Home Theater Reviews

I'm looking for some reviews of a few pieces of HT equipment. I can't seem to find a nice site that has a substantial amount of information to offer.

Tony, you've mentioned HomeTheaterSpot several times, but I have a major problem with their site: it is impossible to view past reviews of PRODUCTS. If you click on their reviews page it only has DVD movie reviews. Judging by the fact that there are product reviews on the front page, I'm sure they must have done them in the past...

So basically, if there is a site out there that is the equivalent of dpreview, I'd love to hear about it. Thanks...

Right, the SPoT's forums are the only useful thing I find there.

I don't have a good index of reviews, although he ones at www.hometheaterhifi.com I trust. I have spent a lot of time poring over their Progressive-Scan DVD shootout documents, very enlightening stuff in there, they seem to be the only ones who take a really critical look at how the decoders handle the deinterlacing.

As Tony said, www.hometheaterhifi.com is far and away the best for DVD players and anything Stacey Spears writes there is worth reading. Their other reviews are a mixed bag.

www.cnet.com has actually become pretty good at reviewing the low end and mid-fi gear. They used to be terrible but the reviews I've read recently seem credible.

For higher end gear you can read the archives at www.guidetohometheater.com.

There are also the consumer review sites like www.audioreview.com and www.epinions.com. Some of the reviews are helpful and some are useless. The challenge is to figure out which people know what they are talking about.

Although they don't have a lot of home theater gear, www.consumersearch.com is a worthwhile site. They attempt to intelligently collate and summarize all of the professional and consumer reviews they can find for a topic.

-Dylan

Thanks guys. Basically, I'm looking into buying the Sony STR-DE985 A/V receiver. It looks like a good unit, but my first source of opinion, which you mentioned Dylan, Cnet didn't have a review for that particular model, which is somewhat suprising.

There's one review on audioreview.com, and it's a positive one, but I prefer professional reviews.

Oh well, I still like the unit, so I might try and get it anyway.