Advantages: Rich sound, super clarity, deep base, look great, robust, high quality Disadvantages: Simply none!
My Harmon Kardon Soundsticks are plugged into the back of a Mac and have certainly livened things up. I haven't needed to upgrade soundcards or do anything technical whatsoever in my pursuit of fantastically rich sound quality.
Firstly, these sound better than anything else on the market within the price bracket. The sound is rich and deep with ample adjustment for either volume or base. The two sticks and base unit come with an instruction manual, but these really are so simple to use that you can throw the manual in the recycling bin. The speaker set simply plugs into the jack socket of your PC/Mac/laptop and have their own power supply which connects to the base unit. Seperate cabling attaches the sticks to the central base unit.
Once plugged in you get a cool blue underlit main unit which looks really stylish. The sticks ...
Advantages: Best of industry digital-to-analog conversion, especially DVD-A and SACD Disadvantages: The audio interface is sub-standard for Harman Kardon
I purchased this, my first HK 3 weeks ago, being the DVD49. The internal Audio D/A of the DVD49 (analogue output) is the best I heard in any commercial playback device - but here the complements end.
Mechanical - Apart from HK's non-conformance to the industry standard 19" wide design, the design of the CD drawer is the worst I have ever seen. There is no damping whatsoever and the drawer runs into the stops at full speed on open and close - this will most definitely cause the device to fail.
Audio Digital - All three of the HDMI, Optical and Coax digital outputs render a 1 second dropout within 5 - 45 second of starting a new track on skip forward on every 3rd or 4th track. This is totally unacceptable.
All Audio outputs - a very annoying click happen every time a track is skipped or fast forwarded - this is indicative of sloppy ...
Advantages: looks fantastic, beautiful picture (depending on connection), Disadvantages: expensive, reliability problems with brand
, but at £190+ with 3 problems (albeit 2 on the previous model) and a lousy design on the remote I would say that there is better out there for the money, I'm only keeping it because it matches my AMP design. But I do have to say that the technical guys at HarmanKardon bent over backwards to try and make me happy with both this unit and the AMP when I was having problems. You can also get a new player the DVD 27 for £150 or less.
I would give 2.5 stars, for average.
This review is also posted on Dooyoo under stevepeto, this review is made up of my own personal experience with the player ...
