Harman kardon DVD 50 User Manual
test report
BY DANIEL KUMIN
Harman Kardon
DVD 50 Five-Disc DVD Changer
hen you can buy a five-disc
changer with all the best features of a fine CD player and
a top-shelf, progressive-scan
DVD player for less than
W
two separate components? You don’t. Harman Kardon’s ne w D VD 50 does it all — it
even plays CDs with MP3 files, making it
potentially a 60-hour music player.
The DVD 50 is laid out along classic
carousel-changer lines, with a single disc
drawer across most of its width. All of its
front-panel disc-selection and transport
controls are sensibly located above the
drawer so they remain accessible when it’s
open. (Don’t laugh: I’ve seen changers with
controls underneath the drawer.) The control labels, though tiny, are all illuminated,
which helps a lot. Another smart touch is
that each disc well inside the drawer has
number labels on both sides flanking the
disc cutout, eliminating confusion about
which well is which.
Around back, the DVD 50 has the expected composite/S-video plus stereo and
coaxial/optical digital audio jacks. There’s
also a trio of wideband component-video
PHOTOS BY TONY CORDOZA
$600, why would you need
outputs. If your TV has a progressive-scan
display, which usually (but not always)
means a high-definition set, these outputs
can be set up for progressive-scan rather
than interlaced video, yielding a smoother,
more filmlike picture.
The player’s setup menus are quite clear
and self-explanatory ,and if you want more
information, the owner’s manual is exceptionally complete and detailed. Since surround sound decoding is left for your receiver or processor to do, setup options are
mostly limited to the usual choices regarding screen shape (standard or widescreen),
bitstream default (you can, for example,
restrict DTS output if your receiver can’t
decode it), parental lockout, and so on.
It’s unusual,but certainly not unheard of,
that you have to set the DVD 50’s video
output to
S-video — and if the former,to progressive
on or off. (My everyday player provides a
progressive-scan component-video output
and both standard video formats simultaneously.) If you’re viewing the setup menu
from the S-video output, when you switch
to component output, the screen goes blank,
with no menu display to help diagnose and
either component- or composite/
fix the problem. You have to change your
TV’s
input to progressive to reacquire a
picture. I learned that the hard way, mucking about in the setup menu before reading
the manual.
On the video front, I have nothing but
praise for this Harman Kardon carousel.
Watching Denzel Washington’s Oscar-winning performance as a bad cop in
Training
fast facts
KEY FEATURES
●
Component-video output switchable
between interlaced and progressive-scan
●
Plays CD-R/RW discs and CD-R/RWs or
CD-ROMs with MP3 files
●
Can replace up to four discs while one is
playing
●
Decodes HDCD-encoded CDs
OUTPUTS composite-, component-, and
S-video; coaxial and optical digital audio;
stereo analog audio
DIMENSIONS 171⁄2inches wide, 5 inches
high, 16 inches deep
WEIGHT 127⁄8pounds
PRICE $649
MANUFACTURER Harman Kardon,
Dept. S&V, 250 Crossways Park Dr.,
Woodbury, NY 11797; www.harmankardon
.com; 800-422-8027
62 JUNE 2002 SOUND & VISION
test report
HIGH POINTS
Excellent progressive-scan
video performance.
Smooth fast and slow video scanning.
Useful onscreen controls for
DVD, CD, and MP3 playback.
Nice remote control.
LOW POINTS
No direct disc selection on remote.
Slow access to high-speed search.
Day on DVD via the progressive-scan output, I saw a sharp, defined picture with outstanding color integrity and range of contrast. The image quality was terrific, with
finely detailed shadows in the countless
scenes shot inside the Monte Carlo where
about half the movie seems to take place.
The speeding car passes Denzel and Ethan
Hawke’s faces through a myriad of differ-
ent lighting conditions and back-
grounds; the DVD 50 showed
every one to excellent adv an-
tage. And its slo-mo scan-
ning was as smooth and
steady as on any player
I’ve used.
I was unable to see any
difference between the pro-
gressive-scan component-
video output of the Har-
man Kardon player and
that of my reference pro-
gressive-scan player —
a widely respected sin-
gle-disc model that
costs around three
times as much. I did
an A/B comparison
using three DVDs of
which I had duplicate
copies, including the visu-
ally stunning
Dragon
patterns from Ovation Software’s
DVD. In short, I simply saw no difference
between the players, which means that the
DVD 50’s progressive-scan video perfor-
mance is top-shelf. It should perform no
less well — within the limitations of the
signal formats — if you use standard interlaced component-, composite, or S-video
connections.
