Harman/Kardon BDS 700 home theater review

Stylish sleek design. Supports high-definition picture playback. Impressive turntable, loudspeakers and built-in multi-channel amplifier. Supports a large number of audio and video formats and codecs. Great number of settings and features. Wide range of connectivity.

Significant shortcomings were not detected.

Blu-ray 5.1 theater

BDS 700 Home Cinema

– One of the top models in the current line of Blu-ray home entertainment systems in size 5.1 by Harman/Kardon. As a flagship model, the stylish design of the included multi-channel receiver, surround sound speakers and an active subwoofer in harmony with the functionality and high performance of the equipment.

Design

The identity of this home theater system to the Harman/Kardon Hi-Fi audio, video and entertainment family is clear at first sight thanks to its distinctive signature style with the characteristic black lacquered surfaces of the speaker cabinets and receiver. The equipment attracts just as much attention as is necessary to realize its high status, and no more.

Design Features

Harman/Kardon BDS 700 Theater System includes a BDS 5 receiver, which is a set of multichannel amplifier, Blu-ray/DVD/CD player and FM tuner, and a set of closed-type speakers: CEN TS7-11 center speaker, SAT-TS7 satellites and HKTS200SUB active subwoofer. All surround speakers center speaker and satellites are 2-way, each consisting of a pair of flat 76mm midrange drivers and a 25mm dome tweeter. All drivers are magnetically shielded to reduce interference. HKTS200SUB subwoofer is active and has a built-in 200W amplifier. The subwoofer of inverter type with 200 mm conical woofer is able to reproduce the low-frequency effects of movies and front speaker woofer bandwidth of 45-200 Hz -6 dB .

Settings and functions

The BDS 5 receiver’s OSD interface has been translated into American. You can use it to make numerous settings and control playback modes, such as repeat mode, which allows you to duplicate the playback of a track, chapter, chapter, or the entire disc. There are also useful functions of slow 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16 of normal speed and fast 2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 times forward and reverse playback. The receiver has a number of essential video settings, with which you can adjust the brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness of the image. Three preset picture modes: “standard,” “live” for video games and “movie” to watch movies and TV shows – are designed for those who do not like to bother with the settings. Sound settings allow you to adjust the tonal balance of audio, channel-by-channel audio delay depending on the distance between the receiver and the multi-channel speaker system. In addition, you can adjust the level and phase of the active subwoofer signal, as well as separately adjust the super-bass register level. Remote receiver can also control a TV or satellite receiver, for which it the remote must be programmed.

Switching

The BDS 5 features numerous connectivity options for audio playback. First, these are amplified analog audio outputs, which are designed for the connection of speakers. Secondly, you can listen to the sound through the headphones thanks to the jack 3.5 mm digital video interface on the front of the receiver. Thirdly, the Harman/Kardon BDS 700 cinema can play sound not only from the built-in player or FM tuner, but also from external audio sources, which are designed to connect two analog stereo pair, two optical and one coaxial digital sound interface. Fourthly, the receiver connects to your iPod or iPhone docked via the Bridge IIP jack. So any audio playback device, from vinyl player to mp3 player, can be integrated into your home entertainment system. The BDS 5 features an HDMI 1.3, which supports up to 30/36-bit DeepColor color expansion technology. The home theater is equipped with USB ports for connecting external media devices – flash cards and hard drives, as well as a LAN interface, through which you can connect to the local network and use the function BD-Live.

Playback capability

The built-in laser disc player is very versatile. It can play BD-Video, DVD-Video, CD-DA discs and supports playback of DVD-R/RW, DVD+R/RW and CD-R/RW recordable media. An extensive set of supported multi-channel audio formats include Dolby Digital/Dolby Digital Plus/Dolby Digital True HD, DTS Digital, DTS-HD High Resolution Audio, DTS-HD Master Audio, PCM, WMA9 CBR 192kbps, VBR 355kbps and mp3 32- 320kbps . Video player supports MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264, VC-1 and DivX 3.x/4.x/5.x. The only supported photo format is JPEG. Multichannel amplifier provides up to 65 W of power per channel at a signal to noise ratio of 90 dB minimum and is capable of playing audio in the frequency band 20 Hz-20 kHz with a coefficient of nonlinear distortion THD of no more than 0.19%. The dynamic range of the audio circuit of the player is 90 dB, non-linearity of the AFC is within +/-0.5 dB frequency bandwidth of 20 Hz – 20 kHz. The sensitivity of each of the surround speakers is 86dB.

49 990 Dollars.