Wireless Surround Sound System

Caveats: This HTIB is connected to a 720P 42″ Panasonic TV purchased in late 2007. I have never previously owned a HTIB, so I have nothing to compare it to apart from stereo systems. Used in a medium-sized living room.
I possess average-to-high tech savviness. Several reviewers have had much grief with the wireless rear speakers. Mine worked out of the box, but only after I remembered to insert the digital transmitter into the main unit. I have been drinking throughout this review.

Setup: Assembly and setup were reasonably simple. Connections were very clearly marked. I may or may not have successfully used the auto speaker setup microphone due to my own stupidity.
The sound levels of each speaker are easy to adjust manually, however. Unlike other reviewers, I was able to play normal TV broadcasts through the system speakers by connecting the optical audio out on my cable box to the digital optical audio in (“D-IN 1″) with a Toslink cable (more below!).

Sound: I’m no audiophile, but the system sounds great to my ear whether playing music from an iPod/Pandora, movies on DVD/BD’s, or even Youtube. Full spectrum with excellent bass. The subwoofer really makes the room shake. It needs to be set pretty low most of the time.
The tiny rear speakers produce excellent ambient sounds during movies and hold their own if I use with other sources.

Picture: Bluray discs look very good, as expected, excellent in fact. Upscaled DVD’s also look very good.

Vieracast: You are doing yourself a serious disservice if you purchase this and don’t take advantage of the internet features available with this unit.
You’ll need to purchase a Panasonic DY-WL10 dongle (about today, weeks ago when I purchased) or a wired LAN connection, but there’s a ton of content out there that make it worthwhile.
In short, Vieracast is Panasonic’s proprietary internet streaming service. It currently offers Netflix, Youtube, Pandora (a music service), and a few lesser lights like Bloomberg news, Picasa, and a German news channel, Tageschau (wuh?). Fox Sports and Twitter are still “Coming Soon!”
The Vieracast interface is a little clumsy in appearance and makes annoying chiming sounds as you click between content.

It sometimes takes more than than one attempt to get started (could also be the fault of the dongle or my router or some other piece of hardware), but it’s dropped a connection exactly-only-once.

Regardless, a Netflix account alone makes Vieracast (no fee) worthwhile in view of the numerous and varied “Watch Instantly” offerings. Examples: My father came to the TV show “Lost” a few seasons late, so he recently bought the first few seasons on DVD to catch up.
Well, all but last season are currently available instantly on netflix.
More and more recent offerings are available, lots of kids’ stuff and documentaries, older classics . . . On a whim I googled a list of “the best movies of all time” and found that most of the top 15 were available for instant viewing (“Battleship Potemkim” – er, great!)

There are some negatives with Netflix. Unlike a DVD/BD, the streaming audio doesn’t appear to automatically separate to 5.1, but you can easily use the “surround” and “sound” buttons on the remote to choose the combination of speakers. Still blows your TV speakers away.

I found the video quality of streaming video on a 42″ plasma to be very good (and it transmits 16:9), but it’s not Bluray or even HD. But I’m also old enough to remember when TV nirvana was watching S-VHS on a 36″ tube set. If you’re rockin’ a 60″ set, sit three feet from the screen, and can’t remember the 80’s, your mileage may vary.

Youtube is rife with possibilities that I haven’t fully exploited, mostly because I haven’t had the patience to figure out my account settings for playlists and favorites on Youtube itself. A 12 year old should be able to do things stranger than i can imagine.
You enter your Youtube account name/password and your lists, etc. should appear. One cool thing I managed to do was create extensive playlists (e.g. old live Dead, Zeppelin, etc.) and put them on continuous play. This is very awesome. Video quality is obviously limited by the source (whateva), the sound too, but I’m listening to it right now and it’s pretty good.

Pandora radio is a great internet music service that I have on iPhone. Enter the name of an artist or genre and it will continuously play music from that artist/genre. It’s like an artist/genre specific radio station.
If you have a (free) account as I did, just enter username/password. Sound quality is excellent.

iPod dock: Excellent feature built into the main unit. The interface can be a little clumsy, however, lots of scrolling with the remote if you’re looking for That Particular Song. If you have playlists like the rest of the sane, no worries.

