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Instant gratification
Instant home theatre from JVC's small blue thing
by Stephen Ballantyne
December 2001
JVC TH-A9 DVD-system. $2499
There’s
two schools of thought about home theatre; one group, heirs to the long
tradition of audio perfectionism, advocates a long and careful process
of assembling carefully matched components to produce a system optimised
as far as possible for the viewing and auditory conditions found in the
viewing room.
For this group, the ideal sound and vision experience is unlikely to be achieved until much iterative tweaking and swapping components in and out is performed; indeed, with technology constantly pushing back the frontiers of what can be achieved, ‘perfection’ will always remain a goal just slightly out of reach.
"Stuff that for a lark" would be the response of the second school of thought, if it was organised enough to be a school. Instead, it’s the great mass of ordinary blokes and blokettes, who like the idea of watching DVDs with sound like you get at the pictures, and could you deliver it this afternoon please?
JVC’s TH-A9 is that manufacturer’s attempt to cater to the instant gratification crowd – and there’s nothing wrong with that. How much data can you extract from a DVD? The image the TH-A9 puts on a TV screen looks fine, and using the default settings the sound it produced was... satisfactory.
It’s an aesthetically attractive system, too: a small central player unit with a fashionable silver, light grey and blue styling (including a blue LED that glows when the system is running – LED blue is definitely the electronic industry’s colour of the month.) Five silver hand-sized satellite speakers look dismayingly small, although JVC assures us they are ‘full-range bass reflex’ speakers. More impressive is the hunky subwoofer and amplifier that powers the whole thing, with a claimed total output of 200 Watts.
Putting the bits together was superbly simple – JVC has thoughtfully labelled every speaker wire (I’m sorry, they’re too skinny for me to call them ‘cables’) so there can be no mistake about what goes where. Wall mounting brackets for the two rear speakers are also included.
The only thing to be aware of is that the player needs enough clearance above it for the powered lid to open. When closed, the unit is about 9cm high; when open it’s about 19cm by my ruler; the blue-grey transparent lid is attractive, but a tray or slot loading system might actually be more practical.
Getting the TH-A9 to work in a basic sense was easy, but accessing some of the more advanced features was more of a struggle. I blame two things: The imperial-size remote control unit has 59 buttons plus a slide switch, almost guaranteed to defeat the comprehension abilities of the technophobic; and the documentation needs to be read carefully to extract maximum usefulness.
Over-eager to watch an old classic I’d missed years ago, I glanced hurriedly at the manual and concluded that selection of on-screen features had to be performed with the number keys on the remote.
The truth (that the system works entirely as you might expect, with on-screen controls selected by an arrow keypad) didn’t dawn on me until the next day, when I read the manual more carefully. True, the documentation is comprehensive, but its presentation could be clearer.
One detail the documentation is quiet about is regionalisation. According to the manual and the box, the unit supplied will only work with zone 3 DVDs (zone 3 covers Asia, excluding Japan), but strangely the unit supplied worked perfectly with American zone 1, our zone 4, and zone-free discs, without any complaint or need to manipulate controls.
The usual fast-forward (up to 60x), slow motion and frame-by-frame advance functions are included, along with less common strobe (which display nine consecutive frames simultaneously in a grid), zoom with user controllable panning, and multi-angle view, for those DVDs that include this feature. These features should be a boon for sports fans; sadly, at present they seem to be much more common on porno disks.
I found the default sound quality of the TH-A9 to be a bit there and there – strong at the top end, very boomy at the bass end, but rather light in the middle. I found the integration of the sound improved when I turned the bass down somewhat. More tweaking may improve things even further.
A choice of DSP-generated spatial-acoustic effects is available to further complicate set-up; arriving at the optimum configuration for a location could take weeks of tweaks, even with the calibration aids built-in to the system.
Oh, there’s a decent FM/AM radio hiding in the TH-A9 as well as a versatile DVD and CD player; that unglamorous functionality may actually be the one most likely to be used in daily life. It works fine.
Overall I found the TH-A9 attractive, though not overwhelmingly so. Neither the cheapest nor the most expensive such system on the market the TH-A9 has features, adequate performance and good looks going for it.
The range of replay functions, the ability to handle most formats including VCDs and SVCDs, Dolby 5.1 Digital and DTS replay and the easy setup make this an attractive system for a movie buff wanting a quick entry into home theatre.
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