Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic SC-PM11 Executive Microsystem

I purchased this product a week ago and I absolutely love it!
The system is small, relatively good looking system which has excellent sound and a great list of features.

The system is small and would be best suited to a bedroom, study, or a room with limited space.
It only comes in one colour (silver with a purplish hue) and has a large, easy to read, orange backlit LCD display.

The sound is absolutely amazing for such a small system. There are five sound presets (heavy, disco, clear, soft and jazz). There is also a setting called 'Suped Sound AI EQ', which improves the sound no end. This sort of system would be best suited for rock and dance/techno music.

The system has great features for both the size and the price: a 5-CD changer, 50W RMS power, a casette desk, full remote control, removable speaker grilles (great if you like your music loud and watching your speakers thumping), and heaps more.

Anyway, in conclusion, this system represents excellent value for money. O would strongly suggest you consider this one if you are looking at micro/mini systems.

The Panasonic SCPM11 offers a very good feature set at a very good price: 5 CD changer, high power, clear sound, fairly good frequency response, and a good remote. Not a bad looking unit either, but not exactly "sexy." The low points: Not as deep a bass response as more pricey units, no PlayExchange (i.e., does not let you swap out CDs while one is playing), no custom equalization, and a noisy changer that will probably wake you up if you use the "sleep" function. If you're willing to forego these shortfalls, it's definitely worth considering.

I went EVERYWHERE looking for a system for my front room, and all I saw in every store were ugly, gargantuan systems with speakers that looked like they were fed crack through the outlet. I saw this system, read the reviews, bought it, and now I'm writing a review about how incredible this system is. Really good sound, great features, no unnecessary bells and whistles, and you don't have to go install additional shelving for it to fit someplace. You can't beat the price. It's the most satisfactory purchase I've made in a while.

I realized I was in the market for a new CD player when the old boombox wouldn't play home-burned MP3 disks.

In the [local store], my wife thought the PANASONIC SC-PM11 "cute". I was more impressed by the price - [money amount]less than list price elsewhere. And we both thought the sound quality excellent.

Once home with our new toy, we suspected we'd made the right choice when the cat woke up and came over to watch as we unpacked the box. Usually, she ignores our homecoming.

Outside its carton, everything about the SC-PM11 is compact - the main unit, speakers, and remote control. Small enough to take into the doghouse if the spouse banishes you there. For us, the main unit fits nicely on a shelf of the living room entertainment center, with the speakers on the top. The system's silver and grey exterior and the orange background of the LCD display don't match the center's dark walnut finish, but what would? The remote joins a growing pile (TV, cable box, VHS player, DVD player). At first, I wondered about the usefulness of a remote, but this particular system has radio and CD listening features only accessible through the hand-held device: pre-setting of radio stations and their subsequent recall, selecting repeat and random play modes for CDs, creating custom programs of CD tracks. I'd better not lose the remote in the couch cushions.

But what about the sound? Those little speakers are amazing. Just to see how high they'd go, we cranked up our favorite CD of the moment, the CHICAGO soundtrack, to the point where Catherine Zeta-Jones's rendition of "All That Jazz" had the windows vibrating. We chickened out and turned it down before the neighbors called the police, but it's nice to know we can be a public nuisance if we so choose.

There are built-in sound quality/field settings that can be chosen: Heavy (for music needing an "added punch"), Clear (for treble range clarity), Soft (for elevator music), Disco (for lengthy reverberations), Live (for "more alive" vocals), and Hall (for concert hall expansiveness). And, to enhance the bass and treble effects, there's the SUPER SOUND EQ button. Audio snobs will perhaps scoff at these one-button gimmicks, but my needs are less discriminating and they'll do fine.

Finally, the Operating Instructions are impressively lucid. The multitudinous features are illustrated, numbered and page referenced, and there's a nice mix of bold-face, boxed and highlighted type to call attention to the important stuff.

And the cat? She jumped into the box once we got it emptied and looked eminently pleased with her new snoozing spot.

After spending so little on the system, I thought I'd be disappointed, but the flaws are few and minor, and overall this is an excellent system.

The most important thing that I discovered about the system when it arrived was that it does indeed have an auxilary input -- the specs either say that it doesn't or are not clear about that. The Aux-In is important if you plan on hooking up your DVD player, Playstation, or MP3 player. I bought thinking that it wouldn't have one but was pleasantly surprised to find that it did.

Otherwise the SC-PM11 is a very powerful stereo in a small amount of space. The 5 CD changer works well, and allows random play from one or all five discs. Buttons allow one-touch playing of any of the 5 CDs, and the sound is very good. The radio has good reception, and comes with an external antenna for improved reception. Graphic equalizer is of the pre-set variety, but at least one of the settings should be good for whatever kind of music you are playing. Tape player is fine, and supposedly allows timed-recordings of programs, which is a nice feature.

Minor problems include the time it takes to switch between CDs, which can be as much as 20 seconds before it starts the next song, and the noise of the changer which is quite noticable. Some of the functions are only available from the remote, which I consider a mistake in case anyone loses the remote, and the buttons on both the remote and the unit itself are not very well laid out. The CD player seems overly sensitive to scratched CDs. All of these are minor inconveniences though, and the fact that it's a very powerful yet compact 5 CD system at a low price make this a wise purchase.