New System Cuts Home Theaters Down to Size

Here’s what you can do with that checklist of reasons you haven’t bought a home theater: Remove list from pocket, insert into shredder, start shredder.

All those home-theater worries--too big, too expensive, too many components, too hard to set up--no longer apply.

Sony’s DVD Dream System, which arrives in stores later this month, is an ultra-compact solution. It’s the first undersized system that combines a DVD/CD player, a six-channel amplifier, a Dolby Digital/DTS processor and an AM/FM tuner in a single component not much bigger than the seat warmer you take to a football game.

Combining that with five pint-size speakers, each small enough to fit in the thigh pocket of your favorite cargo pants, and a stubby sub woofer leaves only a television from completing the home-theater picture.

The system comes with most of the necessary wiring, color-coded for easy installation. And the retail price, about $600, won’t break the piggy bank.

The Dream System, or DAV-300 as it’s formally known, does everything that the bigger, more expensive home theaters do except reach sound levels high enough to pound against your chest cavity.

*

The Dream System is too civilized for that. It won’t blow you out of the chair, but it is a real home theater suitable for smaller rooms. It doesn’t discriminate, either. This slick little system will catch the eye of young singles living in small apartments and students in a dorm just as it will prove a godsend for technophobes like Grandma and Grandpa.

Here’s the tale of the tape: The silver box of electronics is about 15 inches square and not quite 3 inches high. The speakers are essentially 4-inch cubes. The sub woofer, the monster of the family, is 14 inches high, 14 deep and about 7 wide.

If you lifted the entire system, you’d be holding only about 28 pounds. Just add any TV up to 32 inches, and the home theater is complete.

Connections are the simplest in the history of the world, or close. The supplied speaker wires are color-coded, joined by metal tubing that is pushed into the appropriate slot on the back of the electronics component.

After that, there’s only a single connection to the back of your TV (either by a supplied analog RCA or by S-video cable for superior picture quality).

You can also connect the Dream System to a VCR, a different sub woofer, a digital satellite receiver or, via a digital optical input, either a MiniDisc or CD-R deck.

*

Setting up the speaker parameters, using the remote control to input information that will optimize the surround-sound effect, is just as easy. And once you’re set up, you’ll never have to worry about setting the machine to the appropriate format, depending on the disc. Leaving the Sound Field setting in Auto Format Decode tells the system to pick up the signal automatically from the disc, whether it’s Dolby Digital, DTS (Digital Theater Systems, a six-channel rival of Dolby Digital), Dolby Pro Logic or two-channel stereo.

How Sony fit all the electronics into such a tiny box is anyone’s guess. But a necessary compromise was limiting the size of the amplifier. Thirty watts into each channel is sufficient, given the speakers’ size and highly efficient, one-driver design.

The weakness here is the sub woofer, which is incapable of reproducing special-effects low frequencies convincingly. Maybe that’s why Sony supplied an extra sub woofer output--those who want more dynamic explosions can upgrade to a more potent sub woofer.

But given its size and cost, nothing comes close to the Dream System. By the end of the year, it won’t be alone in the compact, plug-and-play home theater category. And prices, surely, will drop even more.