Customer Reviews

Harman Kardon HKTS 14 6-Piece Loudspeaker System

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Phenomenal .....

One word I could match to review of HKTS-14. After extensive research and numerous audio test of various HT speakers I zeroed in for HKTS-14 from Harman/Kardon. Key factors I used to select the systems are as follows:

1. Music performance
2. Substantial Bass response
3. If not too much near high power
4. Compact for my apartment living
5. Crisp high end music reproducing capability especially from guitar, sitar
6. Budget conscious and longterm investment
7. Proven industry name
8. Easy setup & calibration
9. Technical Support

In all aspects HKTS-14 stood out. At first I used my own samples of few songs; music excepts and took it to various showrooms to play. I tested it on Polk, Bose, JBL 300.7/200.7, Micra and HKTS-14. These are my observations

Polk -Excellent satellite speakers, but default bass module didn't impress, need to upgrade to other polk sub which are quite expensive when adding both prices and setup is too confusing.
Bose -Forget about it, sales men did not like putting my CD and when I finally made him he wouldn't pay much attention or help me in adjusting any settings. Only thing he allowed to do is to keep repeating ICE AGE movie clips over and over again in AM16 module.
One I did notice, most of dialogs and beats are directional, you can also try this next time you see a BOSE system is playing, just stand directly in line of bass module and slow move left or right you notice that bass is completely directional and all dialogs are actually come from bass module which is either below or side of system rather on center of screen.

JBL 300.7/2007 - Out of both 300.7 flared excellent, but speakers are doesn't look good though design is unique. Bass module is excellent

Micra - Speakers are good and look good but lacks overall puch, I felt that if you between 4 to 6 feet in radius from speakers they are good beyond that, sound weakens

Finally HKTS-14
Speakers are excellent and sharp to look. Coming to most important sound aspect, sound reproduced is close to the way it should be. Bass module is enough power to shake a large room (BTW my room is 19'x18'). Initially I needed some tweaking with cross over to get the right match between satellites and sub. Other things I have done to fine tune is channel volume using pink noise. Once these basic steps are done, system is all set to rock. Test DVD's I used are Lord of Rings which have enough high/low/mid ranges through the movie. Finally coming to cost whole system I put together i.e receiver+DVD player+HT speakers+ wires hardly touched $800 and I am sure this system will go very long time in my living room for TV/Music/Movie entertainment...next on my list HT projector !-)


Harman/Kardon customer service is excellent by all base lines. I wrote to technical support even before I purchased the product and every time received reply from an actual person rather than automatic reply. All the replies are informative and complete and welcoming for more questions. Of late I have never experienced such a prompt service. Only companies that believe in there products can provide such service

Strengths
Room shaking sub-Excellent High & Mid range capbility of Satellites-Can match any decor especially made for plasma looks-All included kit-Auto signal sensing of Bass module-120 watts for satellites and 200watts for sub


Weakness
Mounting kit supplied is not easy to use-Only HKTS speaker stands can be used -Speakers are all Silver finish, but wires supplied are black.

I have searched for speakers that would compliment my room. My priorities were price, build quality, connectivity, and thundering bass (yes I said it, most of us don't really care about the fine nuances of sound, all we need is decent speakers and some thundering BASS to make your heart flutter). I am no expert in the art of speaker selection or speaker sound but I have ears and consider myself pretty knowledgeable in the art of hearing (which we all are, so I am nothing special).

Price:
I bought these speakers at less than 350$ and believe me they make every penny count. If you look on Harman Kardon's website, this combination is the top of the line. Now, considering Harman Kardon's history I was willing to bet that these speakers were decent before I bought them. I was utterly wrong. These are fantastic for the price. I couldn't buy a comparable 12" subwoofer for that much alone if I wanted to.

