Home Theater Systems Reviews

Far be it for me to expound the simplicity of a system's hookup. My home system is a wreck, with wires running hither and thither that I trip on almost daily. Oh what a tangled web I've woven! Yet my M&K THX speakers sound excellent, and my video system (a Panasonic DVD player and an RCA 36-inch TV) is a godsend. This is my main system, and my conscience would be partly cloudy with a slight chance of regret if I were to bring another system into my house (especially into my bedroom). But when Sony sent me the DVD Dream System (which is perfect for a second system), the trumpets sounded, and I suddenly found myself wearing a red cape and spandex outfit with the letters "EHW" scrawled across the front. I was, for a short while, Easy Hookup Woman (and I don't mean that lewdly, men in the audience).

Performance
Build Quality
Value

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Dynamic, powerful sound
Tight, well-defined bass
Crisp detail
Minus
Best with subwoofers

THE VERDICT
SVS has earned a formidable reputation for producing loudspeakers and subwoofers that outperform their reasonable price points. With the new Ultra Evolution range, they’ve more than upheld their past record. While the Ultra Evolution speakers are the company’s priciest offerings to date, most home theater enthusiasts don’t need to win the lottery or take out a second mortgage to at least consider them.

It doesn’t seem all that long ago that SVS first entered the audio scene. But time does fly.

Consumer confession: A little more than three years ago, I bought my first DVD player for $300. It was a basic player in a nondescript black box with none of the now-standard features like progressive-scan video and component video outputs. It couldn't even read recordable CDs.

Home Theater Comfort Food

On my first trip to London, when I was much younger, my first meal was a mediocre steak in a fifth-rate restaurant full of reveling Australian soccer fans. It was one of the most disappointing meals I’ve ever had. While Britain doesn’t exactly lead the world in cuisine, you can eat well there if you know what you’re doing. The reason I got stuck with a leathery, tasteless, uninspiring piece of meat was that I was jet-lagged and desperately hungry, I didn’t know my way around, and I couldn’t find anything better. HTIBs can be like that. People who might be better served by a higher-quality component system settle for a less fulfilling one because they don’t know their way around the labyrinthine world of A/V receivers and speaker systems. Mixing and matching surround gear can be too steep a hill to climb.

Some people would call it cheating. Others might be less pejorative and consider it a shortcut. Either way, setting a rectangular box on top of your TV, plugging in an analog stereo RCA cable, finding an outlet for a single AC power cord, and pressing the power button isn’t what God intended when he gave us home theater. No, a real man’s home theater demands a separate processor and amplifiers, multiple speakers, many long runs of speaker wire, and an inconvenient place to put a subwoofer. It should take real work to set the whole thing up—and more than a sporting chance to wire something incorrectly.