After being quite happy with the Panasonic Walkman, I got another ‘personal stereo’ device from Panasonic to play CDs when I moved to England and couldn’t take my full stereo with me.
This discman has worked without in hitch in all the years I have used it and while such devices seem a bit passé by now, I remain quite happy with it. It comes with an anti-shock feature that buffers a few seconds of sound to deal with situations where you move too much. And it shipped with the same uncomfortable headphones that the Walkman came with.
A great detail about the player is that it doesn’t just have a headphone jack but also comes with a Line-Out, making it a good device to attach to a stereo as well. In fact, I have used the discman as a replacement CD player on the kitchen stereo since getting an iPod.
In late 2007 I ran into the first seemingly fatal problem with the device. I hit the play button and no music came out. Instead the message ‘F15’ appeared in the display. Search results for that message sounded rather fatal. But after toying around with the player for a while I saw that the laser was positioned at the very outside of the disc (I'd expect it to be in the middle where the CD starts when the player is idle). Figuring that things couldn’t become worse, I gently nudged it towards the middle and there was a bit of resistance at the beginning of the movement. It must have been stuck in that position for some reason and worked fine again after I did this.