If your HDTV’s screen ever hooked up with its speakers on Facebook or Match.com, the relationship would never last.
A million-dollar picture with 10-cent sound? That’s Pamela Anderson-Kid Rock territory.
This is obviously a marriage of convenience. If you need counseling on finding sound more compatible with your high-definition picture, start with the new phenomenon called the soundbar. It’s a single, elongated package of multiple speakers, mountable on a wall, designed to complement today’s flat-panel HDTVs.
The iLive IHT3817DT is more than a mouthpiece for your television. It also has an iPod dock, hidden behind a motorized drawer, and an AM/FM radio. The iLive (www.ilive.net) is not quite 3-feet long, 10 inches high and 7 inches deep, a rugged 17 pounds and loaded with a six-pack of speaker drivers. Step up to the soundbar’s black metal grille and you’re looking at essentially two speakers, each with a 1-inch tweeter for high frequencies and a 4-inch midbass driver that’s supplemented by a 5-inch driver for slightly lower frequencies.
But minus any bass, the iLive still creates a balanced, clean and robust sound that doesn’t distort significantly at higher volumes. After adding a full-size remote with comprehensive iPod controls, four audio-video connections, an LCD display built into the iPod dock’s drawer, a clock-timer and headphone jack, this becomes a full-service system that retails for $300 but is available for significantly less ($195 at amazon.com).
The iLive two-channel analog system is such an improvement over a television’s built-in speakers that it will leave you wondering how much better true digital surround sound can be. (Answer: Much, much better, but the iLive costs less and doesn’t take up much room.)
When used with an HDTV, the iLive’s lower-quality composite and S-Video connections are substandard.
Getting around that was simple. I connected the Oppo DV-981HD DVD player directly to a 60-inch Vizio plasma via HDMI, then ran analog audio cables from the Oppo to the iLive. This way, the video in the action movie “Firewall” was incredibly sharp and the explosions, screeching tires and hand-to-hand combat played out just as vividly.
My Nano sounded so good through the iLive that I would still recommend this soundbar even as an iPod-only speaker system. Trio Mediaeval’s meditative “Folk Songs” showed the iLive nuance. Trisha Yearwood’s “Thinkin’ About You,” played at full volume, revealed its brawn. It reached 82 decibels in a small room, not enough to chip the paint off the walls, but with barely noticeable distortion at full volume. That’s an accomplishment in a lower-priced system.
The AM/FM radio was merely average, worse when lower volumes revealed a steady hum. iLive says hard-drive iPods, like the Nano, cause the hum with any docking system that includes a radio. The hum remained, though, even with the Nano removed.
For those who do not own an iPod, the iLive is still an excellent one-piece system that will add new sonic life to DVD movies and television programming while acting as an exotic boombox for your CDs. For less than $200 (if you shop around), the iLive and your HDTV will build a long-term relationship.
