DVD-C750 Overview, Setup and Remote Control

Yamaha is no stranger to the DVD player market. For years they have been selling DVD players at various price ranges with a host of the latest and greatest features within each respective price class to meet the market needs. Finally, a manufacture has stepped up to the plate and produced a universal DVD player that is cost effective and serves as a multi changer CD player, as well. Thank you, Yamaha, for producing a DVD player with very nice build quality, good video performance, excellent audio performance and capabilities.

What's inside the box?

Upon opening the factory sealed box, I found that the DVD-C750 was well packed from the factory. The DVD-C750 box contained: the DVD player, one remote, one user manual, and one set of cables. I am not an advocate for the high-end cable manufacturers but the cables shipped with this unit are not practical for installation. The cables are not well built as per Audioholics standards. The user manual is well written and easy to comprehend.

The first thing I noticed after unpacking the DVD-C750 was the build quality of the player. It is very impressive for a DVD player that retails for $329. The front panel is neat and well organized. The rear of the DVD-C750 has multiple outputs including both toslink and coax digital; 6.1 channel direct analog outputs; right and left mixed analog outputs; and component, composite and s-video outputs. All RCA outputs are gold plated and they are well spaced for easy connection. The power cord is non detachable.

Remote Control

The DVD-C750 remote is better than the typical remote of other players in this price range. It is responsive and the buttons are clearly labeled. However, its practical usage for home theater is limited because of the lack of back lighting. A simple solution is to program your systems universal remote control with its basic functions and store it away when needed to operate very specific functions.

Audio Set-Up

Setting up the DVD-C750 was a little laborious because of the difficult user interface. I had trouble selecting the setting that I wanted and found it difficult to use the remote control and navigate through the set up process. Though, it was difficult to get a grasp on how to select different items, I did progress and manage to set up the audio portion of the player. On the audio set up page, I configured the Analog output to MULTI for DVD-A/SACD playback. This is the factory default. Digital output was set to ALL for Dolby Digital/DTS. For Speaker set up I selected LARGE for all my speakers and subwoofer to YES. The bass management crossover for SMALL is much too high at 120Hz for most non-satellite or cube speaker systems. I would have preferred an adjustable crossover or a fixed 80Hz setting for SMALL. The DVD-C750 has the option to select CD up Sampling Rates of 88.2 kHz (x2) or 176.4kHz (x4). The default setting for Sampling Rate is OFF. The DVD-C750 also has a Night mode, which compresses the sound by reducing the dynamic range and sound output during loud passages. It also increases the low passages proportionally so the faint movie dialog can be more clearly heard at low volume levels. I left the Night mode in the factory default position: OFF. The DVD-C750 has internal test tones for level matching the analog outputs. You cannot, however, adjust the speaker levels while a DVD is playing. This makes it very difficult (nearly impossible) to adjust speaker levels when using the more precise test tones of special calibration discs like Avia. I resorted to using the internal test tones to level match my speakers for DVD-A /SACD playback and tweaked it thereafter for more precise level matching. The DVD-C750 allows you to adjust the delay times for the center channel and surround speakers. Delay times are in milliseconds rather than feet or meters (note every 1ms of delay corresponds to approximately 1.1 ft). Since my surrounds are closer to the listening position than my fronts, I selected a 10ms delay for the surrounds.

Video Set-Up

I began the video set up the same as the audio. For this review, I used the new Hitachi 70"VS810 LCD, the new Hitachi 55HDT51 55"plasma, and the Phillips 30PW850H HDTV. The DVD-C750 factory default for screen shape is 4:3 and I selected 16:9. I set the progressive scan mode to ON. There are four choices for Picture settings: Standard, Bright, Soft and Personal. The Personal setting allows you to adjust Brightness, Contrast, Tint, and Color. I chose the Standard mode. The other option in the picture settings menu is selecting Black Level Enhance. You can only adjust this when the DVD player is set for NTSC; it will have no effect if the DVD player is set to PAL. I left the Black Level Enhance setting to OFF for the review. The only other selection in the video set up is for Closed Captioning. I left this in the factory default OFF position. One final note about the onscreen display: when initiating the OSD it fills the entire screen. When you try to make an adjustment for video in the Personal Settings the onscreen display remains. This makes it very difficult to make adjustments with a disc like AVIA because you only see the onscreen display, not the changes being made. The other thing I noticed was an absence of Gamma control. I wish more DVD manufacturers would include this in the set up menus. The length of the load time is approximately 18 seconds from the time I pushed the door Close button on the front panel.