great bass and 5.1 sound

hiss from rear speakers and the fake tweeters.

it''s a really good system really nice 5.1 sound and great bass except I was not impressed with the FAKE tweeters and the hiss noise in the rear speakers on low volume.

GOOD SOUND,NICE AND EASY TO USE REMOTE,GREAT DISPLAY AND OPTIONS

NOISE FROM REAR SURROUND SPEAKERS WHEN VOLUME IS UNDER 10

I BOUGHT THIS SYSTEM BECAUSE I WANTED I REAL STERIO SYSTEM,,, NO MORE LITTLE BOOM BOXES. MY BROTHER BOUGHT AN AIWA A FEW YEARS EARLIER, AND IT WAS GREAT, SOUND AND OPTIONS WERE AWESOME. SO I HAD NO ITENTION OF GETTING ANOTHER BRAND. SO I WENT TO THE STORE AND LOOKED AROUND A FEW TIMES. SOME MODELS WERE NICE, BUT NOT FIT FOR ME.. THEN I CAME UPON THIS MODEL NSX-MA845,, TRIED IT OUT, AND BOUGHT IT NO QUESTION.IT WAS LIKE BEING IN A CONCERT HALL EVERY TIME YOU USED IT. I HAVE HAD IT FOR A LITTLE OVER 2 YEARS. AND IM STARTING TO REGRET MY PERCHASE,A LITTLE, I KNOW THESE CAN HAVE PROBLEMS AND REQUIRE MAINTENECE,, BUT NOT THIS SOON. ONE DAY I WENT TO PLAY A CD.. AND IT WOULD NOT PLAY . IT COULD NOT RECONIZE THERE WAS A CD IN IT. THEN A WEEK AFTER THE CASSETTES STARTED TO MAKE CLICKING NOISES AND EVENTUALLY ONE OF MY TAPES WAS STUCK IN THE DECK,, AND WITH NO EJECT BUTTON I COULDNT GET IT OUT. I TRIED AGAIN AND THE CASS. DOOR BROKE OPEN. I TOOK IT TO A REPAIR PLACE AND HAD IT FIXED FOR $90.00. I THOUGH OK ITS FINE NOW,,I WAS WRONG,, IT STILL WOULDNT PLAY CDS..SO I TOOK IT BACK AND THE REPAIR MAN SAID IT WORKS FINE HERE AND THERE IS NOTHING MORE I CAN DO.AND NOW A NEW PROBLEM THE SMALL SURROUND SPEAKERS DONT WORK SOMTIMES. I WOULD EXPECT THIS TO HAPPEN IN MAYBE 10- 15 YEARS,, BUT NOT NOW. I LOVED IT VERY MUCH AND I AM VERY UPSET THAT THIS IS HAPPENING. I AGREE WITH SOME OF THE OTHER REVIEWS ABOUT THE WEAKNESSES OF THE PRODUCT I USE IT ON AN AVERAGE BASES AND WOULD NOT EXPECT THESE PROBLEMS TO HAPPEN. IF ANYONE KNOWS IF I CAN CONTACT THE AIWA COMPANY ABOUT THIS AND HAVE SOMTHING DONE I WOULD GREATLY APPRECIATE IT. AS FAR AS BUYING ANOTHER AIWA.. THEY HAVE A GREAT REPUTATION AND ARE KNOWN FOR GOOD PRODUCTS BUT WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO THIS ONE,,,IF THE COMPANY HELPS ME IN SOME WAY(NOT TO SOUND GREEDY)IT WOULD BE A GREAT BOOST OF CONSUMER CONFIDENCE.

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NONE

Great value for the money. The 300 watts are handled very well by the speaker system. Surround and Dolby Pro Logic give clean sound experience.

I wish it came in a black. The silver case is over-used.

Powerful, sleek styling, all the features that make watching a movie at home all that much more enjoyable.

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I compare it to a SHARP system I used to have with similar features. The AIWA had much more features and came at a cheaper price.

