Digital Trends

JVC TH-L1 October 25th, 2007 | by Jason Tomczak

Setup and Use

Setting up the TH-L1 is pretty easy, but with a dozen parts to plug in and set up in your TV room, you may need to grab the instruction manual to make sure you've got all the wires plugged into the right jacks. In our test, total setup time was roughly 10 minutes. We did not wall mount the speakers, however, which would have taken much more time.

The instruction manual is pretty self-explanatory. Pull all the parts from the box and lay them out in a neat line. It's necessary to pull the opaque plastic covers off the satellite speakers so you can see which are fronts and which are surrounds. All the speakers look identical, and you'll have to tell them apart by the small sticker on the rear of each.

Plug the main receiver into a wall outlet, but hold off on powering the system up. Connect the subwoofer, center, surrounds and front speakers to the corresponding jacks on the back of the receiver.

Connect your a/v components next, whether a DVD player, cable TV box, gaming system or Apple TV. The TH-L1 has plenty of inputs, probably it's most impressive physical attribute. The TH-L1 has only three active source options under the HDMI, component and composite categories, plus the USB and iPod connections. That's five live connections available at once, but if you hook up more than three components (two HDMI devices, for example), you'll need to do a little manual shuffling every once in a while to get the desired component to play through to the speakers or TV.

If you decide to hook your iPod up to the TH-L1, you should note that 4th and 5th gen iPods, 1st and 2nd gen nanos and minis will play audio fine, however only 5th gen iPods will play video. 4th gen iPods (aka iPod photo) can display still images on a TV. At present, the newest iPods released in 2007 (iPod touch, iPhone, new iPod classic and new iPod nano) don't seem to push video properly. Hopefully JVC will be able to supply an adapter for these new iPods (or Apple providing an update), otherwise the TH-L1 will lose a significant consumer draw.

Once everything is hooked up and music is playing, it's very apparent that the TH-L1 handles audio proficiently at low-to-mid volume levels. The surround (and simulated surround) sound works well. No matter the source, sound quality is nice. Because the satellite speakers and subwoofer can be moved around and placed in countless configurations, the sound stage is volatile - in a good way. Sound directionality and elevation can be modified, tweaked and perfected, within reason.

At default levels (speakers set at 0 attenuation), the satellites seemed soft and the subwoofer overbearing and thick. A little correction renders a much better music experience. Trouble only shows up when the volume levels are pushed past 50%. The 10% total harmonic distortion rears its ugly head and reduces the sound quality. Sure, the TH-L1 gets loud - really, really loud - it's just not a clean, flawless loud.

Conclusion

The JVC TH-L1 is an adequate system for first-timers, starving students and people who want a multi-faceted system but who are on strict budgets. It's also good for smaller home theater rooms with good acoustics. The TH-L1 is easy to set up, looks decent and works consistently. It's not an audiophile system by any means as the sound quality is "pretty good" at best. The $299 price line for the TH-L1 is really not bad, but a few dollars more can net a better system.

Pros:

• $299 USD MSRP hard to beat
• HDMI, component, composite, USB and iPod inputs
• Nice looking receiver
• Easy setup and use

Cons:

• No built-in DVD/CD drive
• Unimpressive sounds at mid/high volumes
• Remote is packed tight with tiny buttons
• Speaker construction looks lower-end