Build Quality:
These are perfectly well-built, heavy and robust speakers. The accessories though are a little cheap quality. By accessories I mean only the plastic mounts and nothing else. The wires are thick (Sorry, don't know gauge #) and pre-soldered and are ready to go. Installation on their mounts is a little tricky if you have your room already prewired. Exercise caution and you won't break the plastic mounts while you do it. The speakers themselves are heavy and hence if you put too much weight on the speakers (like you hand) while trying to install them on the wall standing precariously on a stool or ladder you might shatter (yes shatter, not crack or break) them. If you want to use the speakers as table mounted they come with a provided attachment for flat surfaces. This was for the 5 satellite speakers. The only thing I would recommend as a upgrade about these satellite speakers is that they have pinch-clips for wire connections and not banana clips. This will not be a major problem if you use the factory provided pre-soldered wires or if you solder the tips of your own wires. Again, this delves in to the territory of good sound and great sound. The center channel speaker is supposed to be place on a flat surface and does not come with any wall mounting accessories. Also, the 4 satellite speaker mounts can only pivot side to side and not up and down so make sure you know how you are going to mount them in a prewired room with the wiring outlets in the ceiling. I wouldn't recommend using the mounts provided for ceiling mounting of speakers. From seeing how flimsy they are I think they are specifically designed to hold up the speakers from the bottom up and not like a cantilever which will be the case if you mount them on the ceiling.

Now comes the sub-woofer. OH BOY!!!! This is what you call a subwoofer. Huge and powerful. You all know by now that it is a downward firing 12" diameter subwoofer housed in almost a 24" high cabinetry. BUILD QUALITY is spelt, enunciated and redefined with this subwoofer.

Connectivity and Features:
The 5 satellite speakers have the usual red and black pinch clips (which again are not bad at all). The subwoofer on the other hand is decked out. It is self powered, so you don't need a receiver where the sub channel is powered. The subwoofer has a filter switch. If you switch it ON, it will automatically filter the high frequency sounds and play only the low frequency ones in the channel. Now that doesn't mean you can connect your satellite speaker channel to it and expect it to work well. That brings me to its next feature which in my case saved me from buying a new receiver. It has a high level output and speaker level input with banana clips. These inputs and outputs basically let you use the left and right front and rear satellite speaker channels of your reciever to connect through your subwoofer so that it can filter out its own subwoofer signal. This is particularly useful in case you own a receiver without a subwoofer out or if your receiver subwoofer out is a pinch clip or banana clip instead of the compatible rca-jack like pin (hereinafter referrred to as a line-out cable). I've looked in Radioshack and you can build yourself a two wire to line-out cable but don't complain about the sound if you didn't do a good job. So now you know how crappy my receiver is since it doesn't have a regular line-out cable for the subwoofer. (For reference purposes I got this Pioneer receiver from Walmart in a 200$ home theater system package for my apartment. The receiver is pretty good for limited connectivity. It is rated at a 1000 watts output which I highly doubt though.) Ok, coming back to the subwoofer. It has automatic low frequency signal detection circuitry which means that it will not be active when there is no bass in the signal for extended periods which is great for channel flipping on your tv. You really don't need that huge thing to consume energy when you are flipped to a news channel and continue watching for sometime. Oh most importantly, it has its own independent volume konb which allows you to control the maximum the subwoofer could go to without cracking the sound which is generally dependent on the size of your room and the signal from the receiver. So once you set it you can simply adjust your receiver settings for the subwoofer as per your choice. Also, something of minor importance to me but could be an extremely useful feature for someone else. You can reverse the phase in which the subwoofer works. For instance if you have your satellite speakers sound like producing bass at a different note than the subwoofer it could possibly be that your subwoofer is out of phase. Reasons for this happening I don't know. So by flipping the switch you could technically reverse the subwoofer phase and make it sound more coherent with the rest of the sound and video.

