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Reviews and guides for all of the best all-in-one home cinema systems in the UK |
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Pioneer DCS-232 ReviewThe Pioneer DCS-232 may not be the best looking home cinema system on the market, but its certainly not ugly. Its speakers come with attractive sexy black covers, and the design of all of the units is shapely and modern. The DVD unit itself is exceptionally slim and pleasing, and its stylish black LCD and curved front would look fine under and big screen TV. The system can be set up in the standard 5.1 configuration, but for more space-constrained users Pioneer have also provided the option to fit the two outermost speakers on top of the two inner ones, saving space. To make up for the lack of audio emersion, Pioneer have added a special surround sound feature named Front Surround which emulates the surround effect by software audio enhancement. In terms of specifications the Pioneer DCS-232 does reasonably well. It supports Dolby Digital, DTS and ProLogic II sound modes, and can play back a good range of media including DVD, DVD-R, DVD-RW, SVCD, VCD, CD, CD-R, CD-RW, MP3/WMA and JPEG CD. The DCS-232 also supports DivX disk playback, which is rare for units around this price range. For hardware, the unit comes with a rather lowly 360W RMS amplifier and a built in AM/FM radio with 30 presets. The output from the Pioneer DCS-232 is RGB Scart, which is nice, but this is unfortunately not backed up by progressive scan video enhancement. There is also a phono audio in, but unfortunately no video in, so you can't connect your PC or games console directly to the system. Getting the system out of the box and setting it up couldn't really be easier. It defaults to a 5.1 configuration but changing it to Pioneer's Front Surround mode is also very straightforward. Once its set up it performs quite well. The video especially is superb and Philips have clearly put a lot of effort into it - it is crisp, vibrant and colourful and we didn't even miss the progressive scan. The sound was a bit of a disappointment, as to be expected for a system of this price range. The bass was far too pronounced and it took some fiddling to get it down to even acceptable levels. Even then the higher tones on the Pioneer DCS-232 were all but lost at anything but low volumes. Sometimes this was so pronounced it was to the detrement of being able to hear dialogue clearly. Next we tried out the Pioneer DCS-232's Front Surround mode, which definitely did not quite live up to its name. It certainly made the sound more emersive than the audio from a standard 3 speaker system, but it was not comparible to full 5.1 surround sound, and it would seem pointless to dish out on all of this technology and only make use of a little bit of it. This is definitely an added bonus that we could live without. 
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Conclusion The Pioneer DCS-232 is on the surface a good home cinema system, but it lacks on key features especially sound quality, which is too bassy and loses definition in the higher tones including dialogue. The lack of video in makes it rather inflexible for use with other devices and its added-value bonus, the Front Surround enhancement, is rather pointless and disappointing. On the plus side it does produce great visuals and comes with good media and decoder support, but for a real home cinema experience we'd recommend that you look elsewhere. Resources |