Ironically, I wanted a sound system for my big screen that was hassle-free and didn’t involve a lot of wiring; I’m guessing we will be moving in the near future and I didn’t want the bother of wiring the house. So I selected this system as hopefully being totally compatible with my existing Sony TV and Blue Ray DVD. The item was delivered well before it was promised. I then hooked it up, first mounting a wooden cleat to the studs on the wall above the TV — got good sound from my Blue Ray, and the FM tuner — but NO sound at all from the TV. I called Sony Customer Support — a nightmare experience: first support person clueless and not very fluent in English, he finally said he’d “put me on hold for the second level of support for two minutes.” After an hour and ten minutes of listening to muzak and promos, I finally hung up. A second call later in the day to them was also of absolutely no help. After they went over my connections with me, they blandly suggested either HDMI cable issues (I swapped them out with 2 extras I had – made no difference) or that I somehow had a defective cable box. They “doubted” it was the unit. They did inform me (as I had already guessed) that despite the clearly drawn diagram in the documentation, the HDMI lead from the cable box actually needed to go directly to the receiver subwoofer, which of course made complete sense, but wasn’t what was shown.

I decided I had a defective unit and returned it to Amazon. Fabulous Amazon service as usual – they provided me with a prepaid mailing label and quickly delivered a new unit (I’m very stubborn and wanted this system to work for me), this time providing me with Amazon one-day expedited service. I then painstakingly read the documentation for installation TWICE before carefully hooking up the system. The instructions clearly show that the provided optical cable should connect the subwoofer/receiver to the TV’s optical port. Again I got the very same result – no sound from the TV. As I was about to pack up the item and return it a second time in total disgust, I took a hard look at my Amino HDMI cable box and noticed an optical cable port on it. So what the heck, I plugged one end of the optical cable into that and the other into the TV and bingo – sound magically emanated from the TV.

But my success was short lived. The next morning the SECOND UNIT now failed to deliver television sound — just like the first. And I tried every variation of connection in the documentation. Sony Support sent me a connection recommendation I tried (HDMI cables only with no optical or RCA jack connections whatsoever, which is NOT one of the connection schemes shown in the instructions) but that didn’t work either. Bottom line: both of these units worked well for a few hours and then, when I turned them on the next day, failed to deliver any television sound ever again. An extremely frustrating experience. And I’m old enough to remember when Sony was synonymous with quality. So CAVEAT EMPTOR folks!

The sound of this thing is not very good. It sounds a little better than regular tv speakers. I expected a lot more for $400. I like how it is easy to hook everything into it and that it is easy to install. The sound quality on this thing was a real letdown. If I could do it over I would of bought something else.