Samsung HT-C6500 Blu-ray Home Theater System Review

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(More customer reviews)Some HTiB (home theater in a box) systems are inflexible, hard to use and offer questionable performance with cheap, flimsy construction. One might even call them "cheesy." The Samsung HT-C6500 Blu-ray/DVD Home Theater System is not one of these systems. It offers solid audio and video performance, a wealth of online streaming features, including Netflix, Pandora and VUDU, built in Blu-ray, CD and DVD playback with pretty nice upconversion, WiFi networking and ample power to drive the 5.1 channel speaker system in a decent-sized room, and all for a reasonable price. Also, unlike many HTiB systems, the unit features two HDMI inputs, so you can add on a cable or satellite set-top box and/or a gaming system with single wire audio/video simplicity.
The system includes on-board decoding of the latest surround sound codecs, including DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD so it can take full advantage of the sonic capabilities of Blu-ray Disc. It also features snappy load times, loading a DVD in about 9 seconds, a simple Blu-ray disc in 11 seconds and a BD-Java Blu-ray Disc (the first "Pirates of the Caribbean" film) in about 25 seconds. These times compete with the fastest standalone players currently on the market. The initial boot up is a little slow at 22 seconds, but the player is doing a lot of stuff at start-up, including searching DLNA devices for compatible networked media files, as well as loading the code for streaming providers such as Netflix, VUDU and Samsung's own Internet@TV service.
During the review we did notice one disc compatibility issue (the unit can't get past the trailers on "The Incredible Hulk" Blu-ray Disc), but this can be worked around by disabling the BD-Live feature on the player (not ideal, but hopefully Samsung will fix this in a future firmware upgrade). Also, while the audio portion of the iPod dock worked flawlessly for us, if you want to also play video or photos on your iPod or iPhone through the system, you will need to connect an additional composite video cable between the HT-C6500 and your TV or projector (a basic video cable comes in the box). And don't look for anything fancy like album art in the iPod interface, because it just isn't there. However, controlling iPod song access from the unit's remote was very handy.
Speaking of the remote, this is probably the weakest link here. The navigational buttons are a little too low and transport buttons are a little too high to comfortably navigate through set-up and disc menus or to easily control playback. We were happy to see an auto-calibration system on-board (with included microphone) which can get the basics of speaker level and distance calibration accomplished without having to revert to test discs and SPL meters.
Performance tip for owners: if you feel that the bass lacks some definition or sounds a little "thumpy," try inserting a piece of foam or cloth (or some old socks) into the subwoofer port. This will actually tame the boom without losing a significant amount of sonic heft from the mix.
Overall, we were impressed with the HT-C6500 and would recommend it to anyone in the market for a mid-range HTiB system. It's long on features and performance but relatively short on price: a good combination.
You can read our complete review at Big Picture Big Sound (dot com).

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