On the audio side, the only issue I examined was the quality of stereo CD playback,
though most buyers will probably use a
Crouching Tiger, Hidden
. The same held true even with test
Avia
digital link, which means they’ll be listening to the digital-to-analog conversion performed by their receiver or surround processor. Nonetheless, the DVD 50 was an
equally excellent CD player. Stereo playback of known, high-resolution recordings
was clean, detailed, and quiet.
Most of what’s left to talk about here are
the kinds of things that distinguish most
DVD players from each other these days:
functions, features, and ease of use. Fortunately, the Harman Kardon DVD 50 has
plenty to offer in these areas.
It played every CD-R and CD-RW that I
tried without a hiccup, including those
with MP3 files. It offers a useful onscreen
display for MP3 discs, showing an alphabetized list of filenames, though it “flat-
tened” the file structure, at least on the
discs I burned, showing all files at the same
level regardless of any heirarchical folders.
You can program a playlist of up to 60
MP3 tracks, in any order, which is cool.
Unfortunately, they can’t be from more
than one disc. And you can’t play MP3
tracks in random order from either one disc
or multiple discs. That said, since the DVD
50 takes nearly a minute to initialize each
MP3 disc — like all other MP3-capable
DVD players I’ve encountered — not hav-
ing the options of multidisc MP3 programming or random play makes sense.
As if in compensation, there’s an unus-
ually flexible shuffle-play menu for audio
CDs (or DVDs — but does anybody ever
actually play DVD chapters at random?).
You get a choice of single-disc shuffle, all-
discs shuffle (one disc at a time), or a mode
in the lab
DVD-VIDEO PERFORMANCE
Measurements were made from a variety of
DVD test discs, all through the player’s
composite-video output except as noted.
Maximum-white level error....................+1 IRE
Setup level....................+7.5/0 IRE (switchable)
Luminance frequency response
(re level at 1 MHz)
at 4 and 5 MHz.....................................–0.26 dB
at 6 and 6.75 MHz (DVD limit)..............–0.63 dB
The DVD 50’s stereo audio output (figures
omitted for space) was very good to excellent
all around. The one curiosity was its analog
output level, which at 1 volt was 6 dB shy of the
de facto 2-volt standard, but this should have
little or no effect on real-world dynamic range.
Performance through its composite-video
output was slightly better than average thanks
The Harman Kardon DVD 50 provided
Oscar-worthy image quality for Denzel
Washington’s bad cop in
T raining Day.
that plays two randomly selected tracks
from Disc A, then two from Disc B, then
two from C, and so on until all tracks from
all discs have been played, without repeats
— pretty clever. Track/chapter programming is similarly flexible. You can program
a playlist with up to 22 steps from any or
all discs in any order, freely mixing standard CDs, DVDs, and even V ideo CDs (b ut
not CDs containing MP3 files).
Programmability for DVD playback
may appeal to the rare music-video addict,
but I suspect most people will use the DVD
50 as a CD changer for music and as a single-disc player, at least most of the time,
for movies and videos. On the audio side,
it worked like any good changer. Disc-todisc access time was about par (a maximum of 17 seconds), but track-skip time
was under a second and response to play
and pause commands was equally snappy .
Overall, the ergonomic design is very
good. The onscreen operation bar (nearly
universal these days), with icons that give
you access to all the important modes and
displays, worked well. More important, the
Differential gain............................................2%
Differential phase..........................................2°
Onscreen horizontal resolution........540 lines
In-player letterboxing................................poor
Component-output level error (interlaced
mode, Y/P
Component-output timing error (interlaced
mode, P
to the flatness of its luminance frequency
response, which always translates to more
accurate reproduction of very fine image detail.
Its component-video output was also unusually
accurate in level and timing. It could play recordable DVD-R and rewritable DVD-RW discs
recorded in standard DVD-Video mode as well
as DVD+RW discs. —
) ...................+4.85/–1.67/–1.59%
r/Pb
) .......................+4/+4 nanoseconds
r/Pb
D.K. and David Ranada
64 JUNE 2002 SOUND & VISION
Loading...