Micro hi-fi's are great... for not a lot of money you get some decent tunes and a lot of versatility.

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In The Box
When I opened the box for my new LF-D7150 system it contained the main unit, a pair of speakers with thin gauge "zip wire" permanently attatched to them, a bag containing a remote control (no batteries), AM loop antenna, FM antenna (that physically cannot interface with the unit.. wtf? ) and a thin instruction manual.

The Speakers
The speakers are small and narrow, they contain two active midrange drivers about 3.5" diameter with a smooth inverted-dome full face dustcap, a side-firing woofer that must be about 5" or so, and a 2" paper cone tweeter with poly semi-hard dome center, dispersion vented. There is a deep, high velocity port at the rear of the speakers, about 1" diameter, with unsmoothed exit. The speakers are probably particleboard inside but have plastic shells around them for appearance. The back panel is particle board. The speakers hook up with a single 2-conductor wire that is permanently connected and looks to be about 22ga. and 6ft long and as such can be considered a conventional 3-way, 4-driver ported speaker arrangement. Being the geek I am I would have disassembled the speakers for the sake of curiosity but they don't look as though they can be disassembled without damage. The speakers are somewhat sheilded for video.. but not very well. The side mounted woofers MUST be faced outward away from your conventional tube TV, and MUST be placed at least 6 or 7 inches away from it. No problem whatsoever if they are placed according to that. Given a clean signal without equalization the beginnings of a hard roll-off from these loudspeakers looks to be about 85hz or so. I can only guess the port tuning is close to 70hz, as much good as a tiny rear-facing port can do.

Efficiency is claimed 82db @ 1w/1m - pretty darn low.

I must point out that although it does sound like I'm really insulting these speakers... they *do* sound quite nice and the clarity is unexpectedly crisp for a bookshelf or mini system - quite clean indeed. They won't rumble your intestines but one can listen all day without feeling tired of hearing it.

One further note - I don't suspect mine have fully broken in yet, the mechanical portions of the midranges in particular seem quite stiff and may take a month or more to sweeten.


The Remote
It's an easy to use remote, clearly marked. Many of the unit's features are remote only so don't lose it or break it. Seriously. Not a universal remote, but since your DVD and your volume are on the same box that's not so bad.

The FM antenna won't physically connect to the radio. Yeah, weird eh? the radio has a standard 75 ohm coax thinger on the back for FM, and the antenna has some weird connector LIKE a coax connector, except instead of the male center probe it has this weird prolapsed female post in the middle?

The main unit
Well, it's bigger than a lot of "Micro" systems, but smaller than a lot of "Bookshelf" systems. Not a bad size, but there's not a lot of furniture with a nook just the right size for it. It'll just have to sit on top of something somewhere and that's that.

On the back it's got a little fan for cooling the amplifier - i've never heard the fan running but can feel a little breeze, so it's quiet. It's also got an optical IN jack, S-video out, composite out, component out, RCA line in, output for 2 speakers in the form of spring loaded push clips, and the antenna connections. There is no subwoofer out jack, so if you want to hook up a sub it'd better have hi-in.

About power ratings and loudness
Well, the manual doesn't go into much detail, but insists it puts out 80watts RMS to each speaker at 10% THD. So, 160 watts continuous at full boogie. I know class D amplifiers are efficient but the UL information by the power cord says its power consumption is max 70 watts so I think someone at LG is a dirty liar. C'mon marketing guys... can we just call a watt a watt? the CEA has a great system by which to level the playing field.. use it eh? In the really real world, I would wager that you can expect a true 25 watts + 25 watts out of this little guy - which sounds quite nice. It's plenty, plenty loud for a micro hi fi. I would not have expected it to get any louder than it does and I am in no way disappointed by the sound output, just disappointed that someone thought they had to lie and put 80w RMS per channel when that is clearly bogus and doesn't even make mathematical sense.

The power it does deliver is clean, clear, and only shows a wavering at volumes above 80% or so... where it does an odd sort of soft-clipping that i think consumers will slowly get used to as class D with their feedback loops start becoming more prevalent.


DVD
It plays 'em all right.. now, since this device has NO audio output other than the 2 amplified channels... it's odd for it to claim it decodes dolby digital. I suppose it might, but it immediately downmixes it to 2.0. I find that dialog is slightly improved if I select 2.0 channel from the individual DVD's menu, if it has that option.

It claims to play both DivX and divX. I think the last time I saw a DivX (as in, the stupid rental system from the 90s) that chick from Ace of Base was flying off on a pteredactyl with one as a giant earring. As for divX the compressed avi movie scheme, ONLY ILLEGAL DOWNLOADER PEOPLE HAVE THOSE SO ROT IN PRISON! HA! j/k :) i just haven't tried one yet. I'll see about editing this review once I do.

There is also a dynamic range compression option (like "midnight mode", brings the thunder of explosions and the whisper of.. well, whispering closer together volume wise for late night watching) - on a real home theater I hate this kind of compression because explosins SHOULD be louder than whispers - but it really suits a little stereo without much muscle like this and I find myself leaving this option turned on all the time.

USB The good news is it plays USB too. And it has an onscreen navigation system of sorts, as in, on your TV screen. You can use it without a TV too. And it supports my 30 gig external hard drive (as long as it has its own power supply IN ADDITION to the usb... i think USB only supplies 0.5A power at 5v)
The bad news is it does NOT like complex directory structures, the drive MUST be FAT or FAT32, and... THERE IS NO FREAKIN RANDOM FUNCTION. yeah. lamesauce. WHY IS THERE NO RANDOM? c'mon LG you're killing me!

