Philips HTS3400D/37 Home Theater System with DVD Player
From Philips
Whether in homes, factories, offices, airports, or on the street, it's hard to imagine a place where Philips is absent. What Philips wants is to make your life and work easier - and more fun! And Philips continuously explores new ways to improve products and to offer innovative products to its consumers. Philips. "Let's Make Things Better".
Amazon Sales Rank: #179 in Home Theater Color: Blk Brand: Philips Model: HTS3400D/37 Dimensions: 13.96" h x 20.59" w x 22.50" l, 36.00 pounds
Picture CD is a CD-R or CD-RW disc on which you can store your MP3 and digital pictures. When inserting a Picture CD in the DVD player, a screen menu will pop up, showing your JPEG's and/or MP3 files on the disc. Just select the music and pictures files you wish to enjoy and press play or OK. You can watch your pictures on TV with your music playing simultaneously.Multi-format playability allows you to play most disc formats for maximum disc compatibility and listening pleasure.Progressive Scan doubles the vertical resolution of the image resulting in a noticeably sharper picture. Instead of sending a field comprising the odd lines to the screen first, followed by the field with the even lines, both fields are written at one time. A full image is created instantaneously, using the maximum resolution. At such a speed, your eye perceives a sharper picture with no line structure.A built-in DTS and Dolby Digital decoder eliminates the need for an external decoder by processing all six channels of audio information to provide a surround sound experience and an astoundingly natural sense of ambience and dynamic realism. Dolby Pro Logic II provides five channels of surround processing from any stereo source.Multi-format playability allows you to play most disc formats for maximum disc compatibility and viewing pleasure.To guide you through the initial set-up of your system, Philips delivers a Quick Start Guide that uses an easy approach with clearly defined graphics and colors to guide you through the basic steps of connection and obtaining picture and sound. These basic steps are clearly described on one page in the packaging box, making setup quick and simple.Color-coded connectors provide a simple and user-friendly solution to connect the speakers and subwoofer to the center unit of the home entertainment system simply by plugging the connectors in the matching colored interface at the rear of the center unit.When it comes to perfect audio there is no room for distortion. Digital amplifiers generate far less heat than standard analog amplifiers, allowing for smaller set enclosures. Philips Class D Amplifiers™ provide dramatically enhanced sound quality over digital amplifiers used by competitors as they are designed to control and reduce EMI (Electro Magnetic Interference). In addition, the Class D Amplifiers™ use a closed loop design which suppresses distortion and loss of audio quality. The overall result is enhanced audio performance from a much smaller package. Other standard features include: Color-coded Easy-Fit™ connectors simplify set-up. Easy set-up to initialize your total home entertainment. Advanced Class D Amplifier™for compact, powerful sound.
betters Bose at 1/5 of the price! A friend of mine bought this system for his beach-house, and though I was skeptical at first it really surprised me given the pricetag. This little unit is every bit as compact and pretty as Bose, but actually sounds the same or better! I was very leery of the tiny subwoofer (I have a big 55lb. twelve inch Mirage sub at home that I love) but it actually was not bad at all...CERTAINLY much better than those pathetic Bose "bass modules" (they can't call it a "subwoofer" because it's not) which only puts out fuzzy boomy half-baked mid-bass. Having said that, bear in mind that no satellite system at ANY cost (the Mirage Omnisats and Orb Audio units do come close though) can match the sound quality of decent bookshelf speakers (from an Athena AS-B1 to Ascend CBM-170s). Sure it's still much better than your TV's speakers...but God help you if you plan to listen to music on these teensy weensy little sats, unless it's very casual/background listening at moderate volume levels. Make no mistake: the only reason to go with a Home Theater In A Box satellite system is price, compactness, price, and compactness. Just Amazing !!!!! The first time I saw this piece was at Wal-mart. I had listened to Sony,Philips, JVC, Panasonic, RCA in that order, the difference was instantly clear. Then I went back to listen to the Philips again and the difference was clear.I recommend that first time buyers should go to a store with several brands on display that they could listen to. I made up my mind that if I wanted a home theater in a box (HTIB)package it will be the Philips brand.This was about 10 months ago. Each time I stopped by the electronic section of any store I would check it out. Finally, I decided to buy one. Next thing was to read expert reviews and consumer reviews. Most reviews rated it high. However, I was concerned about the hissing sound some consumers had experienced.I still went ahead to buy one at Fred Meyer for $179:00 on sale, if I did not like it, I will return it, I reasoned. I bought the black colored piece. Costco and Radioshack had it on sale for the same price but Fred Meyer is closer to my home. Since adding this piece to our family room, the audio effects in our family room is certainly more welcoming, warmer , richer and entertaining than before. I will address the concerns of a few reviews here. 1. Hissing sound: I found none, but discovered that if the audio OUT on your TV has one jacket like mine, instead of two or three jackets, then you need to get an extension RCA jacket that will split your one outlet to two or three OUT jackets with the apporpriate color codes (white, red (for two jackets) and yellow for the third jacket) to match the audio IN jacket (white and red) of the DVD player, otherwise you will get either a humming or hissing sound. Please note that the key here is to have the color codes on your TV audio OUT,to match the color codes on your Philips DVD audio IN otherwise you will get a humming or hissing sound. 