Harman Kardon DVD 50 User manual

62 JUNE 2002 SOUND & VISION
PHOTOS BY TONY CORDOZA
When you can buy a five-disc
changer with all the best fea-
tures of a fine CD player and
a top-shelf, progressive-scan
DVD player for less than
$600, why would you need
two separate components?You don’t. Har-
man Kardon’s new DVD 50 does it all — it
even plays CDs with MP3 files, making it
potentially a 60-hour music player.
The DVD 50 is laid out along classic
carousel-changer lines, with a single disc
drawer across most of its width. All of its
front-panel disc-selection and transport
controls are sensibly located above the
drawer so they remain accessible when it’s
open. (Don’t laugh: I’ve seen changers with
controls underneath the drawer.) The con-
trol labels, though tiny, are all illuminated,
which helps a lot. Another smart touch is
that each disc well inside the drawer has
number labels on both sides flanking the
disc cutout, eliminating confusion about
which well is which.
Around back, the DVD 50 has the ex-
pected composite/S-video plus stereo and
coaxial/optical digital audio jacks. There’s
also a trio of wideband component-video
outputs. If your TV has a progressive-scan
display, which usually (but not always)
means a high-definition set, these outputs
can be set up for progressive-scan rather
than interlaced video, yielding a smoother,
more filmlike picture.
The player’s setup menus are quite clear
and self-explanatory, and if you want more
information, the owner’s manual is excep-
tionally complete and detailed. Since sur-
round sound decoding is left for your re-
ceiver or processor to do, setup options are
mostly limited to the usual choices regard-
ing screen shape (standard or widescreen),
bitstream default (you can, for example,
restrict DTS output if your receiver can’t
decode it), parental lockout, and so on.
It’s unusual, but certainly not unheard of,
that you have to set the DVD 50’s video
output to either component- or composite/
S-video —and if the former, to progressive
on or off. (My everyday player provides a
progressive-scan component-video output
and both standard video formats simulta-
neously.) If you’re viewing the setup menu
from the S-video output, when you switch
to component output, the screen goes blank,
with no menu display to help diagnose and
fix the problem. You have to change your
TV’s input to progressive to reacquire a
picture. I learned that the hard way, muck-
ing about in the setup menu before reading
the manual.
On the video front, I have nothing but
praise for this Harman Kardon carousel.
Watching Denzel Washington’s Oscar-win-
ning performance as a bad cop in Training
KEY FEATURES
●Component-video output switchable
between interlaced and progressive-scan
●Plays CD-R/RW discs and CD-R/RWs or
CD-ROMs with MP3 files
●Can replace up to four discs while one is
playing
●Decodes HDCD-encoded CDs
OUTPUTS composite-, component-, and
S-video; coaxial and optical digital audio;
stereo analog audio
DIMENSIONS 17
1
⁄ 2 inches wide, 5 inches
high, 16 inches deep
WEIGHT 12
7
⁄ 8 pounds
PRICE $649
MANUFACTURER Harman Kardon,
Dept. S&V, 250 Crossways Park Dr.,
Woodbury, NY 11797; www.harmankardon
.com; 800-422-8027
test report BY DANIEL KUMIN
Harman Kardon
DVD 50 Five-Disc DVD Changer
fast facts

