Customer Reviews
for a small room 
2008-06-28
This is an inexpensive set that will bring a nice surround environment
to a small room. I bought this by accident. I prefer a good 2 channel
system for music and movies. This being my first 5.1 with a subwoofer,
I set it up in my bedroom. After an afternoon of experimenting with the
various settings,I finally found it to be adequate for an evening movie.
Start with the basics -
There are three settings for bass - light, normal, and heavy .
There are several EQ presets for different sound ambience, and also
a variety of surround effects settings.Once you find your ideal, or best settings, fine tune the environment by adjusting the sound level for each speaker, and also the 'distance' from the surround(rear) speakers.
What I liked, Pros:
The instruction page was helpful and easy to understand.
The speaker wires are color coded, and each sp. is labeled as to it's location.
The 'light' bass .
Plays PAL discs!
Sound quality is best at low volume.
Cons:
Manually adjusting all the settings can take some time.
The 200 watt designation is misleading,this system is not that powerful.
No built-in TV tuner.
Had some difficulty with recorded DVDRs skipping and stuttering.
Intermittent pauses while reading DVDRs.
Of course, my first inclination was to watch something loud -
I chose a Godzilla movie for the effects, and the system was not up to my
ideal standard of 'feeling' the action.
My second selection was a commercial PAL music video disc.
This is where the sound reproduction improved, and soon realized that
heavy, gut crunching power was not within this units ability.
It is more refined to subtleties in fidelity.
And through all temptation, I found the strength to keep the volume
down in the 'teens'(volume goes 0-40) for a soothing nightcap
of The Fifth Element.
My optimum settings ended up being -
Light Bass,Flat tone,Prologic Movie , and I increased the dB setting for
the two surround speakers by 2 dB each. And decrease the center channel 2dB.Subsequently, I set the distance
for the surround speakers to 12 foot,even though in reality no speaker is more than 5 feet away.
Ideally, the price of this unit should tip the buyer to its potential:
a cheap,basic system .The surprise is the audio - at low volumes.
In summary, if you like to customize your sounds to your tastes, for
'quiet' surround sound to accompany your favorite movie, this is good.
If you can read and follow instructions, and have the patience to fine tune all the settings, this system might be okay for you.
