JVC LT-42WX70 LCD HDTV Review - Audio & Menus

Audio & Menus Summary
• Add-on speakers have decent quality sound and good volume. • Menus are a little confusing to use • Manual only deals with the basics
	Connectivity	Page 11 of 18	Formats & Media

Audio Quality (5.0)

The speakers on the LT-42WX70 are two 5-watt speakers that are located in a sound bar that fits onto the bottom of the screen. They produce plenty of volume, and have reasonable sound quality; the low notes are deep, and the trebles are clear. But they are nowhere near as good as even a cheap set of dedicated surround sound speakers. You get a fair amount of control over the sound; as well as bass and treble controls, there is an auto volume control, which dynamically adjusts the volume, and a volume limiter, which controls the maximum volume that the display can output. There are no pseudo-surround sound features here; the sound is just straight stereo. There is, however, a mode called PQD that tries to enhance the sound on the included pseakers; we found that it made little difference to the overall sound quality.

Menu Interface (5.25)

There are a number of buttons on the remote control for accessing the on-screen menu; the menu button itself, the directional pad with a central selection button, plus an exit button and a back button (which takes you one step back up the menu tree). The menus themselves use the ubiquitous tabbed approach, with self-explanatory options at the top for Picture, Sound, Setup and HDMI. Most of these options have several screens worth of sub-options, so finding some controls can involve rather a lot of up and down actions.

The on-screen menus are logically laid out

In particular, options such as the color space are buried rather deeply within the menus. However, the most commonly used options (such as the memory settings and the presets) are right at the top and are easily accessible.

Some options are rather deeply buried on the on-screen menus

Manual (6.50)

Included with the display is a printed manual that comes in English, French and Spanish. This manual covers all of the features of the display, but in a somewhat perfunctory way. More complex features, such as how to use the various color spaces that the display supports, are only covered in a cursory way. It is available for download here.

Sample pages from the LT-42WX70 manual