good surround sound.

bad user interface. dvd recognition/boot poor to not working consistently. unit does not always respond after power-up. remote control interface impossible to decipher. only dvd mode has configuration of sound system available. dvd modes do not always work. fm channel switching rediculous. internal processing unit architected, designed and coded by chimpanzees.

This unit is currently under a copyright infringement lawsuit by the sony corporation for looking like the dav-s500 sony unit. too bad i can't sue for receiving such a moronically designed piece-of-@#$%. this unit looks pretty on the shelf but exhibits the worst set of "features" imaginable. let's start by turning on the unit. a noticeable cough on the speakers as the volume comes on at a relatively high preset value. open the dvd tray, smooth motion is ok. place a dvd, old one, new one, doesn't matter. close the tray and let the fun begin! the dvd blue screen comes up the tv/monitor and then we all get to listen to the happy tunes of the dvd playing "read the track". it speeds up, it slows down, no one knows when it will stop. after a few minutes it either "gives up" or it will begin to play. if it plays you are lucky as the amplifier and speakers produce a decent surround-sound presence. the dvd features are only accessible from a completed silly remote control human interface. there is very poor thought into the logical grouping of functions, but that's ok as most of them don't work. some of the other features of this unit is an fm/am receiver which also produces a great sound. too bad the klhians can't design a fm tuner that doesn't tune using 0.1 mhz spacing, rather it plods along at 100 khz intervals slowing the whole fm experience down considerably. wan't to configure the surround sound amplification system in fm mode? nada, only in dvd mode. switching between dvd/fm/av1/av2 modes is a lesson in frustration and disappointment. the flip from dvd to fm relies on waiting for the unit to "settle" in dvd mode for at least 10 seconds before it will acknowledge the switch command. then it plunks you into the fm channel with a default 18 volume. then you must wait again until the microcontroller comes out of it's interminally long setup phase before you can move on to av1. but don't hold the key too long or it'll race past av1 directly into av2. i can only imagine the microcontroller programmer that klh hired to design this beast. junior or high school hacker just learning pic programming. The design team also assembled from neophyte sophomores not knowing much about the real world of ergonomics and user interface design. I would love for either best buy or klh to refund my moeny or at least give me my well deserved hazard pay for putting up with this unit, but i'll acknowledge that they could care less and i'll eat the cost. I plan on tearing this unit out and replacing it with a real system as soon as i can afford it and relegate this unit to playing a single fm station in the kitchen. let's just pray there is no electricity outage as i would need to reset it manually.