Hitachi 702HT 5-Piece Home Theater Speaker System

Hitachi 702HT 5-Piece Home Theater Speaker System
Manufacturer: Hitachi
Product Type: CE

Editorial Review:
Amazon.com Review
Hitachi's 702HT five-piece home theater speaker set is as economical with space as it is with price, providing affordable and affable surround entertainment with decent, natural sound. The video-shielded 702HT comes with everything you need to hook it up to your 5.1-channel surround receiver, including mounting equipment and lots of speaker wire with presoldered leads for easy installation.

An external powered subwoofer is required to get the full effect of 5.1-channel movies or music, but even without a subwoofer, this system offers spacious and pleasing sound from five compact speakers. The center-channel speaker is the largest of the five, as it will be charged with reproducing the bulk of the sound in Dolby Digital, DTS, or televised Dolby Pro Logic programming. The other four speakers--left, right, and left and right surround--are identical and come with pivoting tweeters that let you focus the sound for your prime listening area.

We're quite impressed with the quality of sound from this little system; its hallmark is distortion-free clarity and surprisingly natural vocal and instrumental timbres, especially from the center speaker. Don't expect wonders--the bass response is limited, and the high frequencies can extend only so far and so sweetly in a budget system.

But if you're tight on space and funds, or simply want the enveloping pleasure of surround sound in your office or dormitory, we highly recommend the Hitachi 702HT as a peppy entry-level surround speaker system.

Pay close attention to phase coherence when hooking up the supplied speaker wire. Since the wire is black, it's not easy to tell which of the two leads is which. One is marked with a thin white line, so be consistent about which lead you join to which terminal at the speakers and at your surround receiver; out-of-phase wiring can ruin surround effects and further diminish your system's bass response. --Michael Mikesell