2. DVD player jumping disc: You are using a defective disc. solution: change your disc. 3. Back speakers not working: They will not work if you do not use the remote control to adjust the surround and sound buttons to the appropriate mode e.g. movie , stereo etc. Sometimes, some movies are not recorded to produce surround sound effect, so change the TV channel or your DVD disc. 4. Speaker wires not long enough:Some consumers had enough length, mine were too short for our large family room (too large for me to bother to measure). One reviewer was able to use banana plugs to make the adaptation,I could not. So I returned the banana plugs, I bought from Home depot. Instead, I bought some digital extension cables. They come in different sizes 14G,16G,18G,20G etc. The smaller the size number, the thicker the cable, the better, to avoid loss of digital signals. I bought size 14G. The risk with attaching extension cables is that since you will have to cut into the original cables that come with the equipment you can not return your equipment to the store nor sell it at ebay for a good price if you wanted to,since it will be considered tampered with. But be reassured you will not need to dispose of this equipment once you have it properly set up.If you decide to use additional extension cable/wire, cut the orginal wire at about 6 inches from the speakers. Attach your extention cable to this cut end and run the attached extension cable from your speaker location to where your equipment is.Then attach the other end of your extension cable to the other end of the original cable, so you can still use the proprietary speaker plugs that came with your equipment to attach to the back of the set.This method makes it cosmetically suitable to have one cable (i.e. the extension) run through your entire room and at the same time use the the proprietary plugs attached to the orginal cable at the other end with your equipment, which by the way is the only plug that fits into the jackets at the back of the DVD player/receiver.REMEMBER to tape over all exposed wires/cables with nonconductive electric tape. Normally, comes in black. Caution: you need to buy enough length of extension cable though, they come in 25ft, 50ft and 100ft length. Having a large room I bought three 50 feet cables to do the job satisfactorily.The cost for each 50 ft cable was $19:00. 5. Wall mountings:The enclosed wall mountings are fixed. You can not rotate the position of your speakers once mounted. For less than $15:00 at Wal-mart , I bought a set of 5 speakers wall mounts that I can rotate from side to side or move up and down to a suitable head angle. Speaking of the sound production, it is clear, crisp and true theater realism. The sonics can not be described justily unless you hear it for your self.Do your self a favor and buy one. But for the proprietary plugs that make it difficult to consider using extension cables , I would have given it 5 stars. Philips should make the plugs universally adaptable, so consumers wil not have second thoughts about adding extension cables, if they needed to. Better still, Philips could add more length to the cables or make provisions for one to order fitting extension cables through them so you do not have to cut into the original cables. Constant noise I was looking for a DVD player for my bedroom at Costco and couldn't resist the $179 price for this brand new Philips HTS3400 (HTS3410 is the same except that it comes all in silver rather than silver/black). I played some DVDs and CDs and after 2 days i decided to return it for 2 reasons: 1. It makes a hissing sound when it's turned off. Now, it wouldn't bother me too much in a basement (althought it would still be anoying), but it's a definite NO NO in the bedroom. 2. Rear speakers are almost silent no matter how much you increase the volume to them. If you don't mind these 2 things, then by all means go for it. UPDATE: Having nothing better to do, I went and purchased another unit from Costco to see if indeed I have a bad unit or it's a design/manufacturing issue. Surprise surprise...second unit makes the same exact noise only a bit louder! Curious enough (i'm a mechanical engineer with some knowledge of electronics) i open the unit to see where is this noise coming from. It is the AC/DC transformer, more specific two 330uF capacitors making this noise. That is really poor design and/or low quality components!!! I did not expect this from a brand name like Philips. This is no different than any no name units out there at half price. As a result I am changing my initial reivew and recommend that you look for a different product, this one is definately not worth the money. I cannot update the stars but this time I would rate it with 0 stars.
