Quality
While it's crap that the CD player stopped working after some years, that phenomenon seems to be quite common for stereos of that type and price.
Usually people who had Sony stereos were the first ones seeing such problems. Compared to those, this one wasn’t too bad.
As time went on I felt I had grown out of my original tape radio and I wanted a ‘proper’ stereo. With separate speakers, with two tape decks for making mix tapes and, most importantly, with a CD player.
For some birthday, we went and looked for one and I ended up getting this Philips stereo which I found simply amazing at the time. Not only did it have two tape decks with auto reverse and cool features like the ability to automatically repeat a song, it also came with the CD player and a remote control. I love remote controls. Particularly when they can open and close the CD tray. Magic!
Of course there was also a built-in radio and an AUX input which came handy later on when things like computers and MP3s became popular or when the stereo’s CD player stopped working which doesn't seem to be uncommon for stereos like this one. It started to be a problem after five years or so. Some CDs would just skip a lot. A bit of cleaning improved that situation for a while but ultimately I had to settle for the CD player not working properly and either refusing to recognise CDs or doing a lot of skipping instead of playing them properly.
Thus I ended up using the machine mostly to play music from the computer or discman in the later years.
Another problem I had with this stereo is that it stopped working at some stage. It just wouldn’t display any life signs when plugged it in (a clock is supposed to appear in the display). The nice thing with such ‘old’ devices is that you can still open them and have a look around. It turned out there was a fuse in the transformer which had blown. That could be easily replaced. But even though getting a replacement with the same sensitivity the fuse blew a number of times since when the stereo was plugged in. Which makes unplugging and re-plugging the stereo a bit more ‘interesting’ than I want it to be.
In addition, the erase head in the tape deck stopped working properly. Meaning that I can still play back and record but recording is only fun on blank tapes as previous recordings can still be heard otherwise.
While the stereo is not particularly good – neither in sound quality nor in the volume it can reach, it is doing its job in our kitchen to this day – playing back music from the discman, iPod, PowerBook and – very rarely – from a tape.