Received my 4300 yesterday.
Requirements:
Surround in small space and also odd shaped room - 3.2m x 10m. Tv/unit placed towards one end along long side.
Unit needed to fit over my tv stand which sticks out and is 2.5cm ish high (tv sits on side unit).
Wife wants to listen to music/radio without having tv on. Kids otherwise want to watch tv all the time.
Unit needs to be children friendly.
Sub needs to be flexibly placed and out of way of playing children.
Sounds has to be alot better than my inbuilt Panasonic speakers and overall good for music and film.
So..
It arrived. Huge box but that's what you get for this shaped item. Everything easily placed as just two units plus bits/wires etc. Fitted perfectly over tv stand once i pushed on the two raisers.
Had problem getting sub to connect, but had something to do with order of plugin. Have loads of other close by 2.4ghz wireless items, thus switched them off but these in the end were not problem. Main unit i think should be on before sub to avoid.
Once blue light on sub showing it connected, moved to fm radio. Gives no sound when not tuned to channel of course as fm. Radio wire connector is not same as in manual and doesnt make a good connetion. Cheap piece of wire with a not well suited connector on the end. Got it still to work though with a bit if adjustement to the connector. will get a proper arial later for this. Fm button is under the covered part of the control so you need to slide that out for this.
Stereo sound for music was instantly better than tv, though of couse not comparable to a decent or higher end stereo. I'm a sound engineer as hobby, but the need here is for a general purpose family unit and thus sound is a good enough fit for the purpose.
Owners manual is on cd and quick setup guide of course refers to this so it wasnt long before i had to get the laptop out.
Auto speaker set up for surround was straight forward. Left the room of course during test tones. Did this while kids were in bed so didnt make too much noise. set to 2 + 3 beam.
Sound was a bit left orientated down to my room shape so made some corre tions but the e,planatiin in the owners manual was clear enough on how to change these. Of course you need the tv connected to see these specific menus, unlike radio functions which can be done without.
The left hand side SL virtual placement was effective and could set/determine location of virtual speaker easily however on right unsuprisingly this was not achievable to same degree. Regardless imaging was wider than normal tv and enough to give perception of a speaker to the right 1 or so metres. I have a sofa also on that side in the middle of the room (leather) do also makes that side more tricky.
Sub sounds good and mixes well with the main unit. Sub volume control is indeed handy for reducing neighbour annoyance.
Watched some parts of movies and sound stage is much bigger of course which is what i wanted. Sound effects have good movement left/right and also with depth. I wouldn't say behind but i need to check some more scenes for that. Of course my right hand side is a bit more restricted due to lack of wall but this is not obvious to detect though I expect this may become more apparent in more sweeping scenes.
Overall it fits my requirements perfectly, thus a 9 in that sense. In my view I would still choose a real surround (high end one) if i had the space and family support
thus in my view this is is no replacement for a full surround if your fussy about sound but then sounds quality is for many people now days not noticed given all the additional compression thrown on so much digital music these days.
Oh, and i won't be using the uni volume setting.. this destroys as you would expect the dynamics, but it just doesnt sound very good either. I wonder if the settings for this can be tweaked properly.. ? Cheers.
