Denon DHD-500SD: speakers ate the living room

By Michael Parsons on 22 October 2008, 5:15pm

This weekend we played with Denon’s tried-and-true home cinema system, the DHT 500-SD. This popular all-in-one DVD player and 5.1 speaker system costs less than £500 and is famous for offering high-end audio at a high street price.

The basic set-up was very easy. Plug in the DVD player, connect a SCART lead (no component video on our TV, alas) into the back of the Sony WEGA, and wire up the sub woofer, centre, front, and surround speakers. The on-screen set-up has an easy install option which allows you to choose whether your room is small, medium, or large, and specify whether you're listening from the centre or back of the room. It then lists the distance you'll need to position each speaker from the listening 'sweet spot' -- in our case, the middle of the sofa. In only 15 minutes, rich sound was filling the room and frighening the neighbour's dog. Tweaking the speaker placement to get it obsessively correct took many hours of experimentation with a tape measure, but that was just for fun.

As the handsome silver and wood speaker cabinets come without stands, the final set-up involved some pretty silly impromptu sculptural work, using armchairs, piles of paperbacks, and random coffee tables to get the positioning just right.

The Chinese martial arts epic Hero and daft thriller The Village provided the lush visuals and rich orchestration and sound effects needed to put the kit through its paces. Underrated sci-fi epic The Fifth Element was great for calibrating the sound and also showed off the rich colours and sharp image quality of Denon’s DVD player.

The results were impressive. The sound effects on the signature Dolby screen at the beginning of The Village rippled spookily round the living room and sent a shiver down the spine. The creepy noises-off were genuinely scary, and the intense mood created by the powerful score and the high level of detail that came through in the soundtrack made this silly movie much more engaging.

The challenge of home-cinema-in-a-box is that it has to come out of the box to do its job, and once you start positioning speakers you end up redesigning your living room in a bid to create the perfect sound stage. It's a challenge for anyone who isn’t chasing their Aibo around an industrial warehouse with nothing but a futon and a single bruised orchid to spoil the acoustics.

We loved the audio quality, but felt the cables trashed our living room. We look forward to checking out Yamaha's new one box sound projector, which costs considerably more, but may not involve rearranging so much furniture.