Hitachi Axm 140

I''ve had my Mitachi AXM140 system for nearly two years now, and overall I''m quite happy with it. AMPLIFIER: The amplifier feels solid to the touch, the knobs have a nice feel to them and it produces a nice, crisp sound. As mentioned by a previous poster, the volume does increase in larger increments than would be desired, but it I live with it. Uncomplicated design, nothing there that doesn''t need to be there. Headphone jack, Balance, Volume, Tone, Bass, ON/OFF. lovely! SPEAKERS: The speakers are heavy and provide a nice ''rounded'' sound, not too bassy, and are very crisp in the mid-range. They have single (not bi-wired) gold-plated interconnects which are of adequate quality.My advice would be to throw away the speaker cable and budget around £1.50 a metre for better stuff. In fairness I was very surprised by when I first plugged in and turned on straight out of the box. The amp/speaker combo provides of a much better sound quality than the RRP price would suggest. The unit only just begins to struggle when right at peak volume, but for the money you can forgive it that! CD/DVD PLAYER: Again, no complaints here. Nice responsive player with a clear uncluttered display. I do not play DVD''s through my system, so it would be unfair to me to comment there. Neither do I rip music to the server from the player, so again no comments there. All I can really say is that the whole unit feels sturdy, and it is quiet in operation and plays without any excessive skipping or jumping. DAB RADIO: Very happy with this. I dispensed with the ''mini'' DAB aeriel included and opted for an external wall mounted aeriel (about £15 from ARGOS) and the sound is truly superb. If you have ungraded from a conventional radio you will be very happy with this!! The display is well thought-out and uncluttered, and the front panel has everything you need at our fingertips without unnessesary enbellishments. Very good. MUSIC SERVER: Oh dear! It was all going so well until we get to the music server. Insofar as the build quality goes I have no issues. It has a solid feel and a handy USB jack to the front.It has a 40gb capacity and plays MP3 and .wma files. Transfer of music is easy, just connect to the PC from the front USB cable, and treat as an external hard disc, just ''drag and drop'' your music files! Simplicity itself! The display is clear and sound quality very good, but...and it is a big BUT, the playlist and search functions are APPALLING! I would as far as the to say the worst I have ever seen! You CANNOT search by title, genre, create or store playlists, nothing! It doesn''t even seperate between albums! Every track is assigned a 4 digit number, which you have to manually enter (jukebox style) to play. I have resorted to listing every single track into a book, which I have to open and search through to find a track! It doesn''t even ''remember'' your last point of play, it just goes straight back to TRACK 0001every time you switch on! I mean COME ON!! What is that about? It''s past basic, it''s ''Heath Robinson''!! Considering that this is supposed to be the jewel in the crown of the system, Hitachi well and truly missed the mark here, and probably have condemed the system to long-term obscurity. The errors are compounded by the twitchy remote control, which frequently '' enters the wrong number if your finger lingers for a fraction longer over the buttons. It''s a real shame. I love the rest of the hifi, but the hard disc does make it difficult to live with. Would I buy it again? Probably. Given that the only current opposition is the Cambridge Audio 640H, when compared it offers fantastic value for the money. However, If you are planning to listen almost exclusively to the music server, I think you will find this unit very tedious, very quickly! You can live with it, but it is far from ideal. If you want an ''old school'' style system with the extra benefits of DAB quality, physical reduction in space from conventional ''seperates'' with the ability to store your collection of CD''s then this may be the system for you.

The Hitachi AXM140 is a fantastic piece of kit enabling the storing of 40gb of music, however the instructions are appauling. I bought it to provide the music for my 40th, thinking I could rapidly copy CD's to the hard drive without the need to use a computer. The manual had been poorly translated and I was none the wiser on how to do this. In the end I copied them on a laptop and tranferred them in. There was absolutely no support from Hitachi, (despite e mailing their helpdesk several times) and nothing on the web. It is however "well nifty" and well worth the investment of nearly £550.

Overall a nice looking system with good sound. Though I found the volume increments jump too much, especially at low level for BGM. The Hard drive shuffle repeats the same shuffle every time. The DVD/CD Player loses its colour and cannot play in shuffle mode. DAB Radio very clear. Very easy to set up, with few wires. Smart Remote control.