Wharfdale DVD2900F

I have the Wharfdale DVD2900F freeview box teamed up with the Acoustic Solutions DS1133 to make use of the 5.1 surround sound, and put the output through a Dell 2005FPW 20.1" widescreen monitor. Coming from analogue terrestrial TV with mono sound, the change is amazing!

I had the Wharfdale because I wanted freeview, and it was the only one I could find that gives 5.1 sound output. The fact that it had a built-in DVD and audio CD player was a bonus, and means that I now have a total home media solution in just three boxes. I was stunned at the quality of the freeview pictures after suffering analogue for decades.

The Wharfdale puts out both analogue and digital sound. It also puts out composite, HF and scart, which means I can run it into a monitor rather than a TV - why pay for two tuners? But you do need a monitor that will accept composite or scart, since there's no PC monitor output.

There's not much to say about the freeview part of the Wharfdale - as far as I can tell, it's the same chip driving it that seems to be in most of the freeview boxes. There's no facility for top-up TV, which doesn't bother me in the slightest, but might be an issue for others. It's worth getting the unit set up right; it took me a week or so before I realised that I needed to configure it for widescreen TV before it would automatically give me the correct aspect ratio depending on what was being broadcast.

The only other issues are:

*The remote is unreliable. This may just be down to the batteries provided being nearly flat; I haven't checked that out yet. It's not too much of an issue.

*The set has "crashed" on a couple of occasions (frozen). The solution to that is simply to switch off and switch on again. Also, the unit takes a few moments to respond. I'm learning to be a little more patient, and it seems to pay dividends - I haven't had a crash recently, and the remote has been more reliable. Again, the crashing syndrome seems to be something that is common to sets using this chip set.

*The DVD/CD player is great, but if you run it without the TV display on (we ought to be saving energy you know!) the LCD panel on the unit is somewhat uninformative.

In spite of the minuses, I'm really pleased with the unit. And also with the set-up as a whole (i.e. the Dell screen and AS surround sound) for that matter.