Lots of power, easy to use remote, better sound quality.

weak rear speakers, not dolby digital(only digital ready).

I got this system at BestBuy for $279+tax. Overall, the system is impressive for that price. I have used this system to watch movies in surround sound, listened to music and ver pleased with it. An annoying thing I found was, if I leave the system powered off in CD mode, it turns itself on and plays CDs at exactly at 12:00 AM. I erased all programmed tracks, but it still does it, and I am going to take it back to bestbuy to see what they have to say. Hopefully, this one is a defective piece, and I can exchange it for a good piece. Overall, I think, it is a good buy for that price.

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Sony stereo system

Excellent depth, rich clear sound. low price for what you get.

none

Overall this is a great product. Works great and sounds great. and for this price how can you go wrong?

Sound clarity is good. Built in Powered Subwoofer eliminates the need of separate woofer. (Saves you money). Cassette dubbing is excellent. Surround sound needs some improvement. Didn't get chance to test Dolby Pro Logic effects. Auto-reverse mode is confusing while reversing or forwarding a cassette. You must know the direction in which the cassette is being played, otherwise reverse will act as forward and forward will act as reverse (What a mess?). Looks like a programming bug in the internal computer chip of the system.
AIWA should hire better and intelligent programmers?

Plenty of graphic equalizers let you choose various frequency amplification levels. CD tray location is very convenient to access and change the CDs.

Overall it’s a nice system with lots of features.

bright and colorful graphics,Dolby 5.1 Ready

no digital inputs

they say it's home theater but no digital/optical inputs????
I wanted to connect my ps2 and test it out, all my other connections are taken out except optical and it doesn't have optical in, that sucks...

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sony

Seperate 5.1 channel analog inputs, cd optical(tos-link) output, good remote.

Speakers are hooked up to the unit with RCA plug! No optical (tos-link) or coaxial digital input.

When I got this system, I was very excited because it was the first decent audio system I had gotten for my room. Before that, I was using a small Sanyo system which was a complete joke (cant remeber the model number). This system was much better than the Sanyo both in sound and features.

When I went to shop for a system like this, I had the brands I wanted narrowed down to Aiwa or Sony. The Sony's at the time seemed either too expensive or too ugly for what I was looking for. When I saw this system, I immediately liked the look and I saw it did Dolby Prologic. Unfortunately for me, I thought Dolby Prologic was the standard in surround sound encoding (I thought it was Dolby Digital which is much different). But ofcourse, at that time, I didn't know a whole lot about audio systems and just chocked Prologic down as a plus. I'll tell you that I never use Pro-Logic on this system. Mainly because the rear speakers are so weak, if you're more than a few feet away from them, you dont hear much unless you're blasting the volume, and even then, they are very faint and flat.

The center channel speaker (which is only used if you're in a Pro-Logic, DSP, or 5.1 channel input mode), doesn't sound too bad, but the sound that comes out of it, to me, sounds flat.

The built in subwoofers in the mains are not bad for a shelf system, and the amount of bass can be raised to three different levels by pressing the T-Bass button. Although, if you use the third level (shown as red on the display) the bass is muddy and overused.

As for the main speakers, these werent bad either, they can blast quite loud if you need them to. Also, for once, these speakers arent really unattractive. There are many shelf systems that just look god aweful because the main speakers have a bunch of angles and crevaces. These are pretty plain rap, provided you leave the covers on.

Now that I've gone through the speakers, I'll tell you how they plug into the system, which brings me to my #1 complaint about this product: The speakers plug into the unit using RCA plugs, not stripped speaker wire. This is extremely annoying if you want to replace these speakers down the road because no other brands are going to have a RCA cable on their speaker. The fact that the speaker jakcs are 6ohms (the center speaker jack is 8ohms I believe) doesn't help either.

