A Must Buy - Entry Level HT System. Review on Onkyo HTS 3200

Its was almost a year now ive been wanting to buy a home theatre. As usual the hunt started at Vijay sales, croma etc. The ads in papers by them for Philips home theatre for only 6000/- lured me to venture out to the shop & check it out.

What I realized is that these are not actually home theatres but dvd players with 5.1 channel output & speakers, which in simplified language means that you cannot attach another equipment to it also you cant get the sound from you TV output to the system.

I checked the Sony home theatres in the range of 15000/- to 25000/- as well which to be honest looked really good but again the same issue of lack of connectivity options & sony has a problem of not playing all pirated discs.

With already a DVD player lying at home I realized that DVD player would be a waste. Then my eyes landed on a Home theatre of Onkyo HTS 3200 on display, I always thought these HT systems with amplifier, speakers & all the works cost a bomb till I saw the price tag of 25999/- along with a dvd player free.

This got me interested & asked for a demo. I was amazed at what this entry level HT could do. The demo cds played on the system sounded awesome & I decided this was the home theatre I would want to buy. I also tried the Yamaha 292 HT system but somewhere something lacked in comparison.

As usual no decision of mine is complete without a thorough research of the product on google. 90% of the reviewers & users recommended the product but also reminded us that it was an entry level HT system.

So finally on making up my mind, I walked into a Vijay sales outlet. The Onkyo HTS 3200 was on offer for 25, 999/- with a free dvd player. I asked them to give it to me without the player & reduce the cost which after a lot of haggling got it reduced by Rs. 2000/-. Delivery was promised next day.

Since it was a Saturday I was at home awaiting for the package come. It finally arrived at 5 pm, a big box almost 3 ft tall weighing 25Kgs!

A nice black shiny receiver was the first to come out of the box, it was heavy to be honest. Then a pair of front speakers, a centre speaker, pair of rear speaker & finally the sub woofer. Alongwith the box came a manual, a quick setup brochure, color coded wires, rubber pads, am antennae& fm antennae wire.

Please note that you are expected to setup the system on your own, Vijay sales will only deliver it. Or probably wait for the Onkyo rep to visit your home for the demo and get it fixed then.

Obviously I had no patience to wait and decide to set it up right then. The setup is really simple and the quick setup guides is really helpful & so are the color coded wires & speaker connectors.

Just use the color coding to match and setup the speakers. The speaker wires supplied with the unit don’t look of high quality & I think is a must to upgrade them as soon as possible to have high sound quality. Also the length of wires is short especially for the rear speakers so you will eventually end up buying speaker wires from retail outlet at least for the rear speakers.

You do not get any AV cables along with the set, so you will have to buy cables to connect your dvd player & TV to the Onkyo system. Since I just had one composite RCA cable(the one with Yellow, red & white connectors) which I used to connect my dvd player to the tv. I used the same connecting the 2 audio outputs(Red & White) from the dvd player to the Onkyo dvd analog input and connected the video directly from Dvd out to TV Video in.

Tuned the FM channels & was ready to go.

I already had the new avatar dvd which I picked up for 500/- waiting to be inaugurated! I loaded it in the dvd player & was ready for an cinematic experience.

To be honest I really didn’t expect the kind of output I got from this system…simply awesome. The sub woofer being passive(its powered through the amplifier) was thundering without getting distorted with deep bass that I could feel through my sofa. The centre speaker delivered clean dialogues and the surrounds did quite good too. Overall was a great experience watching the movie & by the end of it I was extremely happy with my decision & money was well spent. Now I just need to buy proper connectors to hook up my dvd player & tv to the HTS 3200 & do some tuning equalizer settings to the system to actually experience the real quality of this Onkyo Home theatre System.

A few important things to consider:

For a living room or bedroom which is not too big this system is good enough, (my living room is 12 ft x 16 ft) for bigger rooms you would probably need a higher output system.

For movies I need to turn up the volume to 50 – 55 for it to sound loud(Max volume is 75) though its not really an issue, for FM or TV you can get loud sound by turning the volume to 35

Use a Component cable to connect your DVD player to the TV or HTS 3200 for better picture quality( You can get one at lamington road for Rs.250/-), if you have HDMI then of course use HDMI just remember the HTS 3200 has HDMI pass through so you will have to connect your audio separately.

Connect your DVD audio through coaxial audio cable or optical cable. Without this you will not be able to enjoy the Dolby 5.1 on the system.

Lastly buy some good quality speaker wires for your speakers as the only supplied with the system are not that great.

for Technical details visit https://onkyoindia.com