Audio Reviews

the support staff assisted me with my predicament and i was able to receive the cable quickly through amazon.com

great product

After a year of shopping, my wife & I decided to experience this puppy. Granted that all plasma t.v.s look great, this one on the show floor looked a tad better, so we sprang for the extra bucks after first getting a sale price, then a 10% discount ontop of an additional 10% discount. It was merely a horribly expensive unit instead of obscenely expensive that way.

At home, we had an installer scheduled to come out and mount it on the wall, but we couldn't wait and went ahead and did the installation on the pedastle, which is a two person job and takes about 3 hours, with the constant fear of dropping something on the screen. We didn't break anything, but I don't recommend self installation unless you have nerves of steel.

After haggling with the cable company, we added HDTV service and after about 5 days managed to review the unit in the following modes:

1. analog cable t.v.
The image quality is good, probably superior to regular NTSC quality. Key advantage is you can toggle the 5 or so image scale modes to make it fit just right. There is a progressive distortion mode that while stretching the image to fit the 16:9 from the NTSC standard, does it so well that there is no obvious distortion except for the rare case where you see what should be a circle in one of the corners. The image size is such that you really can't take in the whole screen at once so it's a rarely if ever noticed distortion and visually quite good considering the low quality of analog broadcast
2. digital cable t.v.
Probably not a great idea. You have two modes on the Hitachi and 3 modes on the cable box to scale the image, and they seem to fight eachother resulting in a less than stellar picture. I actually prefer analog for quality when all settings are done. I would suspect the same issues with Satellite, but I'm not ready to add that to my gadget list to be sure.
Special note for folks who have "movie on demand" fantasies. NONE of the "movies on demand" are HDTV format. Maybe next year. I'm disappointed, but with my cable company, not Hitachi.
3. digital 1080i cable t.v.
Granted, this device is not a 1080i display, it's 1,280 by 780, but however it down-converts the signal, it's an amazingly clear picture. The only concern you might have is looking at the imperfections on people's faces that are normally invisible. I mean, how many of you will find your attention distracted by looking at the details of the hairs growing from a mole on the interviewer's face. Sometimes, detail it too much of a good thing, but by all that's holy, it's remarkable detail and quality. My suspicion is that satellite folks will love this mode too. HOWEVER, there are very few HDTV channels right now, and I'd say, like all t.v. wasteland material, maybe 1 or 2 has something interesting.
4. svideo DVD
A high quality display that looks fine, but you'll discover that frame sizes vary depending upon DVD producer's whim and you may find yourself toggling among 6 different display modes trying to find one that won't burn-in and that looks good too. I don't have the HDTV composite version of a DVD player so I can't comment on that and I blew my toy budget for the next 3 years so it'll be a while before I know how wonderful that feature is.
5. RCA jack vhs video
This is the worst image quality mode, due to the source. however the analog variable image scaling works well, and the picture is better than when displayed on the baby 30 inch sony 3:4 that this replaced.
6. RGB output from a PC
Jury is out here. I've hooked 3 different PCs into this and know for sure that your milage will vary. Depending on which version of Windows you have, whose display driver you have, etc, etc, you will either get a stunning image of your desktop, or a stunning distorted image of your desktop. Be warned a 1280 X 780 display is obviously not the top display mode debugged by video card driver makers. It's not that you won't get it to work, but you may find that your actual display size is, well, funny. Hitachi has a nice "auto size" mode that at least gets the desktop to fill the screen, irrespective of what the video card driver wants to do. You can browse easily, clearly, and start shopping at once for a wireless keyboard and mouse. We did.
7. Universal remote vs. Universal remote
There were actually three settups done for us. The one my wife & I did, the one the official installer did, and the one the cable boy did. Each of us knows how a system should be wired, and how the universal remote should be programmed. At the end of the day, I had THREE universal remotes, sony, cable company, and hitachi. Each programmed by the mad mind of the perfect configurator. At the end of the day, the universal remote that works best is the Hitachi, which surprised me. The cable guy insisted that it would never work with the cable box. I discovered that it works better with the cable box than the universal remote that came with the cable box. That doesn't mean you will have ONE universal remote. Mixed vendors = mixed results. I can now get by with TWO universal remotes, provided I keep a third nearby. Driving 5 different vendor's devices with 2.5 remotes ain't bad.
8. Burn in
Hitachi says, never keep the side bars (normal HTDV display) on for more than 15% of the time, lest thou shalt melt the phosphor and destroy your display. I looked at the persistance image after turning the device off (in the dark), and my guess is that 15% is the maximum. I plan on keeping it down to as close to zero as possible. If you plan on using this with a PC, make sure your screen saver is really on, and really doing a dynamic or BLACK display unless you want to see START on the bottom of your display for eternity. (apologies to MAC users)

Terrific product. We love that we don't have to think about which remote points where. Hot Link doesn't care. You can point your remote towards the ceiling if you want and your components respond without a hitch. Very slick.

