Sony DAV-S300 -- If You Need Home Theater Cheap, Simple, and Tiny
Written: Mar 23 '01 (Updated Mar 23 '01)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Relatively easy to set up. Very compact.
Cons: Really small, cheap speakers. Low amp power. Not the best audio performance.
The Bottom Line: If you're connection-phobic and need a compact, inexpensive home-theater system, this might be for you. Better values elsewhere.
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| radioguy's Full Review: Sony DAV-S300 |
If you want a home-theater surround-sound audio system but the thought of connecting a DVD player to an A/V receiver intimidates you, then Sony's got the perfect product for you. With the DAV-S300 "DVD Dream System," the DVD player and the A/V receiver are one and the same.
Of course, you still must have the mental wherewithal to connect the S300 to your TV and, if you have a VCR, you'll need to deal with connecting the VCR to the S300. Plus, you've got to connect all the speakers. So, if the appeal of the product is that you won't have to connect anything, you'll be disappointed at its complexity. It's a bit like VCR-Plus. Sure, it'll program your VCR, but it's more complicated to setup the VCR-Plus than to figure out how to program your VCR.
With the S300, you can play CD's (but not certain CD-R's) in the disc player, and the receiver section includes an AM/FM tuner, so audio functions, for most people, will be covered by this system. Unfortunately, there are no designated inputs for a tape deck or turntable, but you could run a tape machine into the audio input jacks of one of the S300's two A/V input jack sets. Likewise, you could connect a turntable, but you'd have to have a phono pre-amp between the turntable and the A/V input.
However, since the inputs and outputs are limited to a pair of A/V inputs and a single A/V output, you're pretty much limited to connecting a VCR and the output from your TV set (allowing you to have stereo or Dolby Pro Logic surround sound from the audio signal of whatever broadcast channel you're currently watching on your TV). Your cable and/or antenna signal will have to run either through your VCR or your TV. The S300 does have a single fiber-optic, a.k.a. "optical," digital audio input jack. This will allow you to connect the digital 5.1-channel surround sound output from a satellite receiver box or the digital-audio output from a DVD player if you later move up to a separate DVD player but want to continue to use the S300 for your surround-sound audio amp and speakers.
Sony is putting a product like this on the market to appeal to people for whom convenience is of primary importance and saving money is an ancillary goal. With its street price of approximately $600 (same as list price -- it's not usually discounted much), the S300 does not represent a huge savings over what it would cost to get one of the so-called Home-Theater in a Box (HTIB) receiver/speaker packages plus an inexpensive DVD player.
Kenwood makes a couple of HTIB packages which include their excellent receivers along with passable sets of speakers. The more expensive of the two Kenwood HTIB's, the HTB-503, sells for about $500. The less expensive Kenwood HTIB, the HTB303, sells for about $300. You can get a decent DVD player from Apex for $120. Such an arrangement would give you far better performance than you'd get with the S300.
The problem with the S300 is that, while it's a very small unit with a low price, its amplifier power and speakers are proportionately tiny. If you really want a product like the S300, I'd suggest you go for the similar Panasonic SC-HT80. The HT80 sells for about $100 more than the S300, but it's a much better product, including better speakers, with a dedicated center-channel speaker design.
However, if you're looking for a compact system, suitable for, say, use with the TV set in your bedroom, the S300 is relatively inexpensive and will be as easy to set up as any home theater sound system can be.
The rear panel has a small collection of input and output jacks. First of all, for your FM radio antenna, there's a 75-ohm F-jack connector. For AM, there's a set of 300-ohm spring-clip connector for a wire-loop antenna. The Video 1 has one set of A/V inputs (composite video, audio left, and audio right), to which you'd connect the outputs from your VCR, and one set of A/V (composite video, audio left, and audio right). The Video 2 section has a set of A/V inputs but no outputs. Video 2 also includes a single optical digital-audio input, allowing you to use it to take the 5.1-channel surround-sound digital audio from a satellite receiver.
To send the video from the DVD's you play in the S300, and your VCR if you connect it via the S300, to your TV, there's a composite-video output and an S-Video output. The S-Video output is a good feature to have in conjunction with a DVD player, as it provides a higher-quality connection than the composite connection and thus lets you preserve more of the high-quality DVD picture quality. Of course, your set must have an S-Video input to take advantage of this connection. But even if your set just has a composite-video jack, you'll get much better image quality from DVD's than you get from VHS tapes.
