Customer Reviews

Panasonic RQ-CR07V Portable Cassette Stereo

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I don't know how anyone could be disapointed by this great product at a very affordable price. The tuner works great(Panasonic radio's have excellent sensitivity and selectivity). The tape deck work just fine. I am really impressed at the quality of Panasonic products like this. I can't recommend this product enough to other people.

I must've had this model Panasonic for at least four years now! Before this one I had one of those big white & orange Sony kinds, the ones that are waterproof, jogproof, etc...didn't even last me a year. After that I got this type, the Panasonic RQ-CR07V, and it's been remarkably good to me ever since. After years of use it's all scratched up, the tape deck gets stuck sometimes, and the metallic paint is smearing off at the edges...but it still plays as perfectly as the day I bought it. The only reason I'm getting a new unit now is so I can have one that's nice and new-looking...and I'm planning on getting the same exact model! (I'm so glad it's still being sold.)
Take my advice: if you want a tape deck that's solid and plays well - and will last long - this is the ticket. Plus: I love carrying it around because my friends (who all have mp3 players now) think it's cool that I still have a "walkman!"

The Panasonic RQ-CR70V has served me well enough for the past 2.5 years even with a few bumps and drops. Now the player has literally bit the dust due to a bad accident, but I'd hesitate to buy another same model. Mainly I used it for listening to TAPES of radio news/info (talk) shows, at my convenience when biking, walking, puttering, etc. It is a great value overall, and has been durable. But I need to operate it by feel (thus no MP3 player will do), and that's where the radio operation disappoints. My ratings, in comparison with older Sony Walkmans I've had:

Cassette player: B+ -- Good tactile controls and adequate volume. Has both FFW and Rew buttons. But all cassette buttons are the same size and feel, gotta count them. Has Auto-reverse (full-time, can't be canceled). I've learned it plays better in one direction than the other. When you push any cassette button, it will switch off the radio.

AM/FM radio operation: C at best. -- Has no simple on/off/cassette switch, so it must be toggled thru AM-FM-Off using the "Band" pushbutton. The radio buttons are not ergonomically arranged. Preset stations require sequential 2-button selection, within a few seconds, making it very difficult to change stations by feel. Worse, 3 of the 5 numbered pushbuttons are dual-function; instead of selecting a preset station (by feel), you may instead be tuning a bit off-station, or maybe "lock" the pushbuttons. But sadly, this may be as good as presets get now--boosting my rating to "C"- since current Sony models make you push multiple buttons and run thru menus to get to a preset station --that's ridiculous!

FM sensitivity/selectivity: D -- My favorite FM station is weak where I live. It hisses and fades as I move around, and sometimes is interfered by some unknown station. (This was not a problem on my old Sony Walkman radios.) I have the "City" switch taped "Off." Also, no way to switch off stereo to improve weak stations. [A cheap model, so...?]

Headphones: D -- Too big and uncomfortable, and too much bass bias, like most today. For distinct speech, we need to hear the highs --I NEVER use the idiotic bass boost. (I still use my prized old standard Sony Walkman MDR-006 lightweight headphones, unavailable for years).

Uses two "AA" batteries, advantageous if you use rechargeable ones. Has useful battery strength indicator, good battery life.

For the midrange price point, this is one of the worst classic Walkman clones on the market. I can say this with certainty: I've had three of these, though thanks to a wildly indulgent Radioshack warranty plan I only paid for one. The fact is I kept returning them as defective until I just got sick of them and bought a Sony. I still have the third unit.

One might reasonably ask what's so bad about this reasonably small, inexpensive device, given that it has digital tuning, ample presets, good bass-boost, a pair of not-bad headphones, and (gasp) auto-reverse! The latter feature is particularly exciting because it seems for the first time in Panasonic's history their auto-reverse mechanism actually works. But let's run through these features in order.

1. This device is bigger than its Sony equivalent. It takes two AAs, and its battery economy is nothing special.(As always, leaving it in rewind or fast-forward for ten or twenty minutes will simply void a full battery). It is also _extremely fragile_. The speed potentiometer goes all out of wack in even slightly inclement weather; Toronto winters slow the tape way, way down, and leaving it on in a steamy room will damage the motor irreperably. My third unit simply stopped working (full batteries do not turn the unit on) because I dropped it once. This is silly. Despite no surface flaws, cracks, or other visual cues, it apparently had all it was going to take.

2. There are in fact only ten presets (five per band). The comparable Sony has forty. Forty! And dialing a preset on this model is an awkward process requiring two keypresses on the pretty if unresponsive front console. By comparison, manual tuning is time-consuming and tedious.

3. This device probably has the most essential bass-boost feature in the history of portable audio. The simple reason is that its volume output is offensively low. If you're trying to play something dubbed off a Columbia album, for example, you probably won't even be able to hear it on a busy street. It was almost absurd to hear (or rather, to not hear) that coquettish squeak emerge from Sennheiser headphones on full batteries. One thing I will say is that the sound _quality_ was very nice. In fact, in an absolutely silent room, using a high-quality tape, I think this machine actually sounds a little _better_ than its somewhat soupy Sony equivalent.

4. I can't comment on the headphones. Panasonic ones nowadays are usually OK until they break. For my part, I gave them away.

5. The autoreverse was good and never failed until the whole machine did. But I suppose the engineering wizardry which got the motor small enough to work in a unit this size also made the mechanics extremely delicate. See point 1 above.

Buy the Sony WM-FX290 instead.

There are only about 2 manufactures of portable cassette players left, Sony and Panasonic. I've had 2 sony players quit on me, so decided to switch to the Panasonic. I like the auto reverse feature.

I was looking for a walkman to play my old tapes.
This one has auto reverse, but not auto-shutoff. So it just keeps looping around.

I carry the machine on my hip throughout the day and listen to books on tapes. And it works just fine. It uses two AA batteries, and I use to machines that use one, but it seems a lot sturdier than I am used to and does not break as easily.

It's not easy finding cassette players these days. I listen to a lot of audio books and prefer that format over any of the others. The Panasonic RQ-CR07V was the right choice for me. Everything about it is perfect. The only negative comment would be the belt hook. If you use the player while you are moving around a lot, it wouldn't take you long to despise the hook that is supposed to secure to belt, pocket, etc.

The front panel operations require a minimum of 2 button presses. After a few months of ownership, both of my units became intolerably unresponsive to all but the hardest button pressing and multiple tries. This defeats the whole purpose of the portability and convenience. No pros listed here, others have done that.

Per teli conversation with Moses, it should have had a external power input for a transformer which i purchased at same time.It did not. Otherwise unit is running as expected.