Avia II
Starring: Avia 2: Guide to Home TheaterStudio: Image Entertainment
MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, DVD-Video, Widescreen, NTSC
Running Time: 121 minutes
DVD Release: January 1st 2008
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DVD Review
From the makers of Avia and Avia Pro comes the definitive and easy-to-use tutorial for optimizing your home theater. This all-inclusive guide to home theater calibration for NTSC, HD-DVD, Blu-ray or PAL formats comes with more than 200 test patterns to achieve superior video quality and nearly 100 audio tones for 5.1 and 6.1 channels, plus Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus. Basic and advanced signals allow you to select the test pattern or sound tone needed for a specific calibration, and tutorials cover various home theater components, speaker types and placement, making connection and wiring, and using a sound meter and home theater environments.
User Reviews
Only Benefits are Color Strips & Red Push Test - Rating: 1/5
A complete waste of money. Instead of purchasing the cheapest one, I picked one with the color strips.
1) The hue test indicates it should be adjusted more to the red even when already a bit too red.
2) The sharpness is best adjusted by sight during programming than with the test patterns on any pattern I've used.
3) After setting color saturation, lowering it enough to better satisfy the red push test proved to be a decent maximum setting, although it should really be a bit lower than that.
4) This test & the THX test both indicate a higher brightness than should be used. The recommended setting causes a foggy look.
The color strips were great because I could use the blue one with the free THX tests.
In summary, your eyes alone are probably the best choice. The second best choice would be the free THX test. The THX test indicates the glasses for the test are available online.
Good Overall Audio and Video setup - Rating: 4/5
The Avia II is a great introduction and easy to understand starting guide for someone not familiar with HT (Home Theater) systems and how to connect AVR (Audio Video Receiver), previously idenified as a stereo receiver. And for those true audiophiles it is a good review :)
There are sound tones to make sure your speakers are connected correctly and to set the levels. In addition for audio setting, I would recommend buying a SPL( Sound Pressure Level) meter which measures the loudness of sound in decibels (dBs). Radio Shack makes a very good SPL meter fro $50.
The SPL is more precise than auto-setup because you can very easily adjust teh sound level of every speaker to be exactly equal at the postion listening position or at 1 meter from each speaker.
The video setup is excellent and easy to use for calibrating just about any TV. You do not need any special tools. You need the TV remote and access to the TV setup menu.
Overall, a very good product.
Save your money on this one - Rating: 1/5
This video really only helps with a couple of things such as brightness. It wasn't that far off from the factory settings on my plasma tv. Don't bother with this video unless you need a $30 coaster.
Good product. Did as advertised - Rating: 4/5
This disc was simple and easy to follow. The 2 "stars" were both informative in their directions, which were easy to follow. I haven't accessed the extra content yet, but the basic tests used will calibrate your display perfectly. This disc is good for both the inexperienced and the "pro". It's broken down into chapters, so if you need to go step-by-step you watch the entire disc. If you have prior knowledge RE: calibration you can skip right down to the tests.
All in all a great product, but if I had to say something bad about it, it could have been less expensive?
Did the job...but I expected more - Rating: 3/5
First of all I received the DVD 3 days earlier than the expected receive date. This was nice. The DVD case is cheaply made. The DVD was sliding around inside the case to the point that it scratched the disc. The colour filters are just tossed into the DVD case separated by tissue paper. The two guys narrating on the disc do a fairly good job explaining surround sound and HDTV settings. Using the HDTV calibration menu it was easy to calibrate my Plasma TV. I could tell the difference between my original settings and the calibrated settings. Calibrating my surround was just as easy. Navigating through the disc is a bit difficult. Some of the HDTV calibration test you need to repeat a couple of times. I could FF through some of the test but other test I could not FF. Between the overly casual nature of the narrators, the very plain set/stage and the script reading it appeared to me that this disk was kind of thrown together. Like I said. The disk did the job, but I expected more.
