Harman Kardon brings high-end media centre to Blighty
Harman Kardon has begun selling its high-price 250GB media centre system in the UK.
Harman Kardon's DMC 1000: quarter of a terabyte of music storage
The DMC 1000 packs in a CD and DVD player, though while it'll auto-rip music onto the hard drive, it won't do the same with movies and TV shows. It will upscale them to HD resolution if you have an HD TV attached over HDMI. It also has composite- and component-video outputs and s-video.
No shortage of ports
HK offers an optional add-on iPod dock, allowing musical content to be copied over to player, and the DMC 1000 will also let you transfer songs to USB storage devices and memory cards (SD/SDHC/MMC/MemoryStick/CompactFlash). It can be burned to CD-R/RW too.
Round the back it has a digital audio connectors and a raft of analogue jacks for multi-room speaker sets.
We'd hope so at the price: $2999 in the US, £1800 over here. Phew. Fortunately, you can get its little brother, the DMC-250, for around £450. It lacks a built-in hard drive, but you can get a lot more than 250GB of storage for the £1350 price difference.
COMMENTS
PS3 audio quality
The PS3 actually makes for a great CD player thanks to upsampling and various other features. All PS3 models have analogue audio outputs and if you buy the right model you'll even get SACD playback, analogue stereo and digital multichannel via HDMI. See PS3SACD.com
PS3
Hmm..... really, all of that? I've had a quick look and cannot see a single analogue audio port on the back of a PS3.
Or any reference to any level of quality CD playback... great if you live in the world of low bitrate MP3, but not if you appreciate higher quality audio, the PS3 simply cannot compete.
It's a good system no doubt, but it's compromised in many areas if you really push it....
Hardon Karmon
Or buy a PS3 for less, and get all that and more.
Exchange rate
Hey, at today's exchange rate that makes the UK version roughly £150 cheaper than the US!
So, are we to start a "Rip off States" campaign, encouraging yanks to take long weekends in Blighty to do all their Christmas shopping?
I spy....
Is that a Network Port?
is it capable of stereaming from a media server???