Thundering Bass:
I think by now you have it figured that I am total fan of the subwoofer. Well this is where it started. Performance!!! Knowing how crappy my receiver is with no direct connectivity to the subwoofer this piece of equipment is an absolutely heart fluttering bass producing machine. Don't get me wrong on the other satellite speakers. They are very good too but the center of attraction is the subwoofer undoubtedly. Ok let do some justice to the satellite speakers. The four satellite speakers are great. They produce their own little bass and can also produce clear screeching sound that will make you cringe like an airplane landing on the tarmac, loud and majestic sound but when the wheels hit the tarmac the screeching sound is perfectly reproduced. Basically they reproduce sound very very well and truthfully. The center channel speaker is very powerful and priduces clear voice separation and also blends in very well with the other speakers when an action scene comes around (but that also partly depends on your individual speaker volume settings on your receiver). Coming back to my star performer. This subwoofer will rock your apartment, house, walls, furniture, humans, pets, neighbors, and pests...ok the last one I made up. Home movie watching will change after you've heard this beast perform and I don't even have the recommended connections to make it work at optimum so go figure if you have good reciever already.

This is my review. It is obviously my opinion of this system. Do your own research before you buy your own but I thought since it is such a great system it should receive the recognition it deserves and also budget-minded buyers with a good ear for sound will know what this system has to offer and make their decision more wisely. Having said that, if there is anybody doubting my intentions or capability of enjoying a movie at home, I own a 65" toshiba TV (65H85C). I love my movie experience and I wouldn't waste my time writing this long detailed review if the sound didn't compliment the picture, which by the way is freaking huge. Oh by the way my receiver (when I have the money to buy it) will most definately be the Pioneer VSX-1015TX. Look it up. It will blow your mind away without burning a hole in your pocket. Good Bye!!!

Lets start off by saying that I am not an audiophile. I am in my mid 30s and this is my first home audio system I have purchased since college. Until recently, I had been quite happy with a 2.1 speaker system hooked up to my Sirius satellite radio.

I shopped online and also visited several home electronics stores and listened to their home theater systems. While I could notice the difference between speaker brands while in the theater room and switch back and forth between speakers, I am sure I would have been happy at home with any of those systems I heard. I mean hey, just about anything is better than a set of computer speakers. My goal was to get good quality, something I could add onto later, and something with good aesthetics in my living room.

While I could not find the HKTS14 5.1 speaker system in a local retail store, I did listen to a similar Infinity system (also made by Harman) which sounded good and had really nice brushed aluminum caseings. I already had purchased the Harman Kardon AVR-335, and so I decided to go for the HKTS14, sight unseen.

The arrived yesterday, and here is my impression so far...
The speakers look really nice, though they are made of plastic not brushed aluminim like the Infinity system. The grills are metal however, so that is nice. The sub woofer is large and tall, but it is also very aesthetically pleasing. I had planned to put it under an end table, but it is taller than the end table so maybe my wife will let me keep it in front of the room next to the TV (ideal listening location). I think it looks nice enough. The sub woofer also enables a number of different speaker configurations for older systems that do not have a sub woofer line out. If you hook it to a full audio output, it will actually direct the base frequencies to the woofer and route the higher frequencies to lines out for hooking satellite speakers up to the woofer. If you have a receiver with a seperate sub woofer line out, that is the only connection it needs.

The satellite speakers also look nice, and include both shelf stands and wall mounts. The kit also includes all the color coded wiring you need. It is really nice to get everything needed to be listening to your system in 15 minutes.

So far I have only one complaint about the HKTS14 system. The speakers are designed to mount on the walls, and yet the included wiring is black. Unless you have black walls, this is totally unacceptable.

Another review I read somewhere cited the subwoofer as reason enough to buy these speakers at this price. Spot on. The 10 in. you get (where most HTIB speakers come with subwoofers that are 8 in.) is good sized, so you might do well to prepare those others who will be sharing space with it that it will not tuck neatly away under even a large doily. But, for good reason: it pushes bass like few I heard in investigating the system I ended up buying. Even when you overpower the sound by turning the subwoofer all the way up it doesn't distort or muddy the way the others do. In fact, it's just more fun that way. The satellites are excellent and by all means spring for the speaker stands. My wife claims these as her sole and most valuable input to our HT system: they are sleek, very stylish and just class up the joint, nevermind delivering the sound at the same optimal height of your ear on the couch. The pictures here on Amazon don't do the overall effect justice at all. But the speakers themselves provide undistorted clarity and crispness at 20 decibels and that was enough to start peeling some paint and rattling doors in their jambs. I don't think most will have a room sized so that this speaker system would not fill it with a rich, clean, and full range sound expression. And don't let the differentiation some reviewers make between sound reproduction in movies and music detract you: get the right receiver and there will be no issue.

