Sony BDVE500W 5.1-Channel High-Definition Blu-ray Disc Player/DVD Disc Home theater System, Plenty of features for a HTIB
This system is awesome. I’ve had it for about a month now and watched a few movies with it. I’m not an audiophile and this is my first surround sound system for my primary living room theater.
I picked this system mainly because of the tower speakers and the S-AIR module. It’s a all in one system with a blue ray disk player that supports about 5 different digital audio codecs. It’s a clean minimalist design. I was surprised by the depth of the receiver. It’s bigger than I expected and fills the majority of shelf space in my entertainment stand.
One thing that bugged me are the the buttons on the top front edge of the receiver. They are small, the same shape and color which force you to read the label to tell what they are. This makes it even more irritating because the remote doesn’t have an eject button and I had to learn which of those tiny buttons would eject my disk. I guess I’m really lazy.
Assembly took all but 15 minutes. It took more time to arrange the pieces around the room. There’s a quick setup guide that will calibrate your system with an included microphone.
One thing to be aware of, as with most HTIB, there are no video inputs. What this means, is that you’ll need to connect all your video sources directly to the TV or a HDMI switch. However, there are mutliple audio inputs. So for example, if you wanted to connect your XBOX 360 to this unit, you’ll have to connect your HDMI to your tv and then use an optical cable to route the audio to the receiver. Or you could use the optical out from your TV. This is not ideal, in my opinion, but then again that was not a goal for me.
The sound is crisp, and clean. The sub-woofer gives strong enough punch that you can feel in your chest.
Blue ray disks load quicker than my LG blue ray player.