Sony BDVE500W Home Theater System-Great Today, Not So Much Tomorrow

Audio is a very important part of the home theater experience. While most of the time you can get by with the audio included in your visual medium of choice (televisions and projectors often have speakers built in), it’s not too hard to see where some would want massive, blasting audio to complete the experience. And one fine source of window-flexing audio comes from the Sony BDVE500W, a complete audio package with lots of utility, but at a hefty price.

The Sony BDVE500W home theater system is a thousand watt, 5.1 channel home theater system with four satellite speakers, a center channel speaker, a subwoofer and an included Blu-ray player as well as a wireless S-Air module for your rear speakers. You’ll also get a variety of decoders including DTS-HD Master Audio, Dolby TrueHD, and plenty more, as well as an iPod cradle, a radio tuner, x.v. Color technology in the Blu-ray player, and a complete set of inputs in the receiver, including a component input, a composite output, an HDMI output, two SPDIF inputs, an Ethernet jack and a USB port.

The big thing about the Sony BDVE500W is that it’s basically everything you need today. It’s not a future-ready system, make no mistake about that, but it is a system that will handle your needs today. It’s great on the physical media side–Blu-ray and DVD both get represented here, and pretty well given that the Blu-ray also does upconversion on DVDs, which is a huge help in terms of value.

But like I said, this isn’t a future system. It doesn’t offer any streaming support through Pandora or Netflix, which will likely become vital features in the not too distant future.

And when you consider that some places are selling these at $549, you may want to think twice before going this route, especially since it can’t handle tomorrow’s issues today.

The Sony BDVE500W has most everything you’ll need today, but as physical media becomes less prominent and gets replaced by streaming, it will lose a lot of its utility.