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
