Digital Trends

Onkyo Envision LS-V500C April 9th, 2003 | by Doug MacLean

Home theater has become a staple in the American home. With the addition of new media formats such as DVD, DVD-RW, DVD-R, and MPEG3 most people want to be able to enjoy these shiny new discs, but cost and technical proficiency hold them back. While you can spend almost any given sum on a home theater setup with a product, Onkyo's LS-V500C Envision makes having a full home theater system a few dollars and a few hours away. The Envision provides all the current video and audio formats such as Dolby 5.1, DTS, Prologic II and MPEG3 along with the ability to connect to both interlaced and progressive scan video monitors. There is plenty of power to the amplifier, a five disc changer and a remote that is actually useful throughout your entire system all in one box. Even the manual demonstrates the attention to detail that sets this unit above the pack. This unit was obviously tested with people that know little about setting up a system but it was designed by people that know and love all the technical details of home entertainment.  

Connections

There is a reason many electronic retail sites only show the front of a piece of equipment. The back can be very intimidating for the typical user. With the myriad of connections, jacks and plugs awaiting the correct cable, many units seem to require an advanced degree to understand. The connectors are separated into four groupings; speakers, audio, antenna and video. Each is fully color coded and easy to get to. The only problem I found is the audio and video jacks are a bit far a part which may require you to slice the typical combined three part AV cables where the right audio (red), left audio (white) and video RCA cables are bound together. If you have to do this be sure you do not cut into the actual cable's insulation. For the speakers there are two sets of twisted pair connectors for the front speakers. This gives you the option of running a second set of front speakers to another room. Below these, are the connectors for the rear and center speakers. Oddly, the sub woofer connector resides with the audio section of the connectors. The reason for this seems to be since the sub woofer connection is a pre-amp geared towards a powered sub woofer it was considered a component connection rather than a speaker connection. The internal DVD requires no connections so the provided AV connectors can go to other parts of your home theater. This is the type of unit that permits almost everything to be controlled through it. There are jacks for a VCR, AV1 and AV2. There are also component video input and output jacks as well as two S-Video connectors for input and one for output.  AV1 is paired with one fiber optic video jack and two digital coaxial cable inputs. AV2 has a digital coaxial for use with a MD recorder, CD recorder or a TiVo type device.