Home > Consumer Reviews > Koss C220 DVD/Receiver Home Theater System

To start, I am very familiar with high-end home theater systems, as I've spec'd and installed systems from modest-budget systems to $16K systems. I personally own a fairly nice home theater/music system. I bought the Koss based on other customer reviews for a friend who just recently moved into a studio apartment. For approx. $..., I am truly astounded by the decent quality of the audio and video. The vocals are clear and intelligible. It performs acceptably well for those Hollywood "WOW" action scenes. Stereo playback of CD's sound far better than anything else in its price range. Can it compare to systems costing thousands more? No. But it certainly holds it's own to systems costing hundreds more. Installation was simple. After breaking open the box, I had the whole system connected and placed in 10 minutes. The connections are all well-labeled and color coded. The satellite speakers even come with threads to accept placement using any off-the-shelf universal wall-mount, which is how I setup the surrounds. Remember, this whole audio system, including integrated amp and tuner, costs less than many DVD players alone! So what are my nitpicks? Well, system setup of the speakers is buried in the on-unit menu system, and setting the clock is a pain because I had to dig through the manual to find the directions, which ended up being slightly confusing. As with all systems, to make the most out of its capabilities, speaker/sub placement needs to be carefully done, especially with the limited capability of the "sub" to ensure that it doesn't sound too boomy. When compared to a class higher in quality, the sound is too accentuated in the midrange, while the bass could do with considerably more articulation and the highs could be more detailed. Though overall, especially considering the price, I can't imagine a better home-theater/music system value for $.... A very surprising 5 stars!!

Being a former studio engineer, I became so disenchanted listening to the audio through my TV that I finally "broke down" and decided to purchase a home theatre system. After reading the reviews, I decided on the Koss C220.

Initially, I was very impressed with the ease of setup, especially with the "Quick Start" manual (how many guys like to read directions anyway?!?!). Within about 30 minutes I had the system ready to go with the film "Gettysburg" in the tray. And I must say that the sound was superb! However, the picture quality wasn't that great. So after diagnosing the problem with a few friends, it turns out that I needed an RF modulator ... Using this, I was able to use the S-video out which produced a more crisp picture and separated some of the interference I was seeing on my TV.

One more thing: you'll need to tweak the volume settings on the speakers. You can do this through a cool menu system you view on the TV. I found that I had to set the volume to around 10db on the surround speakers, 6 on the left/right, 8 on the center and 6 on the sub. But you will need to configure for your room.

All in all, a great starter system at a great price! Cheers!

Picked this up because I needed something for my 15 x 15 foot family room that had a small footprint and low cost. Also, I wanted my kids to be able to play DVD's with-out using my high end system.

This is a slim player, and the speakers are small as well. Koss has a good rep, but this unit (after checking the fine print in the manual) is actually made by Oritron.

The install was easy enough, everything is color-coded. The wires to the speakers could be longer. If you aren't going to set-up the front speakers and center channel very close to the DVD unit, you'll be paying a trip to the store for speaker wire!.
The sub-woofer could also use a longer wire. The on-screen instructions and calibrations are user-friendly; you can adjust items like distance from speakers and loudness of each speaker.

Also- if you have an old t.v. (with-out inputs), you'll have to buy an RF modulator.

So even though, the initial price for the Koss DVD player is low, you can have an additional outlay [money] for extra wires and the modulator.

Performance-wise, the system is not bad. Althought the unit only puts out 200 watts (over the 5.1), the sound is clear and strong enough. You're not going to be able to fill an auditorium with the sound, but it's adequate for a decent sized room.
The sub-woofer pumps out plenty of bass as well. There are the usual settings for stadium, hall, disco, live, etc that you can play around with as well.
We put the Lord of The Rings DVD on and it sounded great.
You might want to adjust the surround settings to fit your soundfield.

The fan is loud, but if you're not sitting on top of the unit, it's not noticeable.
The remote control has small buttons, but not microscopic.

The system takes a while to load a dvd. Also, if you want to load or remove a disk, the DVD defaults to on and you'll lose the picture on your tv screen. This aspect is absolutely maddening!

All in all, for the price, you get an integrated system that ties everything together nicely since it also has two aux inputs (so you can pump your tv and vcr through it as well).
As a secondary unit (that you could let your kids use as a knock-around system), it's fine. Just don't expect the quality of an [expensive] system.

This is pretty much a souped up dvd player. Take your standard DVD player and add: amplifier, speakers, am/fm tuner. And that's what you get extra for your extra [money]. The sound is good for the price. The MP3 player is frustrating. Yes it does play your songs, but they navigation is non-existant, neither is shuffle or other interesting (and standard) ways to control the playing of the songs. The DVD player features are same as you can find in any cheap player. For me the two real advantages of this system are: price, and having many components integrated under the same remote control.

This unit is very easy to set up and so far has worked great. The quality is much better than I expected. I live in an apartment and it sounds great in my living room. I even have to keep the woofer at half power. I suspect it is made by the same people that make oritron dvd players, as that is what my parents have and their remote is almost exactly the same, and the onscreen menus feature exactly the same graphics. It is definitly not manufactured by koss, they must outsource or license their name for it. But it still is an excellent system. I use it for the radio as well as cd playback. However every once in a while it will skip excessively with cd's, all I do is eject it, then re-insert it and it works perfectly. My friends pioneer does exactly the same thing. No, it does not have digital inputs, and it may not impress your audiophile friends, but it definitely does the trick especially for the price. I looked at several other dvd players/surround sound systems for around the same price and the quality was definitely not up to the level of this unit. I would recommend this to anyone not wanting to shell out XXX$ for a "name-brand" system.