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Panasonic SC-HT680 Theater System Product Technical DetailsTechnical Details:SCHT680 Key FeaturesIncluded Components:...

Poor quality, bad customer support! Panasonic SC HT75 Theater System My wife and I bought this for our Christmas present. Five months later, after watching a couple DVDs a month, it ...

I’ll confess right here at the start, I probably have the lamest excuse ever for buying a home theater system.

You see, over the summer, some friends of mine encouraged me to finally start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s a great show, in case you’ve never seen it, and it’s awfully addictive. I found myself burning through multiple episodes a day on DVD as I worked my way through the show’s first few seasons. Now once the show reached its fourth season, I suddenly had its spin-off, Angel, to contend with as well. The two shows each exist pretty well on their own, but the story arcs cross over from one to the other from time to time, and I wanted to make sure I got the full cinematic (telematic?) experience. The only proper way to make my way through the two series would be to watch the episodes in the order in which they originally aired. Of course, my plan meant having to get up and change the disk in my DVD player after every single episode, rather than just playing through an entire disk’s worth of episodes from start to finish in one sitting like I had done before Angel spun off from Buffy. I managed to survive, but it was frustrating, since I am, above all, a lazy person. I asked myself “isn’t there some magical way for me to set up several DVD’s at once and skip around from one to another for hours on and without ever having to pry myself off of the couch? What a wonderful world that would be…”

So a few days later, when I saw an add that my local Target store had just knocked fifty dollars a home theater system that included a five DVD changer, I took it as some sort of sign that my existential lament had been answered, and I sallied forth to pick up the aforementioned Panasonic SC-HT680 system, and returned home to set it up, eager to bask in the glow of hours upon hours of magical TV on DVD entertainment.

And I have to say, it may have been nothing more than laziness that prompted me to pick up this home theater system, but had I known about the sheer sonic experience I had been missing out on, I’d have gotten myself one long ago. But I’ve been rambling on a bit too much by this point. Time to get down to brass tacks.

The Panasonic SC-HT680 is a (mostly) all in one home theater system built around an audio receiver unit with a five disk DVD player and an AM/FM radio tuner built in. Five satellite speakers and a moderately sized sub-woofer come bundled along in the box for the full theater sound experience.

Setting up the whole system took a bit of time, but didn’t pose any sort of challenge. The receiver fit nicely on the smallish shelf underneath my television, and from there it was a matter of attaching the wires for all six speakers. The back of the receiver has six sets of clearly labeled inputs (the kind with a pair of little levers that “bite down” on the exposed ends of copper speaker wire), so it was never difficult to tell which wires were intended for which speakers. The box came with enough wires to run to each of the corners of a small room, but if you’re going to be setting up this system in a medium to large sized room or running the wires through the walls to keep them out of the way, you’ll want to go out and buy some extra wire of your own to run between the receiver and the five satellite speakers. The only sticky issue for wiring comes with the sub-woofer which lacks the standard pinch-style wire plugs that all the other speakers have. Instead, there’s a permanently attached wire that leads inside the subwoofer and can’t be swapped out for wire you’ve bought. Unless you’re ready to tackle some wire splicing, you won’t be able to position the sub-woofer more than six feet from the main receiver unit (but, then again, sub-woofer placement isn’t nearly as crucial as front and rear speaker placement for optimal sound).

Once all the speakers are placed just so, it’s just a simple matter of connecting the video output of the home theater receiver to the video input of your television, and you’re all set for an immersive theatrical experience thanks to the systems 600 watts of total sound output. When watching DVD’s encoded in 5.1 surround sound, especially live music performance recordings, the sound is crisp, clear, and immersive. As cliche as it sounds, playing a surround sound disk on this unit really makes you feel like you’re in the middle of the action, rather than simply watching a recording. Even with a disk that’s been recorded in simple two channel stereo (or with standard television signals brought in through the receiver’s auxiliary audio input), the receiver can process the audio signals to pull out background noises and sound effects, isolating them and sending them to the read speakers to “fake” a full, rich surround sound experience.

But the Panasonic SC-HT680 offers more than just rich sound for any DVD you might be watching. The DVD playback functions come with all the standard amenities (progressive scan outlook for crisp picture, change disks while another disk is playing, DVD-R, DVD+R and CD-R(W) compatibility, parental rating locks, to name a few), but there are several functions that come as a surprise after years with my old bare bones DVD player. Variable play speed, commercial skip (in case you’ve recorded some television onto a recordable DVD), quick replay, multiple levels of picture zoom, and other similar functions that I’ll probably never really need or want to use, but it’s nice to have the options.

And of course, since all the speakers are wired directly into the disk player, the whole unit makes for a fine stereo system. Previously, I had used my old DVD player when I wanted to listen to compact disks in my living room, but since it played through the television, I had to have my TV on if I wanted to listen to anything. Now, though, I can get all sorts of musical goodness in full, rich sound without having to bother without having to mess around with the television at all. Up to five different disks, shuffle within or among each of them, play MP3 or WMA files that have been burned to a recordable CD for hours of listening pleasure - and I can finally take full advantage of the flip side of those dual disk albums I slowly been accumulating in the last year.

Now understand I’ve really enjoyed the whole home theater experience since I bought the unit a few months back, but there are some gripes that keep it out of the realm of stellar home entertainment products. My biggest complain is with the receiver unit’s auxiliary input, firstly the fact that there’s only one. I’ve got my cable box, my Nintendo, and my VCR that I want to have hooked up all at the same time. I’ve managed to get everything working at once by plugging the audio wires for both the cable box and the Nintendo into the VCR inputs, and sending the output signal from the VCR to the home theater receiver, but it’s made for a pretty unpleasant tangle of wires behind the TV. If I ever need to add in any other component, I imagine that it’ll be a logistical nightmare. A bigger complain about the auxiliary input would be that it only accepts a standard set of RCA plugs, limiting anything you listen to when the receiver is set to the auxiliary line is limited to standard stereo sound. If you’ve got an X-Box or a Playstation 2 or a digital cable service capable of exporting full surround sound, there’s no way to experience the full sonic spectrum through the Panasonic SC-HT680.

Other, more minor gripes - the five individual trays to hold the disks feel a bit flimsy (but to be honest, none of them have shown even the slightest sign that they’ll actually break). The remote control has a clunky design – in order to save space, some buttons have been assigned two functions, and you have to hold down a shift key to access the second functions, making the remote difficult to use with one hand with full functionality. The controls on the front of the receiver are extremely limited, requiring you to use the remote control for anything beyond changing disks, switching from disk mode to radio mode to auxiliary input, or changing the volume. If you’ve got multiple CD’s playing on shuffle mode, it can take a long time to move from track to track, as every time a disk changes you need to wait five to ten seconds for the receiver to scan the new disk, even if it’s one that’s played recently.

But all these gripes are easy to overlook when you consider the price involved. The Panasonic SC-HT680 doesn’t offer the most powerful speaker output available, and it’s not overflowing with extra audio inputs. But it does offer a more than adequate audio experience, especially if you’re used to listening to the stereo speakers from your television, for under two hundred and fifty dollars – significantly under if you’re willing to shop around. Fanatically audiophiles will scoff at this system and dismiss it as a mere toy, but for the masses looking for an entry level system into the world of home theater audio, it’s hard to go wrong here.

Since I bought it, watching movies and listening to music on the Panasonic SC-HT680 has made the experience much richer that I ever expected it to be. And to think, I never would have headed down this path if I hadn’t been so lazy in the first place.

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