We actually have two Hot Links. The second one solved another problem for us: Our DSS receiver is hooked up next to the TV in our living room. We've split off the signal so that we can watch DirecTV from our bedroom TV as well. The problem is that we couldn't change channels from our bedroom. There's an extension cable you can get for the Hot Link eye so we set up the eye in our bedroom and hooked up an emitter to the DSS receiver in the living room. Voila! We can now change channels from the bedroom.

Hot Link is one of those happy products that you don't realize you can't live without - until you own one. Very happy customers are we.

I just bought this thing from Amazon and all I can say is WOW!!!!

This is probably the best purchase I have ever made. This thing is everything I ever expected and more!! It's easy to use as well - even my wife can operate it!

I have to say, everyone out there who is thinking of buying this, stop thinking. I bought it and I am extremely happy with it the moment I powered this thing on. YOU ABSOLUTELY POSITIVELY CANNOT GO WRONG WITH THIS PURCHASE! I GUARANTEE IT!!!

I bought this several weeks ago and I take it EVERYWHERE! I love that it is USB and I can make downloads to the player's adapter very fast. The radio is a GREAT feature. My friends go ripped off when they bought other MP3 players. There is one are two things I dislike though first it comes with 2-16 MP cards instead of 1 32 MB and also the tracks are called Track 1 and so on instead of the name of the song. But all and all you can't get more for the money! BUY IT TODAY! Also the light in the back is a great feature.

This is quite simply the best music player ever made. It has more built in features than an ipod, longer battery life, faster transfer speeds, can act like a USB drive - the list goes on and on. All for a price that is considerably less than a comparable 20 GB ipod. Some may say that not having a screen on the base and only the remote is a downside - but I say absolutely not. It genious in design. You never really want to take that out of your pocket or belt and fumble around with it anyway. You'd risk dropping it - esp if you're walking or running.

The controls on the remote are ellegantly designed - with a minimum set of dials and buttons serving muliple purposes. You can even manage your files through those controls too. What I like most is that there is a lock on both the remote and the base. If you lock the base, and unlock the remote, you can still turn it on though the remote but not through the base. Simply brilliant in that you can leave the controls on w/o risking a mis-press when it's in your pocket.

If you have an ipod you need this case. I love it.

I just bought this player, and it was perfect even working in my car with a cheap car adapter, there is only pure music. Default earphones are pretty good as well. Only thing is, input voltage of AC adapter was not stated in amazon.com, I was expecting it is 125 VAC because of US, but it should be stated in description anyway. I strongly recommend this to everybody.

I got my Joybee several days ago. I really love it. I had read many reviews here and on other websites and many of them were saying to get a different set of headphones for it. So I did that
I got a set of the Sennheiser MX500 and a set of Koss (the Plug)and ordered a set of panasonic but they were out of stock. so I could make a comparison my self. Well here is what I found. The player has plenty of power and I found that the set of earphones that come with the Joybee sound way better than any of the other ones. Just got the sennheiser ones in today and they do not have near the bass capability as the ones the come with the Joybee. Except for the color they look identical in construction, but the joybee earphones sound much better. When I first got them I thought they sounded tiny and cheap and I was using the Koss plugs and they kicked butt especially on the bass end. then I was fiddling around with the stock earbuds and putting them in the ears different ways. And Holly smokes I put them in sideways and they really kicked. Put them in sideways with the little stem towards the back of the ear and sticking out horizontally. the earbud disk itself is in a vertical position with the face of the transducer facing straight forward then stick them in and they hold quite well and sound great. I did not use any cushions with it. Quite comfortable. But other people ears may have varying results. this set has deep bass that rivals a big sub-woofer, and i have to run it at about 8 on the volume scale of 10. So if you consider getting any other earbuds for this unit you wont do any better unless you go to the higher priced models and I have not tested any of them.
As far as the Joybee itself I am real happy with it. It does what I bought it for to play mp3 files. And it does that very well. I cant see much room for improvement in the sound quality and volume.

this system sounds great. i was worried when i got it because the speakers are small and lightweight but they pack a huge punch and the subwoffer is great also. worth the price. dvd's sound like they should and i really like playing playstation in surround sound it makes video games come alive. money well spent.