64 JUNE 2002 SOUND & VISION
Day on DVD via the progressive-scan out-
put, I saw a sharp, defined picture with out-
standing color integrity and range of con-
trast. The image quality was terrific, with
finely detailed shadows in the countless
scenes shot inside the Monte Carlo where
about half the movie seems to take place.
The speeding car passes Denzel and Ethan
Hawke’s faces through a myriad of differ-
ent lighting conditions and back-
grounds; the DVD 50 showed
every one to excellent advan-
tage. And its slo-mo scan-
ning was as smooth and
steady as on any player
I’ve used.
I was unable to see any
difference between the pro-
gressive-scan component-
video output of the Har-
man Kardon player and
that of my reference pro-
gressive-scan player —
a widely respected sin-
gle-disc model that
costs around three
times as much. I did
an A/B comparison
using three DVDs of
which I had duplicate
copies, including the visu-
ally stunning Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon. The same held true even with test
patterns from Ovation Software’s Avia
DVD. In short, I simply saw no difference
between the players, which means that the
DVD 50’s progressive-scan video perfor-
mance is top-shelf. It should perform no
less well —within the limitations of the
signal formats —if you use standard inter-
laced component-, composite, or S-video
connections.
On the audio side, the only issue I exam-
ined was the quality of stereo CD playback,
though most buyers will probably use a
digital link, which means they’ll be listen-
ing to the digital-to-analog conversion per-
formed by their receiver or surround proc-
essor. Nonetheless, the DVD 50 was an
equally excellent CD player. Stereo play-
back of known, high-resolution recordings
was clean, detailed, and quiet.
Most of what’s left to talk about here are
the kinds of things that distinguish most
DVD players from each other these days:
functions, features, and ease of use. Fortu-
nately, the Harman Kardon DVD 50 has
plenty to offer in these areas.
It played every CD-R and CD-RW that I
tried without a hiccup, including those
with MP3 files. It offers a useful onscreen
display for MP3 discs, showing an alpha-
betized list of filenames, though it “flat-
tened”the file structure, at least on the
discs I burned, showing all files at the same
level regardless of any heirarchical folders.
You can program a playlist of up to 60
MP3 tracks, in any order, which is cool.
Unfortunately, they can’t be from more
than one disc. And you can’t play MP3
tracks in random order from either one disc
or multiple discs. That said, since the DVD
50 takes nearly a minute to initialize each
MP3 disc —like all other MP3-capable
DVD players I’ve encountered —not hav-
ing the options of multidisc MP3 program-
ming or random play makes sense.
As if in compensation, there’s an unus-
ually flexible shuffle-play menu for audio
CDs (or DVDs —but does anybody ever
actually play DVD chapters at random?).
You get a choice of single-disc shuffle, all-
discs shuffle (one disc at a time), or a mode
that plays two randomly selected tracks
from Disc A, then two from Disc B, then
two from C, and so on until all tracks from
all discs have been played, without repeats
—pretty clever. Track/chapter program-
ming is similarly flexible.You can program
a playlist with up to 22 steps from any or
all discs in any order, freely mixing stan-
dard CDs, DVDs, and evenVideo CDs (but
not CDs containing MP3 files).
Programmability for DVD playback
may appeal to the rare music-video addict,
but I suspect most people will use the DVD
50 as a CD changer for music and as a sin-
gle-disc player, at least most of the time,
for movies and videos. On the audio side,
it worked like any good changer. Disc-to-
disc access time was about par (a maxi-
mum of 17 seconds), but track-skip time
was under a second and response to play
and pause commands was equally snappy.
Overall, the ergonomic design is very
good. The onscreen operation bar (nearly
universal these days), with icons that give
you access to all the important modes and
displays, worked well. More important, the
test report
HIGH POINTS
Excellent progressive-scan
video performance.
Smooth fast and slow video scanning.
Useful onscreen controls for
DVD, CD, and MP3 playback.
Nice remote control.
LOW POINTS
No direct disc selection on remote.
Slow access to high-speed search.
The Harman Kardon DVD 50 provided
Oscar-worthy image quality for Denzel
Washington’s bad cop in Training Day.
DVD-VIDEO PERFORMANCE
Measurements were made from a variety of
DVD test discs, all through the player’s
composite-video output except as noted.
Maximum-white level error....................+1 IRE
Setup level....................+7.5/0 IRE (switchable)
Luminance frequency response
(re level at 1 MHz)
at 4 and 5 MHz.....................................–0.26 dB
at 6 and 6.75 MHz (DVD limit)..............–0.63 dB
Differential gain............................................2%
Differential phase..........................................2°
Onscreen horizontal resolution........540 lines
In-player letterboxing................................poor
Component-output level error (interlaced
mode, Y/P
r
/P
b
) ...................+4.85/–1.67/–1.59%
Component-output timing error (interlaced
mode, P
r
/P
b
) .......................+4/+4 nanoseconds
in the lab
The DVD 50’s stereo audio output (figures
omitted for space) was very good to excellent
all around. The one curiosity was its analog
output level, which at 1 volt was 6 dB shy of the
de facto 2-volt standard, but this should have
little or no effect on real-world dynamic range.
Performance through its composite-video
output was slightly better than average thanks
to the flatness of its luminance frequency
response, which always translates to more
accurate reproduction of very fine image detail.
Its component-video output was also unusually
accurate in level and timing. It could play record-
able DVD-R and rewritable DVD-RW discs
recorded in standard DVD-Video mode as well
as DVD+RW discs. —D.K. and David Ranada

DVD 50 comes with an excellent remote
control. It’s unusually well laid out, with
legible graphics and sensible key spacing,
and all of the buttons are backlit, a rarity
among dedicated remotes.
Nonetheless, I still have a couple of
gripes. First, while the DVD 50 lets you se-
lect any of the five loaded discs from the
front panel, there’s no corresponding direct
access on the remote, only the Disc Skip
button, which works in only one direction.
So if you want to change from, say, Disc 2
to Disc 1 using the remote, you must press
Disc Skip four times, waiting for each disc
in turn to load before pressing it again. The
process takes precisely one entire, intermin-
able minute —what were they thinking?
Second, the DVD 50 has an interesting
audible fast-search feature for CD play-
back. It offers the same 2
X ,4 X , and 8 X
search speeds in both directions as it does
for DVDs —but in 2
X forward mode, it
actually doubles the sampling rate, deliver-
ing an Alvin-and-the-Chipmunks rendition
of the program. This is really pretty cool
(and very unusual), but the downside is that
it takes a full 4 seconds to call up fast-
search and seconds more to step up to each
faster speed, as you must do to reach the
maximum setting. It required some 8 sec-
onds to get to 8
X —an eternity after the
newness wears off.
Otherwise, this changer has all of the
modes and functions you might expect, in-
cluding repeat for a single disc, a track, all
loaded discs, or a user-defined (A-B) seg-
ment. I particularly liked the onscreen pro-
gramming display, though I’d have liked it
even better if you could modify a playlist
while it’s active (the player must be in stop
mode) or if it used CD Text for onscreen
display of disc and track titles. There’s also
a nifty Bookmark system that let’s you store
up to nine reference points per CD or DVD
for rapid access. Bookmarks remain as long
as you don’t replace the disc in the player
or open the drawer when the changer is in
the stop mode. What a great feature for se-
rious music or film study!
Me, I don’t have to rely on just one opti-
cal-disc player (and I won’t admit how
many are kicking around the studio). But if
I did, I think I could live happily with Har-
man Kardon’s DVD 50. It has everything I
really need —most important, truly excel-
lent audio and video performance (if not
DVD-Audio playback), and a well-designed
remote —along with a good supply of use-
ful features. S&V