TV Broadcasts: As noted above, and in contrast to other reviewers, cable/satellite broadcasts can be played through the unit’s speakers with a Toslink cable (which costs less than a Big Mac).
I have a cablebox (HD with modern connections) and it took a little experimentation to get it to work. The unit’s instructions read like, well, stereo instructions, and were not particularly helpful. Each must find his own path, but I was easily able to play normal TV broadcasts through the system speakers by connecting the optical audio out on my cable box to the digital optical audio in (“D-IN 1″) with the Toslink cable.

FM radio: Does anyone really care? Well, if you’re so inclined, it receives FM transmissions pretty well, much better than my last (1998-ish) receiver, and has auto pre-sets available (just like a rental car!) Worked well. Also plays SD cards, another useless thing that these things all do. Useless unless you want to subject someone to a slide show, which was a peculiar form of torture back in the day.

Conclusion: This device sounds great and has opened up a whole new world of content on the TV. The four stars is for interface clumsiness, and the remote, which I don’t feel like reviewing but I don’t really like. You can’t go wrong with this unit at the current price point.

1. Built in Wifi
2. Streaming software… which means you can stream from your computer.
3. HDMI inputs.

Otherwise the Panasonic works awesome. It’s fast and responsive, easy to setup, small and sleek, and it’s cheaper than the comparable LG unit.

It includes the following features.

1. Amazon video rentals… Awesome.. However it’s for most regular rentals and then more for HD. I’m still a bigger fan of RedBox for anything… Amazon I might be holding out on your steep prices.

2. Netflix the same as everything else… other than the interface is really simple and ugly like the PS3 interface. It’s not as easy to navigate and search like the X Box 360 or on your computer.

3. Youtube which is cool.

4. Picas pictures which is neat but almost useless in some cases.

5. iPhone/iPod doc that allows audio and video playback. Very cool, it charges and doesn’t display the “this accessory is not made to work with your device” message.

6. Blue ray, DVD, burned DVD’s etc.

7. Two fiber optic inputs that allow you to plug in your infamous HD DVD player or some other audio sources. Would have liked to see HDMI here… LG has it.

8. Viera Link which is cool if you have a Panasonic TV like I do. It turns the stuff on off etc by communicating over the HDMI cable.

9. The sound is AMAZING for as cheap as this unit is. The speakers are crisp and clear. Very nice surround sound. I had a Sony STR-K750P, and this Panasonic system is way better.

Overall the packaging was slick with everything well packaged for shipment. I couldn’t find the electronic version of the manual online anywhere. The specs say it’s wireless ready, which means it has a USB port on the back that you have to pay 0 to get the Panasonic WIFI dongle. Total rip off. I just hard wired.

The menus are not quite as elegant as the Apple TV, it also has this hard switch thing.. Basically if you need to adjust any settings, it unloads the web content dashboard thing, then takes you back to the DVD menu. So there is a bit of a lag making adjustments. I don’t understand why they just didn’t layer the menus and then reload if your settings require it. It also has some sort of quick on feature. Basically if you start it up from scratch, AKA no power supplied, it takes about 30 seconds to boot.. So they added this quick boot thing which makes the unit run in some kind of a standby. It tells you it will consume slightly more power while in this mode. I did have a couple times where the web interface streaming thing had garbled text, I tried powering on off, but it doesn’t fully reboot if you use the quick boot. In order to get it to fully reboot, you have to turn it off, then unplug the power and re-connect.

The manual isn’t very descriptive and there is a lot of technical jargon as you wade deeper into the settings. Lots of color control, bit level, sound stuff, display stuff etc.

It does have the capability to adjust the surround and EQ levels while playing. It’s not entirely intuitive, and the manual is wrong, but it works. When you use the buttons on the bottom of the remote to adjust the surround, it displays on little screen on the unit, the levels. In the manual it tells you to use up and down to adjust these. I must have wasted 20 minutes on this part before I tried left and right and then it worked. Looks like Panasonic needs an updated manual. The firmware on the unit is 1.0 which hopefully means there will be some software updates sooner than later. It would be nice to see layered settings menus, and they have some room on the dash board for new content.

The unit is so new that if you use a Logitec Harmony remote, it won’t detect your unit yet. I had to use the older model Bt-300 or something to get my Logitec remote to work.

anyhow.. thats my review… Enjoy!