Customer Reviews

Philips Factory Refurbished HTS3372D Home Theater System

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

 

 

My husband has a kazillion watt surround sound-something that could power a square mile, and has at least 6 remotes that require extensive study to operate. He loves it, and he has a studio for that.

Upstairs, I have a more quiet Vizio M261VP, wi-fi enabled 26-inch which I love. It has a great 1080p picture, and streams Netflix. It has really tinny sound though! So, I looked about for a small footprint solution, and found little to improve this situation. Big-bucks surround-sound or nothing. Vizio offers a soundbar, but it is $100 with no other functionality. BOSE has spectacular speakers at about $100 with 2X inputs (Generation 2), but those inputs are the mini-stereo jack - really designed for PC's.

Then I ran into this by accident - the Phillips HTS3D372 "refurbished," $99 at Best Buy. I have the 5 speakers arranged in a row like a sound bar, the slim subwoofer hidden behind the couch. In a 25 X 20 room, this system will blow your face off - it turns out it is a tiny 1000 watt system that could rival my husband's on the block. It takes mp3's off a flash drive (USB), and plays DVD/CD's, and has an IPOD dock (I have not tried that.)

So much product and connectivity! Extremely nice.

A complaint is that it has no working code for the universal Atlas remote, or any other universal remote, even their own Philips universal remote.

Big recommendation - but why can't electronics get along?

For 1000 watts it just doesn't seem that loud to me. No Bass at all.
And there's no in between on volume levels. I was expecting more but for the price I shouldn't complain. I got this to replace much more expensive system I had that was killed by Lighting. Speaker wires are Longer than most reviews make them sound... but still are short.

You cannot replace the speaker wires or connectors for this. If you need extra length to get behind your couch you are unable to extend the speaker wire w/o voiding the warranty. I called philips directly and spoke with a customer service agent and they basically told me I'm SOL. They use a special connector to get to the back of the DVD player for the speakers and the do not even make extenders for them. This is a horrible design and I definately do not recommend buying this system.

I bought this unit refurbished for a small apartment to replace a set of tiny speakers. With it, you get lots of nice features with a not-so-easy-to-use interface to use them. The unit needed a software update to stop freezing on MP3 playback, but otherwise hasn't had any weird glitches since.

The sound is probably about right for a $130 Dolby 5.1 system: not great. Bass is muddy, highs are lacking, and the "sound" equalization that comes with the unit isn't very helpful. Also, it's really loud even at very low volume levels. But it's fun to now have legitimate surround sound and the picture that I get from DVDs on my LCD TV is much improved.

It's tough to know if I could have gotten more for my money. I think I did okay.