Home > Consumer Reviews > Panasonic SC-HT900 Home Theater System with 5-Disc DVD Changer

I bought this unit from Amazon about 6 months ago. I must admit, this is a very stylish system with very low profile. The dvd player itself is very very slim. It is wider than normal components though.

Sound is pretty decent. I have not had any problem with the sound. Some folks have complained about the subwoofer being weak. But in my setup it is delivering robust and rich bass. I think this unit is not meant to be in a very big room. In small rooms sound is great.

The remote feels flimsy. I am scared one day may 20 months old daughter is going to break it and my system will be unusable. Sometimes the buttons need to be pressed hard. And since there is no indicator LED on the remote, you can't tell if the button got pressed or not. Little annoying.

It does not play dvd-rw or dvd+rw. I think this day and age all dvd players need to handle the above formats.

Worked fine till 9 months of usage, then the system started to emit loud pops in all speakers. After looking at the reviews, I wish I would of read them before this purchase, but it was a Spontaneous buy and I am not in the habit of reading reviews for products, prior to buying them. I guess I should change my ways. I am a technician, so I did a little looking into the problem, and did notice that the fan does not work. In troubleshooting, I changed out the fan itself and noticed the whole circuit is not working feeding into the fan. And a few components internally have overheated already, with the caps leaking fluid, and burn marks at certain points near resistors on the circuit board. All and all, I am still covered under the warranty, but do not look forward to the wait time in order to get the system back, as well as keeping my fingers crossed that it won't happen again.
All and All, I will try to neogiate with the actual store in giving me credit to buy a whole entire different system.

Like others, we have experienced loud cracking and popping sounds from the speakers. It first happened after 5 months of ownership. We took it to an authorized service center who couldn't fix it and then it was sent back to the company. We were told the unit is over-heating. We got it back after a 3 week wait and guess what? The cracking sound started again about 1 week later. Don't buy this equipment!!!

After 4 months of dealing with Panasonic customer support and their authorized service centers I finally have an answer to what is causing the popping noise and sporadic sound loss. The Panasonic tech actually called me, which renewed a little faith in the company. He said it is a know issue with a number of these systems. Apparently a circuit board on the amplifier in the subwoofer is faulty.

Now why does the authorized service centers not know this and why does the customer service personal guarantee you there is not a known defect in the product. I can't tell you.

This unit looks great, sounds great, and the price is unbeatable. The overheating seems to be causing a lot of people problems, if not for that I would give this unit 5 stars. If you have some guts and some basic knowledge about electricity and electronics you can avoid these problems. I got a really good deal on one, then found out about the overheating. Not wanting this to be a problem I decided to investigate. I popped off the back panel of the sub to find that the fan wasn't actually working. I imagine that it is supposed to kick on when things start getting hot, but my unit was already really hot. The heatsink inside was almost too hot to touch. The fan is 80mm so I took a standard led case fan and replaced the stock one. The stock one has some non standard screw holes so I had to use some strong adhesive foam tape to hold the new fan in place. Then I ran the wire outside the sub and rigged up a small ac/dc power adapter to power the fan. It took about 30 minutes to do and now my unit runs very cool, and has a cool looking blue glow on the wall coming from the fan to boot. You could just use the stock fan and rig up an adapter to it but I didn't want to cut off the connector in case I needed to take the unit back. For the adapter use something between 7 and 12 volts, lower voltage = quiter fan but less airflow. If you don't want to open it up, you could just mount a fan right on the outside of the vent. I think the major problem is there is a defect in the board that doesn't turn the fan on, and you don't want a bunch of really hot electronics with no airflow.