Reviews - Teufel Columa 300R home cinema speakers review

[HEXUS]

Big and bold, we put some of Teufel's best speakers under the review spotlight.

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[Ciber]

We're a little miffed as to why no HDMI inputs (enabling 'native' or bitstreamed DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD) and pass-through outputs are provided, seeing as how the majority of modern A/V equipment is laden with the port. This means that the picture component needs to be attached separately to your screen.

Big downside. So only any good really if you never ever intend to upgrade to bluray or other HD source then. £700 is a lot to spend on something that only really makes sense with a DVD player.

Makes CDs sound as bad as DAB? No HD audio with films? You want £700 for it? No thanks! 4 stars is definitely too many.

[snootyjim]

I'm not convinced about that. You can always just direct the HDMI straight to the screen, and use the receiver purely for audio.

Virtually everything these days has a optical out, even more so when there's a HDMI out.

[edzieba]

Except TOSLINK doesn't have all that much bandwidth. You can use plain 5.1 DTS or DD. If you use LPCM, you're limited to stereo. That means if you have DTS-HDMA*, DD-tHD, DD+, FLAC or whathaveyou, you need to transcode it before you can send it to the receiver (assuming your player can transcode), or you're stuck with stereo. It also means that any HTPC users are SOL when it comes to 5.1 in games unless they happen to have one of the few cards that licensed DD-live/DTS-connect.
For £700, you'd expect HDMI pass through at the very least. It's like buying a brand new HD plasma and finding it only accepts component video: that might have been OK a few years ago, but it just doesn't fly for a new product.

*Yes, there's the core DTS track, but that has issues of it's own.

[Ciber]

I tried outputting via toslink or coaxial digital from my sony bluray player, a new £160 one. Non hdmi in other words like this system would be stuck with. I had to change a setting in my bluray player to even make that work with bluray films and the result was basically stereo. The best it would do is prologic. As far as I know if you buy one of these non-HDMI speaker systems to play bluray films you will be getting worse sound than DVD. Like I said £700 for a speaker system that doesn't do HD-Audio makes no sense.

[Ciber]

Virtually everything these days has a optical out, even more so when there's a HDMI out.

For how long with HDMI being the only connection you really need on a bluray player?

[snootyjim]

For how long with HDMI being the only connection you really need on a bluray player?

Depends if the players want to ignore what consumers want. It will be a long time before people are satisfied with HDMI audio and no alternative.