Also the very tiny owners manual has virtually nothing to say about USB... it basically just says yep, there's a USB port on it all right - oh, and don't try playing divx videos off the USB, not gonna happen. it cares about MP3 and i think WMA, not that anyone actually uses stupid WMA. It won't play an ogg or a flac, tried those. A shame, ogg > mp3 .

Radio and stuff If I wanted to listen to nothing but commercials and angry political extremists blowing wind, I suppose I'd turn on the radio. Apparently if you like that Ranchero music the radio is a paradise, with few commercials and no angry people talking about whatever a left or right wing is all day long. I gotta learn some spanish man!

So How's it Sound?
Good. Actually very pleasant to listen to. The tone from the speakers with no equalization is nice, spoken male voices don't have exaggerated depth like many "fake bass" schemes produce, percussion has a cleanly imprinted ring and sizzle at the top, a pleasant body, and enough bottom to get by - though it never does smack you in the chest or even come close to it. You won't ever forget that it's a micro system. Still, it "fills the room" as they say. One place a lot of systems fail miserably is in clarity and intelligibility of guitar midtones among complex musical passages... I mean, I've heard some absolute rubbish in this department so I listen carefully for it on any system I buy or plan to buy.
The LG LF-D7150 is not miserable in this regard... not great but passable. I'd give its "lead guitar clarity among complex music" score a 7 out of 10 where most micro systems are much more like a 5 out of 10 and most cheap home-theater-in-a-box's are.. like negative 4000 out of 10.

There are the usual assortment of sound adjustments and listening modes, none of which are described in any sort of way by the manual.

There's XDSS or whatever which is your normal fluttery bass boost, it's centered at a very low frequency like 35hz maybe and at low listening volumes it DRAMATICALLY brings in the low bass... at volumes above 50% it just *arts. Just call it bass boost LG, come on. XTSS? WTF.

Then there's "XTS Pro" which is weird because they claim that's the name of their class D amplifier.. but then it's also a sound mode.. I can't put my finger on exactly what this does... i mean, it clearly has a gentle bass nudge, and a minor mid-treble nudge (maybe 9khz with a very wide Q) - but I think it might have some other processing in there as well, almost like a soft 2-stage compressor. It sounds nice when I listen to instrumental and bluegrass. Incidentally turning XTS Pro on turns off XDSS and vice versa.

There's a few "sound field processing" modes like "studio" and "hall".... they're retarded. I used to have an old 1970's console stereo that had an unlabeled button on it that, when pressed, made everything sound like crap. I couldn't figure out what it was INTENDED to do, but pressing that button threw all sorts of distortion, static, and horrible noise into the playback of radio or vinyl. I called it "The Crappy Button" and assumed it was only there to remind you how good the music sounded when it WASN'T set to "crappy". I think that's what the "sound field processing" modes on the LG LF-D7150 are for.

And, there are some preset equalizer curves. You can't set your own, but since most people just make a dumb smiley face when given control of an equalizer that's probably for the better. The equalizer curves they give you are like most other electronics... and like most other electronics it still sounds best with all of them turned off. Still, none of the presets are abhorrent and they all have their place. There's also one of those digitized spectrum analyzer displays that doesn't really respond very well to what's going through it but since none of us are mastering engineers we don't really care. Dancing pretty lights, and a bunch of various modes you can cycle through.

There's also an "mp3 remaster" that you can select while playing MP3 from disc or usb - like pretty much every other electronic device that does this, it's clearly the product of sound engineers who don't understand data compression and equate it to audio compression. They're not even close to the same thing. True, data compression does affect the high tones more than low by mathematical necessity - but it doesn't simply make the highs quieter, and therefore the solution is not to crank the highs up like all these "MP3 REMASTER" solutions on electronics basically do. If for some reason you didn't think ICE ICE BABY had enough cymbals and high hats (with a souped up tempo) - this button will fix that and overload you with high hats and cymbals. Otherwise it just makes everything sound excessively bright and crappy. Your choice.

The Bottom Line
It's a small system that plays DVDs, is inexpensive, and sounds really quite nice for what it is. I know I'm harshly critical of a lot of features but at the end of the day it's a darn fine sounding device and does everything I need it to do. For a minimalist who recognizes that a great movie through 2 speakers is still better than a crappy movie through 9.1 or whatever they're up to these days... it's perfect. I live in a small house and this IS my home theater system. Really.

I wish it had a subwoofer out jack. I wish it had a coaxial digital audio output, or even 6 channel discrete outs.. I wish it had a video input so you could run your game console through it. I really wish it had a random function for USB.

But heck, here we have a VIDEO AND AUDIO system that SOUNDS GOOD for under two hundred bucks. Way under if you look around. Not too shabby indeed, friends.


UPDATE!
1. DIVX: yep, it plays 'em! and it played a non-divx AVI file from a cd! but then it failed to play another non-divx AVI... so, inconsistent.

2. I blew up the speakers! Yep, listening to some Dragonforce on CD at about 80% volume with equalization turned off... the right midrange driver cooked its voice coil adhesive, leaving it with a buzzy ring that might sound almost "cool" on solo electro-acoustic guitar music but sounds like poo 100% of the rest of the time.

I had a pair of floorstanding speakers in my closet, but... it's disappointing that LG packaged a system with speakers it could blow out.



Recommended: Yes