LG HT762TZ review

LG HT762TZ Review

Reviewed by: Ian Morris

Reviewed on: 4 June 2008

If you own a flat-panel TV, there is a good chance you aren't satisfied with the quality of the sound it produces. As nice as these TVs look, the speaker systems often tend to be neglected. The best way to improve your home cinema experience is to add an external system.

The £380 LG HT762TZ is a 5.1 surround sound speaker system, with an upscaling DVD player thrown into the mix. Will it be the speaker system complement to your lovely flatscreen?

Design
We're always thrilled to see a unique design rather than the same old square box. Worse yet is a design that has been 'borrowed' from another company. Happily, the LG has a style all of its own, which we rather like. The corners are rounded, with smooth lines and attractive glossy black surfaces.

This is the entire setup, speakers and all. LG describes the satellite speakers as champagne flutes, and you can see why

The satellite speakers -- the ones that deal with front left and right and rear left and right channels -- are what LG describes as champagne flutes. Indeed, we can see why they've compared them to the world's favourite fizzy wine. We also think the whole package works really well together.

Although we like the flute speakers and the centre channel, we weren't so crazy on the subwoofer, which is both ugly and slightly flimsy. That said, this speaker will spend its life hidden away somewhere, so we're not going to criticise LG for not lavishing extra design pennies on it.

At the rear of the DVD player are, as you would expect, speaker terminals for each of the six speakers. Each is colour coded, and the supplied speaker cable should match up. This is done so the cable lengths can be kept short for the front speakers and more generous for the rear channels.

You also get an HDMI, composite, component, S-Video and Scart outputs for getting the video to the TV. There's also an optical audio input so you can hook up an external source like a Blu-ray player or games console.

The remote control for the unit is fairly large, but it's got buttons for everything, which reduces the need for menus.

Features
The LG has a built-in radio and we can see this being less relevant with digital TV, which has a good selection of radio stations already. Those stations are over-compressed and FM still has its charms, so the radio may be of some use. Shame LG didn't include DAB on this machine.

The HT762TZ is also a pretty useful media playback device. You can plug in a USB stick with DivX video or just bung in a DVD with AVI files burnt on to it. Either way, the machine is comfortable with the files.

You also get a phenomenal amount of disc support. There really isn't much aside from Blu-ray and HD DVD that this player can't handle. Even SACD and DVD Audio are supported, and DVD+/-R, DVD+/-RW and DVD RAM are all playable. That's pretty impressive.