>> Hi I'm Matthew Moskovciak, Senior Associate Editor at CNET and we're here with the Samsung HT-C6500. This is a home theater in a box system with a built-in Blue Ray player and it's currently selling for about $550 online. The HT-C6500 includes a 5.1 speaker system with two front tall speakers, smaller rear speakers, a center channel and a sub-woofer. There's also the main receiver unit which includes the Blue Ray player and also access the amplifier. We like the glossy black look of the system but we're disappointed to see touch sensitive buttons on the top of the player which are hard to get to if you stack other devices on the system. We also like that Samsung includes iPod connectivity with a dock but we prefer the design on competing home theater systems which integrate the dock into the main unit which makes for a sleeker design. The graphical user interface is the same one included with Samsung's stand alone Blue Ray players which makes it easy to access included streaming media services such as Netflix, Vudu, You Tube and Pandora. It does have built-in Wi-Fi so you don't need to have Ethernet in your living room in order to take advantage of the streaming services. Around back you can see its connectivity which includes two HDMI inputs, an optical audio input and an analog audio input. That means you can connect up to four devices which should be enough for many home theaters especially since the Blue Ray player is built in but it's worth pointing out that some competitors such as LG's cheaper LHB 535 offer a little bit more connectivity. We found the sound quality on the HT-C6500 to be outstanding for a home theater in a box system. Movies sounded detailed and rich and even CD's sounded good which many competing systems can't handle well. When we compared it directly to the Sony BDV E-77W we really liked both systems but we felt that the Samsung had just a little bit fuller sound. So overall while we had some complaints about the design of the unit, it features some of the best sound quality we've heard on a home theater in a box system and a really strong feature set making it one of the best Blue Ray home theater systems we've reviewed. I'm Matthew Moskovciak at CNET and this is the Samsung HT-C6500.
