Excuse Me! We Can Hear Your T.V. Three Apartments Away!

With Mrs. Royalcrowncola and I now setting up our US homestead, there is one piece of electronic gear I’ve been wanting for a long time: A home theatre system. I’ve been eyeing them from afar for a long time, but I was hesitant to spend a large chunk of the Royalcrown reserves without Mrs. Royalcrowncola being comfortable with it…and, she is far from being an audio-videophile! Mrs. Royalcrowncola is usually pretty happy if the TV has a picture and sound enough for her to follow the dialogue.


Then One Day In San Marcos …

… while visiting my junior brother, we were out for a spin in his BMW convertible and I suggested that we pass through a nearby Fry’s Electronics. There I saw displayed on a shelf the Sony HT-DDW700. Junior Brother—who owns a mega-buck home theatre system—was sorta snickering over the system. I cranked the volume up and nearly blasted away several other nearby shoppers. Junior Brother was impressed with the sound volume and quality…for the money. Since one of the Fry’s technoguys was making his way towards us in a determined manner, I took a deep breath and asked him to get one of the systems from stock for me. The cost of the system : $199.00.

Outta The Box and On to My Shelf

Now, Junior Brother lives on an acreage in suburbia. I live in a small condo in a 17 story high rise. That was later to be in important consideration. Once settled in our home, I set about to spend a day setting up my home theater system. Surprise: It doesn’t take nearly that long! The set-up was very straightforward and the installation manual provided very clear instructions…even for a technologically semi-literate like me.

The system consists of the tuner/amp, five speakers, the sub-woofer, and a remote control. The tuner/amp was one of the feature that attracted me to the system. It tunes AM and FM bands…and I like to listen to the morning news while I sip my coffee. The tuner can pre-set the stations you like to listen to so that they are easily accessible from the remote control.

The amp is rated at 700 watts…this turns out to be more than enough to fill my apartment with sound. The speakers are you typical cheap sound system small speakers, but the woofer is a more robust component that I had seen on other systems. The installation manual has some nice diagrams for setting up the speaker system….which I basically followed. The cool part about the HT-DDW700 is the auto-calibration feature. After setting my speakers up the way I wanted them…within the parameters that Mrs. Royalcrowncola had laid down. “I don’t want a bunch of wires hanging around in my livingroom!” I simply plugged in the provided microphone and pressed the autocalibrate function on the remote control. That feature automatically balances out all the speakers and calibrates the best sound for the room. Mrs. Royalcrowncola was in the room in a flash asking about the static sound that was being sent to the speakers…but, I was able to convince her that it was all a part of the set-up procedure.

Now, Even My Neighbors Can Enjoy My System


Once I had the system set-up and balanced (approximate time: 1 hour). I popped in a DVD (Pirates Of The Caribbean) and tested out my system. The sound was simply fantastic considering the source was a $199 home theatre system. Mrs. Royalcrowncola came running in the room and asked, “Where is all that sound coming from?” I pointed with pride to our new system…and, she remarked that it made our living room sound like a movie theater. Evidently she wasn’t the only one making that discovery because our neighbors—three apartments away—called to remark how theatre-like our system was as well. Both Mrs. Royalcrown and I dove for the remote. Mrs. Royalcrown swears to this moment that she detected an evil and self-satisfied look on my face. Maybe so.

The Back Of The Tuner/Amp

Digital signals can come into the tuner through either a coaxial cable input OR a optical cable input. I am using the coax from my DVD player to the tuner. There is also inputs for FM antenna and AM antenna (both supplied with the tuner). There are also RCA-type stereo inputs from CD-ROM players, DVD, VCR, and an additional set labeled “video 2”. The installation manual covers installation with satellite tuner, digital cable, and DVD. I am using digital coax from the DVD player to the tuner/amp and S-Video from the DVD to my television along with L and R stereo inputs from the DVD player to my television for those times I don’t want to use the home theatre system.

Of course there are the requisite speaker outputs…and, this is where the HT-DDW700 goes really cheap-o. The outputs are the same kind of push the wires in the hole and clamp shut system I used to see on cheap-o boom boxes in Africa. UGH! I hated that. The speaker wires are pretty light as well. One day when Mrs. Royalcrowncola goes to visit the grandkids I’ll replace those flimsy wires with something better.

Navigating through the various menus for the tuner can be a bit confusing…especially for a non-technical person like me. I look at the manual and decide: There’s a lot of capacity in this system. Most of it is wasted on me.


Bottom Line

The HT-DDW700 puts out plenty of high quality sound for my apartment…and, my neighbor’s apartment as well. It is easy to install and use…and, the manual gets you up and going quickly. We like it.