Give your living room that real cinema feeling! (Sony DAV DZ100)

Member Name: Escorcio

Product:	Sony DAV DZ100
Date:	04/10/09 (23 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great sound and stylish looking speaker system

Disadvantages: Annoying mass of cables and long installation process

The Sony DAV DZ100 is a great home cinema system and although it's been discontinued it's still going strong after 2 years.

The DZ100 is a 5.1 surround system meaning you get 1 subwoofer and 5 smaller satellite speakers to put around the room. Although the subwoofer is slightly on the large side, they are all very stylish and look great as part of your TV setup. The speakers and DVD player are all silver with black material over the front of the speakers. This means that it will suit most rooms whether you have a black or silver TV.

The satellite speakers are a nice enough size, I prefer not to use the stands and bought brackets to hang them around the room, as for the DVD player it is pretty standard. Nothing too flashy here with simple playback controls and the usual remote features.

Setting up the surround sound system can be time-consuming, it still uses the old wired cables that are exposed at the end. You have to put 2 cables into each speaker and then more into the back of the DVD player meaning there is quite a lot to do. This is very annoying if you want to move the system around. As well as this, there is simply too much cable length, it could quite literally loop the cables around the room and still have enough to put it into the DVD player, I had to buy some cable tidies the hide the mass of wires behind the TV.

Sound Quality on the DZ100 is great, the surround sound speakers work great once you've set them up and are well suited to movies, gaming or casual TV watching. The bass is very powerful on these making them great for music playback too. Unfortunately connectivity isn't too great. It connects via SCART meaning you can't hook it up to an MP3 player or computer.

Picture Quality is also quite good when using the DVD player. Standard movies look fine but nothing too amazing. I do find that picture quality is better on my PS3 but the DZ100 does beat my stand-alone DVD player.

The DZ100 is another one of those gadgets that love to collect dust. It must be a Sony thing as my PS3 does the same. No matter how much it's cleaned it always attracts dust meaning that you regularly have to go round and wipe the satellite speakers clean.

Overall the DZ100 is a great home cinema system. It's not on sale anymore but was fairly cheap when it was. I would have recommended it, however now there are much better alternatives than offer better connectivity through HDMI and digital upscaling.

Summary: A great surround system that was cheap and still produces brilliant quality

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