- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 54 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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14 out of 14 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
"Great show for the money"
Pros: Great price and sound; marvelous footprint; quality DVD video, CD sound
Cons: No bass/treble controls. Nit picky... no rear audio in for iPod; limited options for Tivo or additional boxes; remote small
Summary: OK... so I waited 4 months for this to get out, drove 70 mi to Palo Alto to hear it at BB- they didn't have it on the shelf yet- so I took the chance and bought. You can get it cheaper on Amazon BTW.
Quick to set up, and the "tweaters" (old school me) are rock solid and well built. The Av unit itself is exactly the form factor I was looking for- small and non-blingy; it fits perfectly on top of the Tivo. The sub seems oversized and cheap in comparison to the tweeters (-). Nice touch including wall brackets for the tweeters too.
I also went with the HDMI hookup to my Sony 32 LCD. I tested my iPod first, using the front input (be nice to have a rear as well- nitpicky, but -). Depending on your MP3 settings, you'll need to fiddle with the presets to find the sound you are looking for.
Next came Metallica Black.... most excellent and rich sound. Not a Bose or Denon 5.1, but for hundreds less, amazing- I don't have the space or patience for speakers and wires all over the place- I just got rid of all that. After that, I threw in a West Wing DVD to test the video quality. The 1080i was incredibly clear and brilliant.
I did not have the TV audio set through the HDMI, so that remains to be seen. But seeing as I am more concerned with music quality and picture quality from the unit, I am very pleased.
Certainly the pros outweigh the cons, and as mentioned above, the biggest disappointments are the lack of the bass/treble control (presets only) and the poor remote- you need to be a fighter pilot to read the text. For the amount of "thump" coming from the sub, it should be smaller. All in all, an 8+ (just can't quite rate a 9) with a marvelously rich sound coming from a unit which is next to invisible.
Philips HTS6500:
