2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Buyers remorse
Date of Review: May 8, 2003
The Bottom Line: Skip this product and put in a 5-speaker system with normal DVD features. This was a good concept, but a poor implementation.
This system sounded fantastic in the showroom. In fact, the demo system sounded so good, I bought on impulse, without first doing my normal research. The fact that I wouldn't have to run wires for the extra speakers was the icing on the cake.
When I got it home, it was very easy to install. I had it up and running in a few minutes, and my wife and kids were in oohing and aahing over the relatively big sound from such a small package. Up to this point, I loved this system.
No headphone jack!
Somehow this detail escaped me in the showroom. I never would have believed that an entertainment system wouldn't include a headphone jack (I need headphones for listening when the rest of the family is asleep). But, resourceful guy that I am, I went to radio shack and got the appropriate adapters and connected my headphones to the audio output on the back of the unit. The only problem was, I could barely hear the sound, and the external output is at a fixed level (no volume adjustment). So back to the drawing board. I had been wanting to buy a headphone amp, so 3 days later, my Headbanger amp shows up, and I'm ready to listen. Sounds good, but I notice another problem. The mute on the system is not "sticky". As soon as you hit any other button on the remote (e.g. "next track"), the volume is back on. So the only way to mute the system is to turn the volume all the way down.
Silly remote limitations.
Now that I have lived with the system for a while, there are a number of other things that make no sense. The remote has no buttons to deal with the normal DVD-play options (audio, subtitles, angle). These can only be accessed through on-screen menus.
Glitches.
We have had one major glitch so far. The system got into a state where every other remote button press was a "mute" command. After much frustration, we found that the only fix was to unplug the system and then plug it back in. In addition, the system seems to have second-long skips for a lot of my music DVDs, in DTS mode. My other DVD players play these same discs without a problem.
I guess its time to box the system up and save it for my son's dorm room when he goes to college in a couple of years. In the meantime, I'm going to do my homework, and buy a normal 5-speaker entertainment system. For $1000, I should be able to get something a lot better.
