Christmas party and Surround Sound
This past weekend, we had our company Christmas Party. For the most part it was fun. We had a DJ that MC'd the event with games and dances. Our company regularly does door prizes at our big parties/meetings. Some of the big prizes this year were a Wii, a 26in LCD, and a night for two at the Marriott with some food gift certificates. In fact, I won one of the grand prizes; a new Home Theater Sound System. I wasn't expecting anything expensive or flashy, and I was right. But, surprisingly, the system is not too bad. I have never owned a surround system, nor have I shopped for one, so I have nothing to compare this with..besides obviously, an actual theater.
jWin DVD Theater System
Setup was easy, except for having to move the mammoth entertainment cabinet that we own. Once I plugged in all of the wires and set the speakers, we turned it on and we were ready to go. One annoying feature of this system is that, by default, the captions are turned on each time you insert a dvd. Only thing I can figure is that this system is karaoke-enabled which means that you can buy special cds to do karaoke with this system. Also, the initial setting for video output is S-video. I hooked up the Component cables and everything on the screen was blue. I check all of my connections and everything was correct. I also noticed that the frame rate was terrible. Finally, I checked the settings and found that to use component cables, you have have to switch to component with Progressive Scan (which fixes the slow frame rate). So, fortunately, this setting stays until you do a hard reset, I guess because we haven't had to change it again.
To thoroughly test the "Theater Sound", we looked no further than Star Wars. To be more specific, we chose Episode III since we hadn't watched it in a while. The THX intro was impressive, but during the movie, small captions started appearing at the top of the screen. Not lines from the movie, but names of people who helped produce the movie (Lucas, etc). We had already turned off captions, so we tried that again. Apparently, this isn't a subtitle/caption. I'm sure it has something to do with it being a karaoke machine as well. I guess we can live with it. And if you haven't clicked on the link above, the lowest price of the unit I have found is around $85. Plus, I won it as a gift, so I can't complain. Now, if it explodes and burns down my house, then I'll be ticked off.
So, what I'm sayin' is, if you want to experience "surround sound" without paying a lot of money, you could buy this system. The speakers are all fairly small and cheap -looking. The sub woofer is fine. Again, I don't have a lot to compare this with, and of course, this is by no means, a BOSE-comparable system, but it sounds pretty decent. The rear speakers aren't very loud, but I don't think they are supposed to be. We have all of our Christmas stuff up right now, so we don't have the speakers set up in the right place, but we do occasionally hear a passing helicopter or spaceship in movies.
Merry Christmas.
jWin DVD Theater System
Setup was easy, except for having to move the mammoth entertainment cabinet that we own. Once I plugged in all of the wires and set the speakers, we turned it on and we were ready to go. One annoying feature of this system is that, by default, the captions are turned on each time you insert a dvd. Only thing I can figure is that this system is karaoke-enabled which means that you can buy special cds to do karaoke with this system. Also, the initial setting for video output is S-video. I hooked up the Component cables and everything on the screen was blue. I check all of my connections and everything was correct. I also noticed that the frame rate was terrible. Finally, I checked the settings and found that to use component cables, you have have to switch to component with Progressive Scan (which fixes the slow frame rate). So, fortunately, this setting stays until you do a hard reset, I guess because we haven't had to change it again.
To thoroughly test the "Theater Sound", we looked no further than Star Wars. To be more specific, we chose Episode III since we hadn't watched it in a while. The THX intro was impressive, but during the movie, small captions started appearing at the top of the screen. Not lines from the movie, but names of people who helped produce the movie (Lucas, etc). We had already turned off captions, so we tried that again. Apparently, this isn't a subtitle/caption. I'm sure it has something to do with it being a karaoke machine as well. I guess we can live with it. And if you haven't clicked on the link above, the lowest price of the unit I have found is around $85. Plus, I won it as a gift, so I can't complain. Now, if it explodes and burns down my house, then I'll be ticked off.
So, what I'm sayin' is, if you want to experience "surround sound" without paying a lot of money, you could buy this system. The speakers are all fairly small and cheap -looking. The sub woofer is fine. Again, I don't have a lot to compare this with, and of course, this is by no means, a BOSE-comparable system, but it sounds pretty decent. The rear speakers aren't very loud, but I don't think they are supposed to be. We have all of our Christmas stuff up right now, so we don't have the speakers set up in the right place, but we do occasionally hear a passing helicopter or spaceship in movies.
Merry Christmas.
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