Reviewing sound bars is especially difficult. Each person has his own preferences and expectations for audio quality and included features. What sounds great and meets the expectations of one person may be just the opposite for someone else. I initially wrote a glowing review of this ZVOX sound bar after listening to it for a few hours. It does indeed produce very good audio, however, after getting all of my components fully integrated with the sound bar and then attempting to adjust the sound to my liking, a couple of deliberate decisions in the design of the 430HSD have made me much less pleased with it. First of all, although the ZVOX430HSD includes two digital audio connections (1 optical and 1 coaxial) only one of those digital connections can be used. For example, I initially connected my Blu-ray player to the coaxial input and my DVR to the optical. I was not getting any sound from the DVR. A call to the nice folks at ZVOX confirmed that the two digital inputs are wired together in some fashion so that only one of them at a time passes a signal. You can't switch back and forth between them and you can't turn off the component connected to one digital input and then have the other digital input start to work. When you plug in the ZVOX for the first time, it recognizes the signal from whichever digital input is receiving a signal first. The other digital input is then silent. The only way to change which input is working is to unplug the ZVOX and then connect to the other digital input. Having always used an AV receiver in the past, I expected every input to work. In fact, the gentleman I spoke with at ZVOX expressed surprise that I wanted to use both digital inputs since most users connect everything to their TV and then connect one cable to the ZVOX, thus never running into the situation I described above. However, for my particular home theater setup and personal preference, the ability to use both digital inputs and not have to go through the TV for everything would work best.
The second design quirk concerns Phase Cue, ZVOX's virtual surround processing feature. I don't like the sound of any fake surround processing that I've heard. This includes Phase Cue on the ZVOX 430HSD. I had always intended to use the sound bar with Phase Cue turned off and just listen to the unprocessed audio through the sound bar's 4 speakers. It turns out, however, that if you turn the Phase Cue feature completely off, only the center channel speaker and subwoofer are active. The other two speakers do not output any sound at all! This was confirmed to me through another call to ZVOX. I didn't like being "forced" to use the virtual surround feature in order to have every speaker in the sound bar work. It was a lot of money to pay to only be able to listen to two out of the four speakers.
So, my sound bar experience is over. Reluctantly, the ZVOX is being returned and I'm going back to a nice 2.0 system consisting of a Denon receiver and large bookshelf speakers. I don't mean to bash the ZVOX. It is well made and will work well for many people in many situations. For my needs though, its just not quite the right answer.
The second design quirk concerns Phase Cue, ZVOX's virtual surround processing feature. I don't like the sound of any fake surround processing that I've heard. This includes Phase Cue on the ZVOX 430HSD. I had always intended to use the sound bar with Phase Cue turned off and just listen to the unprocessed audio through the sound bar's 4 speakers. It turns out, however, that if you turn the Phase Cue feature completely off, only the center channel speaker and subwoofer are active. The other two speakers do not output any sound at all! This was confirmed to me through another call to ZVOX. I didn't like being "forced" to use the virtual surround feature in order to have every speaker in the sound bar work. It was a lot of money to pay to only be able to listen to two out of the four speakers.
So, my sound bar experience is over. Reluctantly, the ZVOX is being returned and I'm going back to a nice 2.0 system consisting of a Denon receiver and large bookshelf speakers. I don't mean to bash the ZVOX. It is well made and will work well for many people in many situations. For my needs though, its just not quite the right answer.
