Home > Consumer Reviews > Philips HTS3357 - 5.1 ch Tallboy Multi-Region Capable - DVD Home Cinema System - With 1080i Upscaling - Black

I placed an order for this item late yesterday afternoon, with a first-class delivery date two days later. Imagine my surprise and delight when my order arrived this morning, a full day earlier than estimated!

Setting up my new DVD home theatre system was simplicity and the superb sound and picture quality enhancements surpassed even my expectations of what to expect from such a reasonably priced system.

Overall I am absolutely delighted with my purchase and highly impressed with the service from Amazon and Parcelforce. Especially as the same item in two major electrical retail stores is being sold for at least £30 more than I paid for my system!

well after reading some of the other reviews and the negatives about the sound I wasn't sure about ordering, but I took a chance anyway and boy did it pay off.
the sound is perfect, clear and it puts you right at the heart of the action, i really thought that i was in the middle of a thunderstorm, great stuff.The picture is crystal clear and the controls are great, with one slight problem the TV we are using is also a Phillips so the handsets are almost identical and one tends to operate the other, we probably just need to read the user guide.

but this system gets the full reccomendation from me.

Great sound, good picture. Plays your CDs, MP3s on disc or through the ipod; and best of all (for me anyway) can handle divx and xvid either on disc or on a USB!!

If you are looking for a Home Theatre system that can play pretty much anything, is powerful enough to cope with even the most ridiculous volume and can upscale your DVD's at an affordable price then buy this!

My only criticisms would be the speakers are hard wired. I wanted to use the tall boy speakers in the front (which does have loads of cord but are for the rear accoring to the manufacturer) and the smaller satellite speakers in the rear (which as these were for the front don't have much cord), so the smaller speakers are a bit tight on cord length as a result....

This is my very first set of speakers I have ever owned and they are absolutly stunning. Very clear and surrounding sound that is just amazing and is particularly good in producing low sounds. I don't know why people say "it's good value for money" because these speakers are eaysily as good as a 500pound (My pound sign is broke) system so I think its a bit better than 'good'.

The picture quality of the DVD player isn't as good as my XBox 360 though. The DVD player comes with a scart lead so I bought a HDMI cable (the ones that are recommended for you to buy with this system), but I could only get sound on DVDs and not normal TV or game consoles so im going to have to stick with a scart lead.

And if you're buying this system so you can get 5.1 cinema suround sound for normal TV, freeview, Sky box, Virgin TV, XBox 360s PS2, PS3 (like me) then get it! Alls you do is press 'TV' on the remote and there you go, cinema sound for watching Sky Sports or Call of Duty! You don't even have to plug anything directly into the actual system ither.

Set up was very easy, as everyone is saying it's colour coded. eg: the purple cable goes in the purple slot and you've hooked up you're subwoofer(all the cables plug into the DVD player). Also the cables are very long (the rear speakers have longer cables than the frontal speakers, which makes sense).

Oh and just a few more minor things. The system is well packed, it comes with a 3 pin UK plug, its a multi region system and you can hook up iPods & MP4s as well as MP3s to the system.

Thanks for reading! Now buy the system!

Edit:
There is a very noticable hiss when the volume is at or around full blast (30-40) but you've got to be ither deff or an idiot to turn it up that high. But at a low setting, even 0 there is no hiss what so ever, honestly! I have mine on at around 7-15 and that still manages to shake the floor :O.
Another thing, which can be very annoying is that some of the buttons on the remote sometimes don't work. I pressed Select at a DVD menu so I could watch the film but nothing happened. I thought it might be the remote itself but I pressed the volume button and that worked fine. I had to get up and press the button on the DVD player! That's totaly unacceptable. This is also the case for 'setup', 'display' and other buttons that I can't remember.
If you know the answer to my 'setup' button problem please tell me!

Still there only minor problems.

One thing that nobody has mentioned is trying to setup via a sky+/ v+ box as the only output on the dvd amp is coaxial and the sky+/ v+ box is optical so to get 5.1 sound you have to mess about buying a coaxial and optical cable along with a optical to coaxial converter, thats what I did and the sound is so much better than a standard set of audio leads from aux.
As more and more people struggle with this now that people are getting hd/sky+/v+ and have this home theatre system