After a lot of research I finally chose the Harman over the Bose.
From what I read, the Harman was equal to the Bose at a fraction of the cost, so I took a chance I bought it from JR.com(on sale for $379 plus free shipping). Unit came in TWO DAYS. Awesome service from JR where I also bought my Sony AV receiver. Well, the reviews were correct. The sound is fantastic and I think better than my father's Bose Lifestyle Sytem. Setup was a breeze and what a nice touch to include the mounting brackets for the sats. The sub is awesome (but huge) be sure you have enough room to accomadate it. If you do, you will not be dissatisfied.
For the money, the most bang for the buck available.

Sound quality is superb. The sound is very crisp and clear. The surround is very true life. The base is so powerful. We were amazed at how big the subwoofer was for the price. We only use 30% of the base and it sounds like 90%. Center channel also brings the dialog to out. Overall, we are very pleased with this system. We couldn't believe we could own a great system with the money we paid. Originally we wanted the Bose Acoustimass 6 (also 5.1 channel surround sound). However, the price was too high for us. The Harman Kardon HKTS 14 is $200 cheaper. Cnet gave it an 8.0 Excellent rating and it was top four on their editor's choices list. And Bose wasn't on the list. With all the good reviews I read, We decided to give it a try.

We live in a one bedroom apartment and this system is more than enough to turn our living room into a small theater. One thing to keep in mind is that the media you watch has to be 5.1 to fully use the surround system. If the media is not 5.1, switching to stereo mode still gives you powerful bass and good sound. Also, in order to bring out the fullness of the system, following the manufacture's suggested placement of the speakers is crucial. I don't have any complaint but if I have to pick one, I wish I could boost the base up and rock my entire apartment!! Then again, we wouldn't want to be kicked out for being too loud.

Definitely recommend it.

After countless hours researching speakers for my new surround sound tv/audio system ( My receiver is a Yamaha rx v2500) I finally settled on the HKTS 14's and I am happy I did. I have no real complaints other than the wall speaker mounts. They are a bit challenging and feel flimsy in contrast to what you can buy. Additionally, don't rely on the equally flimsy, but provided speaker wire. If you are going to spend this much money on speakers, break down and buy 14 gauge wire to drive the sound. I love the powered sub, but its absolutely massive. That said, it can really do the trick and will quickly have neighbors looking for thunderstorms with its deep bass. Solid cabinets, high tech look.

This set is all about the MONSTER sub. The satelites are good quality, nice look and feel. Sound is fantastic. you can,t beat this system for the money. only person that doesnt like it is my neigbors, cause it shakes their house too.

This speaker set is value priced far below what the performance it gives. I was pleasantly suprised.

The time had finally come to get a matched set of speakers for home theater use. I had been using a set of Bose Acoustimass 5 Series, a pair of Polk SDA-2, and a Bose VCS-10 center speaker for years. It was finally time to say goodbe to the old speakers.

As we all do, I did my research and my homework and wasn't particularly thrilled by anything in my price range. I was considering the Harman Kardon 18 system but took a look at the HKTS-14. I contacted Polk Customer Service and they said that the only difference between the two systems is that the 14 has a 12" subwoofer instead of the 18's 10". I was sold on the HKTS 14.

After a couple of days of impatient waiting I got the speakers and got them rigged up. I had to readjust the settings on my Sony STR-DE595 receiver and fine tune the volume on the subwoofer - using "The Fellowship of the Ring" opening scenes at a pretty high volume level. I have all the levels where I think they need to be in my apartment and I love these speakers.

Watching movies has become a new experience. The HKTS-14 allow dialogue to be crystal clear while sound effects and score have the right amount of OOOMPH - all without having to turn the receiver volume up and down during a movie. I do a lot of gaming on the XBOX360 and games have taken on a whole new demension. Even just watching baseball on TV has the "you are there" thrill.

These are great speakers - especially if you don't have a suitcase full of money or a dedicated theater in your home.