

Overall the SL-CT7000 is a great CD player although it could have been thought through practically a bit more. Its not cheap but you get what you pay for and its great quality.