Harman Kardon

[PaceAerospace]

Just a post to say just played my first DVD on my new system a Harman Kardon HS300, and wow its great, a big step up from my old pioneer DCS313.
I can total recomend it.

[dgtale]

I bought the HS500 and I am disappointed with it.

Two main issues:
============
DVD ripped into DivX with original audio 5.1: when I play a divx movie with 5.1 audio, I can hear it only in stereo mode (my MVix MX760HD, connected with a optical cable to the HS500, can play it in 5.1).

TV->HS500 audio delay: the TV is connected to the HS500 with a scart cable. If i turn on both volumes (TV & HS500), just for testing purpose, I can hear a kind of echo because of the audio delay (100/200 millis) of the HS500. This is very annoying because when people are talking I can see the mouth opening and after a while I hear the words.
With my previous HTIB, a very old AIWA, all worked fine.

Bad support: I sent the HS500 to the support and they just returned it back saying they didn't find any of the listed issues.

[dgtale]

Take a look at this: http://www.dgtale.ch/dg_img/hs500_delay.png

How did I make the test? Well...
- I took the left channel from the TV-audio-out and put into my pc sound card (line-in left channel)
- I took the left channel from the HS 500 audio-out and put into my pc sound card (line-in right channel)

Stay away from H/K !!!

[LMD]

I'm very pleased with the H200 I purchased recently

[interbear]

Originally Posted by LMD

I'm very pleased with the H200 I purchased recently

Glad to hear it. Any specific positives / negatives to report yet? I'm very interested in how it performs with CDs and also TV sound - I'd be looking to connect it to a Sky HD box via optical. Also, any views on DVD picture quality via HDMI? Upscaling better than you first thought?

Generally I am still reading very positive reports about the quality of audio with all HK kit. Not much out there on video quality though, Denon may still be doing better on that front perhaps?

[LMD]

Originally Posted by interbear

Glad to hear it. Any specific positives / negatives to report yet? I'm very interested in how it performs with CDs and also TV sound - I'd be looking to connect it to a Sky HD box via optical. Also, any views on DVD picture quality via HDMI? Upscaling better than you first thought?

Generally I am still reading very positive reports about the quality of audio with all HK kit. Not much out there on video quality though, Denon may still be doing better on that front perhaps?

I guess my current thoughts, based on limited time with the kit is that it does everything well and that's probably the best you should expect from an all-in-one system.

I still haven't properly calibrated the system or the display so not really in a position to comment definatively on the picture quality - all I will say is that it's very good but based on the reviews I've read I'd expect the Denon to perform better. I say this because the S-301 reviews rave about the picture quality and claim it's as good as an upscaled picture gets. The picture on the H200 is very good and certainly better than the Pioneer I was previously using but I've yet to see a massive step-up from SD quality.

I am of course making assumptions about the S-301 and as previously stated perhaps my expectations of how upscaled pictures would compare to standard definition is quite simply unrealistic.

The thing I've been most obviously impressed with is CD playback with the H200. Again this is based on my expectations from an all-in-one system i.e. I didn't expect performance comparible to a seperates system. For me the sound quality is plenty good enough and gets better the louder you go.

I will get round to posting a review in the near future - I just need to spend more time with the kit and actually try all of the functionality out.

[jusu]

Decided to add my comments to this thread if someone is looking for HS X00 info. I purchased HS 500 and I'm very happy with the sound, especially the bass is excellent, the speakers sound very good on low and moderate volume, but give up a bit at higher volumes. This really is audible only when listening to demanding music and I'm really pushing the system.

Remote is pretty awful and works a bit slow. I also had an issue with the subwoofer auto on/off line, if I had that connected I got quite loud static on the subwoofer, fortunately the sub is clever enough to turn itself off when there is no input, therefore I just dropped the connector and now it works fine.

I haven't noticed any delay in the sound output, but I guess I'll try it out to see if the audio has the delay and I'm just too daft to notice

As a recap:

Pros:
- looks, it really is a good looking and relatively small system
- subwoofer, simply excellent
- overall sound, movies and music is good at least in my very subjective view.

Cons:
- remote, works slowly, complicated to program, modes are very messily designed.
- 1080i image looks pretty bad on my screen, however 720p is very good.

[Graham_E]

Anyone having audio delay issues with ANY av kit should make sure that speaker distances are properly adjusted - having LR / centre wrong will cause lip sync issues.

Does this solve your problem?

[jusu]

Adding the audio delay discussion here. This is what I have noticed now after some time of using the system:

Internal DVD - no audio delay
analog line in - no / neglible audio delay
optical in - bad audio delay, seems to be at around 100-200ms, this can be very disturbing in some material.

Does any of you people know if I can do anything about this, I have adjusted all the settings with calibration disk several times, reset them to defaults, updated the firmware etc. It seems that this delay just is there and it could be that there is nothing I can do about it.

Do current Blue ray players allow one to freely adjust the audio/video delays so that I could manually adjust the delays to a suitable level? If that would be the case, I guess I could live with the problem, since regular TV sounds good enough over analog lines too where the problem does not exist.

Any feedback would be appreciated.