Panasonic SLSX270 Portable CD Player

Jogging, driving, or hiking doesn't preclude enjoying the music you love. The Panasonic SLSX270 is a durable, portable CD player with features to accommodate movement and seemingly adverse conditions.

It sports a heat-resistant, polycarbonate casing, so you can confidently place it on the dash of your car without damaging the CD player. It also has a sliding lock to keep the lid closed during rougher handling. A one-push, full-open mechanism pops the lid and slightly ejects the disc, so you can easily load and remove your audio media. Its compact design lets you slip it into a pocket or, using the included neoprene belt, take it with you wherever you go.

Panasonic offers a one-bit digital-to-analog converter to ensure exceptional signal linearity--you can hear every quiet note amid competing instruments. The super-extra bass system delivers hard-hitting low-end, while a digital servo system maintains accurate reading and playback.

People who exercise can put in a disc, program their settings, and forget worries about changing those settings--a convenient hold switch prevents other buttons from being pressed accidentally, saving batteries as well as effort.

A top-mounted liquid crystal display reveals operating details such as track information and whether antishock is on or off. The Panasonic SL-SX270 offers 24-track random-access programming that lets you listen to songs on a CD in the order you prefer or completely at random.

Track and disc repeat automatically replays any song or, once the disc is over, it starts at the beginning without stopping. You can skip through the tracks, search, or pause the music, and a resume function plays the music from the exact same spot.

To eliminate audio skips, Panasonic offers in this model version 3.0 of its enhanced antishock memory. It gives you virtually flawless playback, even during jolt-heavy activities like driving and jogging.

How does it work? Panasonic's antishock system rotates discs faster than normal speed, reading the digital data into a memory buffer. When a vertical shock occurs along the axis of a disc and causes a tracking error, the system plays music, stored 40 seconds in advance, from its digital memory so the correct tracking resumes.

Additionally, the antishock memory has a sophisticated new chip to correct horizontal shocks that occur in the plane of disc rotation and can sometimes force the disc to momentarily spin faster or slower. Controlling sporadic disc speeds allows the digital memory buffer to cope with vertical errors and function at full capacity, though you should be aware that jolts continuing longer than the buffer can still interfere with playback.

The SL-SX270 spins discs reliably and it plays them longer. On a pair of AA alkaline batteries (not included), it offers up to 28 hours of playback. It runs on an AC adapter that comes with the CD player, so you can listen to your favorite CDs right away. An auto power shutoff feature turns the unit off after five minutes of non-use to preserve battery life.