Finally, you have the speaker connections for the front-right, front-center, front-left, surround-left (rear), surround-right (rear), and subwoofer speakers, with colors to match the wires which go to the various speakers -- red, green, white, purple, yellow, and black, respectively. Speaker connection should not prove to be too challenging. There's also an RCA jack with line-level output, allowing you to later connect a self-powered subwoofer (though you could also connect a self-powered sub by running the regular speaker-output wires through the subs speaker-level input/output connections). Finally, there's a headphone jack on the front of the S300 so you can crank "Sister Ray" without your roomies threatening to throw you out the window.
The speakers that come with the S300 are a bit minimal. Housed in squarish plastic enclosures, each of the five identical satellite speakers consists of a single 2.75-inch driver (speaker), which is about the size of the speaker you'll find in a typical clock radio. There are five of these speakers, instead of the single speaker in a clock radio, but high-fidelity these are not. Each speaker housing has a small opening on the rear to let you hang it from a wall hook, if desired.
The subwoofer has a seven-inch driver. This is a passive sub design, meaning it's powered by the amplifier in the S300. Almost all decent surround-speaker configurations use a self-powered sub, meaning the subwoofer has its own integral amplifier, an amplifier which is tailored to produce the low-bass frequencies used by the sub's large driver. As this type of amplifier is more prone to produce heat than the amps which drive the satellite speakers, it's advantageous to have it in the large, airy subwoofer enclosure rather than in the tight space of the player/receiver unit. Speaking of amplifier heat, and the tight spaces of the S300, this unit has no cooling fan. On the other hand, its amplifier runs at a rather low rated maximum output power of 30 watts per channel. Still, things might get a little hot in the S300.
The S300 handles three popular surround-sound formats, the older, analog Dolby Pro Logic and the newer Dolby Digital (DD) and Digital Theater Sound (DTS).
Dolby Pro Logic surround sound will be found on some TV broadcasts and many movies on VHS tape. Due to the specifications of Dolby Pro Logic, it only provides a limited-range signal to your left and right rear surround speakers.
Dolby Digital, also known as AC-3, or "5.1" (for the five surround speakers and the subwoofer) is found on DVD's, CD's, and satellite broadcasts. The DTS implementation, in terms of speakers, is identical to the DD. However, DTS audio, a home-based version of the method used for audio in some movie theaters, handles the sound signal somewhat differently.
The DTS digital audio is uncompressed, allowing it, potentially, to have somewhat greater range than DD. In practice, DVD's encoded with DTS sound are a bit tough to find and some users, after having heard side-by-side comparisons of DD and DTS-soundtrack DVD's, say they can't hear a difference between the two. Others do report greater range with DTS. You'll find DTS soundtracks on DVD's, CD's, and laserdiscs. Many DVD's are released in both DD and DTS versions, so check packaging carefully if you want DTS on your rental or purchase DVD's.
The remote is quite compact, by Sony standards. You can actually operate it with one hand, without juggling. The main controls, including the DVD menu up-down/left-right navigation control, volume, and tuning plus/minus, are on the lower section of the remote. The upper section has a flip-up lid, hiding the controls which you're likely to use less often. The upper controls include speaker levels, test tone, mono/stereo, and controls for your TV channels, if you use the remote to control your TV (it's preprogrammed with selectable control codes for Sony TV's). At the very top of the remote, above the lid, there's the power on/off switch for the entire S300 unit.
The S300, manufactured in Korea*, is such a basic unit that it gives the impression that it's disposable. I'm saying disposable in the sense that it's very compact and simple to set up and operate, not that you'd drop $600 on it and throw it out in a month. As for durability, I'm really not sure, as I haven't used one long enough to test it. The S300 is covered by a one-year parts and labor warranty.
This is a very basic unit which will only appeal to people on extremely-limited home-theater budgets and/or folks who want to equip a bedroom or a dorm room with an all-in-one DVD player/stereo AM/FM receiver. If you're looking for a unit to provide DVD and surround-sound audio functions for your main home theater, I'd suggest you opt for one of the products I mentioned previously, such as the Panasonic SC-HT80 or the Kenwood HTB-503.
* If you feel dogs and cats deserve humane treatment, you might want to avoid purchasing products manufactured in Korea. See the small page I put together for more information on this topic:
http://members.xoom.com/konichidog/img08.html
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