Avia II

From the makers of Avia and Avia Pro comes the definitive and easy-to-use tutorial for optimizing your home theater. This all-inclusive guide to home theater calibration for NTSC, HD-DVD, Blu-ray or PAL formats comes with more than 200 test patterns to achieve superior video quality and nearly 100 audio tones for 5.1 and 6.1 channels, plus Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus. Basic and advanced signals allow you to select the test pattern or sound tone needed for a specific calibration, and tutorials cover various home theater components, speaker types and placement, making connection and wiring, and using a sound meter and home theater environments.

Avia’s latest entry into TV and audio configuration strikes a fine balance between being friendly to newcomers and satisfying to home theater gurus. Navigating the disc is easy, as it is logically divided into ten main topics that are further divided into chapters. If you are new to home theater, the first few chapters walk you through topics like Home Theater Components, Video Basics, HD Technology, and Making the Connection (hooking up your system)--all in plain English, not in techno-babble. If you already understand the basics of home theater, it’s easy to skip to the final three chapters to tweak and calibrate every aspect of your system’s audio and video. To really take advantage of the audio test tones, you need a SPL meter, and if you don’t know how to use one, the disc walks you through the process. It also walks you through the most common video test patterns and how to use them to make proper adjustments to the sharpness, brightness, color, tint, and contrast settings on your display. The first time you calibrate your display it will look a lot different than you are used to, but resist the urge to turn the brightness up. By the end of the week, you will appreciate the improved picture and wonder how you were able to watch it before. Just be careful with the included color filters—since they lack a sturdy, cardboard liner, they can be easy to lose. --Adam Gregorich

The Avia II is a great introduction and easy to understand starting guide for someone not familiar with HT (Home Theater) systems and how to connect AVR (Audio Video Receiver), previously idenified as a stereo receiver. And for those true audiophiles it is a good review :) There are sound tones to make sure your speakers are connected correctly and to set the levels. In addition for audio setting, I would recommend buying a SPL( Sound Pressure Level) meter which measures the loudness of sound in decibels (dBs). Radio Shack makes a very good SPL meter fro $50. The SPL is more precise than auto-setup because you can very easily adjust teh sound level of every speaker to be exactly equal at the postion listening position or at 1 meter from each speaker. The video setup is excellent and easy to use for calibrating just about any TV. You do not need any special tools. You need the TV remote and access to the TV setup menu. Overall, a very good product.

This video really only helps with a couple of things such as brightness. It wasn't that far off from the factory settings on my plasma tv. Don't bother with this video unless you need a $30 coaster.

This disc was simple and easy to follow. The 2 "stars" were both informative in their directions, which were easy to follow. I haven't accessed the extra content yet, but the basic tests used will calibrate your display perfectly. This disc is good for both the inexperienced and the "pro". It's broken down into chapters, so if you need to go step-by-step you watch the entire disc. If you have prior knowledge RE: calibration you can skip right down to the tests. All in all a great product, but if I had to say something bad about it, it could have been less expensive?

First of all I received the DVD 3 days earlier than the expected receive date. This was nice. The DVD case is cheaply made. The DVD was sliding around inside the case to the point that it scratched the disc. The colour filters are just tossed into the DVD case separated by tissue paper. The two guys narrating on the disc do a fairly good job explaining surround sound and HDTV settings. Using the HDTV calibration menu it was easy to calibrate my Plasma TV. I could tell the difference between my original settings and the calibrated settings. Calibrating my surround was just as easy. Navigating through the disc is a bit difficult. Some of the HDTV calibration test you need to repeat a couple of times. I could FF through some of the test but other test I could not FF. Between the overly casual nature of the narrators, the very plain set/stage and the script reading it appeared to me that this disk was kind of thrown together. Like I said. The disk did the job, but I expected more.

might not be completely useless, but it's close enough. Maybe I'm being a little harsh, because I did wait long enough after buying my TV to have tweaked the settings to my satisfaction without this disc. The biggest reason I got it was to check the color accuracy, and I find their method of doing so extremely flawed. In fact, I found it useless. You're looking through colored gels at a color test pattern with blinking squares in the center, and you really can't tell what the heck you're adjusting, or if it's getting better or worse or what. Just play a bunch of DVDs and watch a lot of broadcast channels and tweak until you get the skin tones right on most of them, it'll be better than this.