[Jeffhs]

Here is my Panasonic RX-S5400 boombox, a trash find behind my apartment last year. The cassette deck was working, but I think a belt must have snapped, as the take-up hub spindle does not move when the deck is in playback mode. The radio, however, works well and sounds excellent. The only things I could see wrong with this unit as found were, one, the FM antenna was broken, two, the former owner had left the batteries in it for goodness only knows how long (the originals were still there), as several of them had leaked onto the battery contacts, and three, the battery compartment cover is missing. However, the AC power cord was still attached to the unit when I found it, so it was easy to test it when I brought it inside; worked as soon as I threw the switch.

This unit is a keeper, as Panasonic probably doesn't make big, hefty boom boxes like this one anymore, having switched to building and marketing CD/mp3/satellite radio players; the latter, of course, are much, much smaller than any boombox ever was--witness the very small "stick" mp3 players now available these days at Big Lots, et al. for $10 or less.

The price of SanDisk's "Sansa" mp3 player is coming down in a big way as well; the large-capacity players (with 2+ gigabyte storage capacity before formatting) can be had for about $30, with the original 512mb Sansa now selling almost dirt-cheap. I'd have one by now, but I just found out two days ago that the iTunes mp3 player does not support any other operating systems except Windows XP and Vista (I run Win98SE on a nine-year-old IBM Aptiva 595 computer, 128mb RAM and 600-MHz AMD "K7" processor). The only other way I am aware of right now to download to a portable mp3 player the music now on my computer would be to use my Winamp 5.3 media player, which is capable of downloading mp3 files to portable devices.

BTW, I took the attached picture of my Pana boombox in something of a hurry and in less-than-optimum lighting, so it will be dark (at least it looks that way on my old HP Pavilion mx70 monitor). If you supersize the image and increase the brightness of your monitor, however, it should show just fine.