Home Theater System

I like it!
I like the set and we really enjoy using it. Although it is very good and we like it, we have some minor issues with it:
1) At nights, the volume is either too high or too low. Although we set it to "Night" mode, for some DVDs, we could not find a volume that is not too loud while we can still hear the dialogues well.
2) The user interface could have been designed a little bit more easy to use. We had one SONY DVD player and I found it's interface user-friendlier than this.

Less than you'd expect
So you saw it in the store and it looked like a good idea. Maybe you were upgrading (finally!) to a 5.1 system from those terrible TV speakers or that old bookshelf stereo you rigged up because the TV speakers were so bad.

You unbox it and hook it up, hey, that was easy, everything is color coded, nothing to screw up! Only, as you look closer, those speakers look a little funny through the grate. The tinkerer in you gets the best of you and you take a speaker apart. Holy crap! They put fake speakers in there just to make it "look better." Only 1 of the speakers in there is real!

You turn it on and wow, 5.1. Finally. Only, 1/2 of your DVDs support only DTS, and this player only supports Dolby Digital and on those DVDs, the dialogue is really hard to hear, but boy do those action scenes and soundtracks pop. You like playing with the remote though, right?

A month later, your 6 year old nephew comes over and oops, he accidentally bumped the speaker wire extruding from the base of the rear speaker and broke it off. Well, unfortunately you can't get those connectors anywhere, except maybe Philips at a premium. You might as well try and repair the flimsy 22ga. wires and solder it back to the connector. That will work until it happens again when you're vacuuming even though you tucked the wire back under the base of the speaker to try and protect it. This time you get smart though. You take the speaker stand apart and replace the connectors with some generic butt connectors from radioshack and bypass that ridiculously placed connector at the back and have the wire come out from the bottom of the speaker stand.

Well, you were finally sick of straining to hear the dialogue on your movies and when you played music, all you got was tinny treble and some base from the (unpowered) 3ohm resistance sub. Your uncle is giving up his pair of reference grade HiFi's from the 80s and you think it would be fun to put some decent music speakers with this. Only how are you going to hook them up? they have standard post connectors and your speakers have hard wired connections from the speaker straight to the custom "easy-fit" connector on the DVD player. Well, just clip the speaker cables about 6 inches from the speaker and solder some standard connectors on. Fire it up and oh, oh my god, that's so much better! There are mid-range vocals to be heard and the tinny treble is gone, and there's something between the subwoofer cutoff and the bottom of the tweeter range! What a difference. But what to do with those old fronts? Meh, they're speakers in some plastic. Toss 'em.

Bottom Line:
You get less than you pay for.
Speakers:
Custom "Easy-Fit" connections end up being a huge pain and limit customizability of the system.
Fake cones mean that they could have been dramatically reduced in size with no ill effect on sound (was the impression of bigger speakers somehow worth it in their mind?)
Speakers have terrible sound reproduction in the normal vocal (mid) range. Bass is muddled and without punch.
DVD Player:
Doesn't support DTS audio encoding, which is more common than Dolby Digital, leading to awful sounding movies requiring constant remote volume attention.
No inputs: your game console will have to play through the TV or you'll have to route the sound separately from the video.
On Screen Menu: all options are only available when the source is "Disc" and there is no disc inserted, or it is fully stopped (press Stop twice).

Save your money and put it toward a real home theater system in the future.

Sceptical
Initially I was very skeptical about purchasing this product because it was extreme cheap in comparison to similar products. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I got the theater system. Setting it up was relatively simple, instructions were very straight forward and the remote control seemed fairly easy to use. One of the speakers didn't function and had to be replaced but other than that it has been working great. I have an older Philips TV (non digital) and my laptop (for music, movies etc) hooked up to it and so far so good. I am especially fond of the Ipod doc which I now use to charge both my Ipod and Iphone, while seamlessly listening to music. I normally don't post reviews but this product's performance was a strong motivator.

Good System for the Price
I didn't buy this through Amazon, but rather through my local membership-only retailer. That said, the price is roughly comparable and regardless, the system is REMARKABLE. The sound is clear, the volume LOUD, and the quality exceptional. The only things I would change with the system are thus:

- Proprietary jacks are lame. I have an oddly shaped room, and the rear left speaker's wire was far FAR too short to reach to where I needed it too. I butt-spliced some 22-gauge wire into the cable and it works fine, but that I had to and didn't have the option to just use another cable wholesale was obnoxious.
- All speakers save the central one have only a single hanging peg, and that is annoying if they hang anywhere in reach - even tapping them lightly can push them significantly off-center. A small nail hidden in the assembly screw-well resolved the issue, but isn't super clean.
- Boot time is LOOOOONG, and sometimes when switching to USB-mode from anything other than Disc-mode it doesn't load correctly. Disc > USB almost always works, though, but it's a matter of waiting longer than I'd like.
- Controls via the remote to the iPod dock are severely limited.

Other that those nit-picks, the system is great. Well worth it for an entry-level system, and an excellent upgrade over the built-in speakers on my TV.

Why are we getting the lemons???
We purchased this home theater system right after Christmas. The first one arrived and we hooked it up and .... nothing. No sound whatsoever. Called Philips and they went through all the steps to make sure we had hooked it up right (which we had) and after about an hour they said they would send out another one. Second one arrived, hooked it up and the sound was great....but the DVD player wouldn't play. Called again. Went through everything again. Third one arrived about two weeks later. Hooked it up, sounded great, DVD player worked - happy right? Yes, for about one week and then nothing... no sound at all. Now the DVD player won't open so we can get our movie out! Are we just jinxed or is there something really wrong here? Also, now we have three systems sitting in our house and none of them work and we have to haul them to the post office to return them. Now what I want to know is .. Why would Philips send us out two more systems without us even having to return the ones we had? Makes me wonder if they get these calls all the time and are just throwing them out to people hoping they'll stick. Needless to say we're returning all of them and looking for something else.