I did use a DVD player with this system (I plugged it in through the 5.1 channel input which is the systems biggest PLUS. The sound that I was getting was what it was. This system has EQ's in it, but that will just mess with the original sound. But overall, the 5.1 channel inputs are a great feature and work well. I wish this setup did have an optical or coaxial digital input though. However, I think for a receiver to have a digital input, it has to have a decoder to decode it, so if its encoded in DTS 5.1, the receiver would need a DTS decoder to read it. Not entirely sure how that would work on this, but I know thats true with home theater receivers.

The 3CD carousel is easy to use and goes between discs fast. If you press "Disc Direct" and then the number for the disc you want, the system will play that cd only. If you just press play, it will roll over to the next cd when it finishes the one its on. If you select random while using disc direct it will randomize tracks on just that cd, but if you select random while just playing a cd, it can select any track on any of the cd's, which is cool. This system also has an optical digital out for high quality cd signal output.

The remote isn't universal, but its easy to hold in your hand and the buttons are spread out nicely so you can memorize which is which (I know that second from the left on the top is sleep, so I just set it for sleep in 20 min and hit the hay).

Overall, this has some good plusses and some bad minuses, but for a beginner or for someone who wants a system they can throw in a room and have ready in 10 minutes for some easy tunes, its good. If you're looking for this to be your center piece of a DVD home theater system, look at a stand alone receiver. I recently purchased a Harman Kardon AVR-110 receiver that has 3 optical inputs and 3 coaxial inputs, 5 s-video inputs, 40watts/channel and much more. I know that 40watts/channel figure looks dreadfully low but Harman Kardon is one of the few brands that under rates their product.

I'll give this a 3 for value because of the 5.1 channel inputs, and a 3 for overall because those speaker hookups annoyed me a lot and the DSP's and prologic arent anything spectacular.

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Sanyo Shelf System

Powerful subs, fantastic remote, clear and colorful display, 5.1 analong inputs, ENOUGH POWER FOR SMALL EARTHQUAKE

Surround speakers are EXTREMELY weak and crackle at volumes less than 10, RCA speaker jacks, Dolby Pro Logic-no Digital, no optical or coax inputs.

This is a very up and down system. It has 300 watts of total power, but obviously aren't all put to use in Pro Logic mode unless volume is so high it's too high. Powerful and rich-sounding subwoofers, but in my 11x11 foot room, small loose objects rattle and shake when volume is at 15 and over.

CD changer is okay, I would have bought another favored Sony with a 60 disk changer if it weren't for the Aiwa's $212.00 price including tax. Surround speakers are too weak to hear and crackle unless the volume is above 10. The sound is good, but I really don't think that Aiwa had any use in installing the super-tweeter, because it sounds as if it's not even installed.

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none similar

Clean Stereo Sound, Many AV Features, Complete (or it may seem) Home Theatre system. colorful GEQ, timers, sleep, everything can be done on the remote (almost). Great tape playback and recording, MD Input, Aux Input, 5.1 Input. Very extensive manual, easily configured.

cannot change EQ on remote, Bad rear channel sound (quiet and fuzzy)

Great value, also have Kenwood VR-255 w/ KLH 12" Liquid cooled 3 ways, and this Aiwa blows it away in Stereo Mode. In Home Theatre mode it all falls apart. With DSP or Pro Logic on playing music, almost no sound comes from rear channels, I think they need thicker wires and clearer amplifiers for the rears. On Dolby 3 channel with movies or music it sounds alright, but center must be turned down or else it overpowers the bass, even with boost all the way up. Aside from all those bad things though, in Stereo Mode it will blow away huge standalone systems. Front mid sounds clear and realistic, although if you put your ear to the tweeter, you can tell it is fake and has no use but to take up space. Even though my Kenwood can't come close to this sound, Aiwa has alot of problems to face in future years, if I were to recommend a stereo, I would say this is good, but you may want to reconsider, and choose a brand that tests their equipment *FULLY* before selling it, for $300, I should at least get what they told me I was gettting.