Home Theater System Live

2 Responses to “Samsung HT-C650W Home Theater System”

1. Matthew Morse Says: July 29th, 2010 at 9:34 pm

   I recently purchased this Samsung system as a replacement to my previous Samsung system that was destroyed in a house fire. I’m no audiophile, but I do know good sound when I hear it.

   Before buying this set, I had considered sound bars and other 2.1 systems (mainly Bose) as I live in an apartment and my living room isn’t all that big, nor did I want the system to blow away my neighbors. I ended up with this, though for a couple of reasons:

   For the money, it’s a good system. It’s almost identical to the last albeit with wireless rear speakers. Which is my first point. The wireless rear speakers just work. You plug in a transmitter to the back of the unit and then plug the rear speakers into a receiver unit that you plug into the wall. So the rear speakers aren’t truly wireless, but they’re good enough. I did buy some nice stands to put them on so that I could hide the speaker wire. The receiver box is small (about the size of a Nintendo Wii or similar) and unobtrusive. I set it next to my couch on the floor under a side table and you can’t see it unless you’re looking for it. Also, the couch hides the wires coming from the farthest speaker.

   The speakers are good. Not great, but they’ll do. They don’t have any grilles on them, which is a bit annoying. They look good, but if you’ve got toddlers on the move or a big dog, I’d suggest wall-mounting them or putting them up on stands to get them out of the way of curious fingers and/or sharp teeth. My rear speakers exhibit a bit of fuzziness at low volumes, especially when I’m sitting right next to one of them, but turn up the volume and have a steady flow of sound, and you never hear it. I’m guessing this might be a slight loss in transmission from the transmitter to the rear receiver, but I may be wrong.

   The setup for this system was incredibly easy. Samsung color-codes their speaker wires so you can’t really mess it up. The only bad thing about this is that if you want new, more or better speaker wire, you’re going to have to get something Samsung compatible with their connections or either do some MacGuyvering to get their connection onto your wire of choice (which may defeat the purpose of better speaker wire). The good thing about this system vs. my last one, is that the wires weren’t permanently attached to the speakers so I can upgrade my speakers at any point by just unplugging the wires from these and plugging them into the back of something nicer. I doubt I’ll ever need anything more, but it’s an option. Back to the setup, Samsung provides a microphone for an auto setup feature and while I never could get it to pick up every speaker every time (it would miss at least one each time), it did seem to get things close enough for me.

   This system works flawlessly with my Samsung 46″ LCD HDTV and while I don’t use the remote (I have a Logitech Harmony remote), it seemed easy enough to use and matched the remote to my TV almost button for button.

   For the money, there aren’t much better systems out there. Especially if you’re looking for rear speakers that are wireless. It’s a good starter set or a replacement to an old setup if you just want to add in the all-in-one capability of the box.
   Rating: 4 / 5

2. YabbaDabbaDoo! Says: July 29th, 2010 at 11:44 pm

   So I could go into detail about this system (it’s decent), its sound (okay, but not great), its design/quality (looks good/feels cheap, get’s dusty easily), etc. But the thing that seems the most notable is how horrible Samsung’s customer “service” is. My remote was defective and the system’s compatibility with my Samsung TV wasn’t great (I know – the least they could do would be to get it to work well with their own products!). It took me more than a dozen calls to get to their Tier 3 technical support, and still they couldn’t resolve all the issues with this system. Along the way their customer “service”:
   
   -Lost my work ticket 3 different times
   
   -Failed to write down the details of my problem so I had to explain it to each new person I was passed to
   
   -Ordered me the wrong remote (twice)
   
   -Lacked proper documentation for system (I stopped counting the times they told me to try changing the batteries)

   The bottom-line is don’t buy this system. Its compatibility my Samsung HDTV isn’t great, the user interface is clunky and confusing, the sound quality is only okay, and if anything goes wrong, you will spend a year of your life dealing with Samsung’s customer “service.”

   Rating: 1 / 5

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