Product Description

The Sony HT-DDW790 home theater system is a perfect complement to your TV and DVD player to setup a great sounding home theater. 800 watts (RMS) AV receiver and 5.1 ch. speaker systems completes the package. Also, rest assured that you will not need to spend hours configuring the system so that it sounds right. With its auto calibration feature (microphone included), configuring the 5.1 ch. speakers to create an optimum sound field for your listening environment is automatic.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21867 in Consumer Electronics
• Color: Silver
• Brand: Sony
• Model: HTDDW790
• Dimensions: 11.00 pounds

Features

• 5.1 channel home theater system with 800 Watts of total power
• 8" 135-Watt powered subwoofer
• Portable audio enhancer with front audio input
• Digital cinema automatic calibration
• Dolby Digital, Pro Logic II, and DTS decoding

Amazon.com Product Description
Fill the room with quality sound from all angles with the Sony HT-DDW790 Component Home Theater System. The perfect companion to your television and DVD player is this six-speaker setup with its monstrous total output of 800 watts. And don't worry about wasting your time with calibration. An automatic feature adjust the levels for you, creating an optimum sound field for movie watching. The 8" subwoofer provides deep bass with dramatic effect and Dolby® Pro Logic® II decoding sends specific audio to individual speakers, delivering an incredibly realistic listening environment.

Customer Reviews

Great value! Best cheap surround sound i've owned yet.
I've always had cheap surround sound systems. Usually i'll get one as a gift for xmas or something, over the coarse of a year it'll break just in time for someone to get me another cheapie the following xmas. Well, I finally invested a healthy sum of money into a 61 inch DLP televesion, so I figured... what better to go with my new TV then another cheapie surround sound system! (but this time I would buy it). My previous system had a couple busted speakers, so it wasn't worth much. I had limited funds because I spent so much cash on the TV, so I ended up buying this.

I believe people are being too critical about this system. People seem to expect a flagship quality system when they buy a system that costs less then 1/2 as much as a decent receiver alone.

I saw this system at Best Buy for a mere $150.00. Perfect. They had a model on the floor so I gave it a listen, was impressed and decided to buy it. I was happy that it came with an actual receiver rather then a crappy DVD combo type of deal (experience shows me that these always go faulty).

Setup was a snap, much easier then i'm used to thanks to the handy mic that comes with the system that helps your receiver automatically calibrate your speaker settings. I was happy with what I heard at the store, but I was blown away when I heard this in my own home (no sound pollution, like at the store). For a $150.00 system this sounds great! The audio is mostly clean, bass is pulse-pounding, mids and highs are good. So how does it compare to the $6,000.00 high end system my buddy has? Well, obviously not even close.

Here's what you can expect with this system:
The sound is mostly clean. The mids and highs are good, but someone seeking perfection may be a bit disappointed. Don't expect eye-blinking highs and super-rich mids. The bass is surprisingly powerful, but at higher volumes you will get "bass belching". The bass does thump pretty well but this bass module is passive so you wont get those strong soul-shaking bass thumps that you hear in high end systems. Worth mentioning is the form-factor of this system, well the speakers anyways. The speakers are nice and small, making this system discrete. The speakers have a nice feel to them, they don't feel like super cheap speakers. The receiver isn't as attractive because it's quite large and lacks substance because the buttons are very tiny - there's a lot of empty space.

So there are some issues with this system, why did I give it 5 stars? Well, first off, these issues are to be expected. One reviewer said that sony cut corners, I say - duh! Of course if you're going to build a complete 5.1 surround system including a receiver and price it around $150.00 then you're going to cut corners. Anyways, it deserves 5 stars because this is the best cheapie 5.1 system i've ever owned. I went in expecting crud and ended up with something that actually sounds pretty darn good! My movies are very immersive and my music sounds pretty good. That's all I need right now.

Pretty good for a simple setup
This unit has everything I need. I have a pretty basic system in a one bedroom apartment, and it does a great job of filling the room with sound. The digital inputs in particular sound wonderful. It's not a high end system by any means but I think it's a good value for the money and works for small or medium sized rooms. My favorite feature is the sub, which seems bigger than it should be for a system of this size, and shakes my floor pretty well.

As other reviewers noted there are only 3 RCA inputs, but it also has coaxial and optical inputs (as well as the iPod jack in the front). I hooked the DVD player up with coaxial and my Xbox 360 through the optical, leaving only the TV and PS2 to be hooked up with RCAs.

Calibrating the speakers with the included microphone was really easy, but I still had to tinker with it. In particular the auto calibration does not recognize the sub, which I found to be too loud on it's default setting. Using a calibration program and doing it manually might produce better results.

The only real disappointment I have with it is that the (incredibly thin gauge) wires are fixed into the speakers. I have to run wire around the perimeter of my room, and then splice it with the wire fixed to the speaker.

Save your money
First, let me say that this system is allright (hence, three stars). It has some nice features -- like the automatic setup, and the different surround sound modes. But honestly, you are so much better off dropping an extra $100 or getting an "open box" special at this price, that you really should not buy this system.

Here are the flaws, as I see them:

1. No built-in DVD. Normally I prefer to have a separate DVD player for scalability and to avoid any signal interference within the unit. But after comparison shopping, it seems like the systems with a DVD player offer a lot better value. They give you the same sound quality without necessarily costing more. And some have really nice built-in DVD players with 1080p upscaling, Divx compatibility, or 5-disc selector carousels.

2. Paucity of inputs. There are only three standard inputs here. That might barely be enough right now, but it doesn't offer you any room to grow. I've never seen another system with so few inputs. You need one for your TV, one for you DVD player, one for your Ipod dock and.. oops! I guess there's no satelite radio for you.

3. Sound quality. Like I said, the sound is alright. But it's just ok. Sort of passable. I wouldn't really want to listen to music on this system -- except maybe just as background, easy listening or something. It's missing the middle range and sounds canned. If you compare it to a similar system for about $100 more, you will see what I mean. I'm sure it's fine for movies and TV, but why buy a system like this if you can't use it for everything.

4. Wires and set up. The wires are fixed to the speakers. That means if you need a long wire to run around door frames or along the perimeter of the room, you will need to do some splicing. It would be preferable to just have speaker wire inputs and one big spool of wire that you cut to suit your needs. The speakers are built so that they can be hung from a screw drilled into the wall, making for easy mounting -- but they don't include any kind of bracket to point and angle them toward the sweetspot.

5. Appearance. The pieces don't really look like they belong together when you see them in person. The reciever is a tasteful brushed stainless, but the speakers are silver plastic, and the subwoofer is black particle board. The speakers are compact, but the reciever is full-sized, and the subwoofer is somewhere in-between. It doesn't really look like a set.

Overall, it's really not a bad little system. It's a quality Sony product and it sounds nice for movies and TV. But it offers you no versatility or room to grow. (And if you're purchasing surround sound, you probably want more than that.) So save your money and when you have another $100 or so go buy something that won't have noticeable shortcomings right away. You deserve better than this product.