Digital Trends

Philips HTS8100 December 17th, 2007 | by Marshal Rosenthal

Features and Design 

The main unit’s “soundbar” design hides speakers behind the grill, with an LCD display and motorized sliding glass panel on the front that moves aside when inserting a disc. A set of basic controls are placed along the system’s top, out of sight, so you’ll mostly be using the remote, which just happens to be one of the nicest we’ve seen in a long time, with buttons well spaced out for controlling DVD playback and toggling between sources, surround modes and audio adjustments. (Although having a few glow-in-the-dark buttons would have been nice for low-light situations.) A back panel conceals the A/V connections, and there’s also inputs on the left side for a USB flash drive/memory card, an MP3 Line-in and a socket for the included iPod dock.

Installation/Setup 

The main unit is really designed to be placed beneath a wall-mounted flat panel TV (bracket included for this purpose), but is svelte enough to fit on a stand in front of a TV without covering up the screen at the bottom. Which, go figure, is exactly what we did in an 18x18 foot bedroom with our Samsung HLS-5679W LED 1080p HDTV that rests on a TV stand. An HDMI cable can be connected from the main unit to the TV, but we also attached a pair of RCA stereo audio outputs from the TV to the inputs on the device. The last step is to plug in the two wires that come from the included subwoofer and which provide both amplification as well as power to the Main Unit. It’s quite attractive due to its black and glass-reflecting construction, and the subwoofer has a similar styling to the main unit with a glassed top as well - still it should be stuck in a corner out of the way since it’s fairly large and heavy. 

Turning the Main Unit on, we select 1) whether the room has “hard” (i.e., concrete or wood) or “soft” walls (an open area with curtains, for example), 2) if the main unit is in the center of the room or a corner and 3) whether it’s above or below the listening level. In our case that’s “hard”, “center” and “low.” A few more basic settings are required, such as selecting 16:9 widescreen, upconversion to 1080p and leaving en-hancements such as the Picture Setting and others at their normal position (since we prefer adjusting for them at the TV). But we do leave the DCDi video processor on for optimizing video quality.

Image Courtesy of Philips