You can connect this cheap DVD to several thousand pounds worth of amplification (krell/bryston) and I assure you it will not disgrace itself, imaging, bass, treble and midrange all excellent and as good or perhaps a little sharper sounding than my old micro mega stage 2 dedicated (1994CD player).
Sound is excellent in my opinion.
I also have a pioneer dvd717 £400 pounds and the sound is disappointing/boring.

Overall fantastic 5.1 player for its time, mine is still going strong after an internal clean, the whole drive mechanism can be removed and cleaned , remote is cheap and black, silver would have been nice, bit on the large side. 5 stars due lack of support from the makers, do the player justice buy a 5.1 speaker set to realise the full potiential. Yaaz

I bought my Acoustic Solutions DVD551 in feb 2003 for £119.00 from Richer Sounds and it now sells for £49!

Within Couple of months noticed picture going "Blocky" with the picture turning into liitle squares and pausing, then in October had to have it replaced for new unit from Richer Sounds - they replaced it straight away without argument - which may or may not indicate a fault problem they know about.

Picture quality is fine but sound is a little low.

It's definately worth buying for £49.00 and I recommend Richer Sounds as a place to buy from.

I suspect if you wedged an LP in an AS551 DVD player, it would have a go at playing it. It has a wide variety of play modes for a small budget.

However, the remote control was designed by monkeys, and the worst thing about it is the tremendous amount of heat it generates if used for more than about half a movie. This is, I suspect, what causes the enormous pauses and occasional outright failures in the player. I was trying to have a bit of a Buffy season five marathon tonight, but right after the bit where Glory sends Tara insane, the machine just gave up the ghost and tried to hang on to the disk. I actually had to power it down to get it to behave, and the disk eventually popped out white hot. Don't bother, in my humble opinion. Chip a Sony instead.

I chose this for a birthday present, I'm not a big hi-fi techie but here goes.
I originally wanted a new CD player as mine was old and I wanted one with optical output so I could record minidisks.
I decided that I might as well get a DVD player, they play CDs as well, I looked on the richer sounds website and found the 551 to have all the features I wanted.
so far I have had no complaints at all, as it was only intended as a CD player I have been very impressed with the quality of DVD video.
hooked up though my amp I get amazing sound, admittedly like other folk I did have some problems when I was playing Monty Pythons holy grail, but being a computer techie I wasn't going to give up, I simply fiddled with the audio settings on the remote and presto!! it worked a treat!
the CD sound is good too, much better than my old player.
I would recommend this to any first time DVD buyer.

I've only had this a few days and have already found quite a few bad points. Having said all this I would still recommend it to others, particularly those on a budget.

I got impressed by looking at the reviews posted in this site. I exchanged 2 pieces and both had the same problems

This is a very versatile machine but the faults I have found worry me. The fact that the discs jam so frequently is annoying and the noise the player makes is surely louder than it should be. Providing Richer Sounds can rectify these problems I would recommend it.

This Acoustic Solutions dvd551 DVD player is brilliant. got it from richersounds for £119 it plays anything. bought the sharp dv740 first but took it back and got this one which is miles better.

The DVD551 by Acoustic Solutions is a good looking, cheap dvd player but is somewhat lacking in quality. It plays everything. My player has been sent off for repair so hopefully when i get it back it will be a very good bit of kit. If it works when i get it back i would give it a 10/10!

lots of features but all you can hear is the background noise and not what the actors/actresses are saying!bummer!

nice machine if you dont want to play vcd

This DVD551 DVD player from Acoustic Solutions is quite a good budget buy and has plenty of features but I found the picture quality lacking in quality compared to some of the other budget players on the market. The picture shows "artefacts" on areas of solid colour and in dark areas on most dvd's played.

This used to be put down to the encoding of the disc and on many older region 2 movies this is true. However with newer movies this is no longer the case.

Regardless of the movie you can see "artefacts" this used to be a problem on other players and normally a firmware upgrade would fix this.

I have yet to see any firmware upgrades for this player and without one I can't recommend it as there are better players available for the same price

I purchased the Acoustic soloutions DVD551 DVD player for my daughters bedroom (from www.richersounds.com for £119) after studying the reviews on this site.
It plays just about anything from any region with no problem. The player came with the region hack which worked first time when entered.
The picture and sound quality are very good for the price it also plays mp3's. If you want a budget player that looks good you can not go wrong with this one.*****

Bought this DVD551 from Acoustic Solutions as my first DVD player and am very impressed. Especially considering the price. Looks very stylish and so far have had no problems.

Went for this one because I was told that I could play region 1 discs in colour on my tv which isn't NTSC compatable (has some kind of PAL conversion mechanism!?!?). However, haven't tried yet - has anyone else? How did you get on?

My friend purchased the Acoustic Solutions dvd551 DVD player and we tested it straight out of the box with a region 2 and 1 (even a region 1 RCE coded) disc and they all played first time with the hack. Played it through a JVC TV with 3D phonic connected with a scart. The sound was good through this setup. This is an ideal entry level or second DVD player for the money - £119.

I was recommended the DVD551 DVD player from Acoustic Solutions by Richer sounds as I was looking for a player with on-board decoder. (I am slowly making the move from PC DVD with 5.1 soundcard and Creative 5.1 speakers to proper setup with DVD, AV amp and speakers, and fancied this as a viable intermediate step). I can tell you this approach works well and would recommend it to anyone as a serious altenative to £500+ DVD & 5.1 speaker packages available!
Anyway, I digress. What can I say? This thing will play just about anything except soup can lids. It plays overburned SVCD's (errm, that errm, my mate gave me) without a hitch, MP3 cd's.. you name it. Even popping in a data CD with mpeg-2 files on, it pops up a file browser and plays them quite happily. Superb! My only gripe (a small one given the low cost of the unit) is that the remote is not well laid out, and will only work if you have a good aim and are level with the player. Unless you are easily amused and play with special features menus a lot this shouldn't be a problem.

I bought this Acoustic Solutions DVD 551 DVD player from Richer Sounds as my first player just to see what DVDs were like. It was a smart looking little thing for the money but the first problem I found was that the sound level was way too low. An Acoustic Solutions Support chap I emailed admitted that the sound output of this box was known to be less than most of it's contemporaries but it was so poor I thought it was faulty and took it back. No problem was found so I was resigned to putting the TV volume up to practically full power to watch a DVD at a reasonable level. The second problem was that on selecting certain items on various DVDs (usually the trailers or special features) the player locked solid while the TV screen flashed constantly - the only option being to power the player off with the disc still inside it. In the end I upgraded to an LG model and the difference is very noticeable. If you get a good 551 then you're lucky but if there are known problems with it out there why haven't they been sorted out and why is the box still being sold??

Very impressed with this DVD551 DVD player from Acoustic Solutions. Quality is very good indeed. I bought it as a second machine as my £250 + main player does not play vcd or cdr the picture is very similar. I can, and have recomended this machine to others.

The DVD551 DVD player is a top machine!!!
It's a bargain! Unless you want a designer label machine, this one does the job nicely.