Cyberhome AD L 528

Author's product rating:   

Picture Playback	Poor
Sound Level	Good
Range of Features	Above Average
Durability	Satisfactory
Value for Money	Satisfactory

Advantages:	Cheap, reliable, multi - region .
Disadvantages:	Slow, clumsy - looking, noisy, naff remote, unresponsive .  .  .

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

I'm gonna go against the grain with this one. The CyberHome ADL528 (Cyber who?) is an award winning little DVD player. It comes highly recommended as a budget machine from a whole host of home entertainment magazines. Even here on Ciao, the five reviews that have already been posted on this product give it the full 5 stars. Based on these recommendations, I even bought one as a Christmas present for someone who herself said that it was a great player and hadn't given her any trouble at all. It's cheap, reliable and is easily converted to multi-region capability with a simple hack via the remote control. Overall then a good buy... except for one teensy weensy problem.
I just don't like it.

What do you know about it Spike? Well, I may not be an expert when it comes to the intricacies and electronics of a DVD player but I do spend a lot of my free time in dark rooms watching movies by myself (and therefore don't have many friends) so I do feel qualified to talk about this stuff to some extent.
And I say I don't like it.

I didn't really want to buy it in the first place but my previous player, a Samsung 709, decided it wasn't going to play my DVD's properly anymore. It started off as an occasional glitch on an occasional disc but soon got to the stage when it wouldn't play anything without fouling up half way through. Eventually, when I couldn't even watch an episode of Buffy without the picture freezing/skipping/breaking down, I decided it really was time to invest in a new machine.

So, off I trot to Richer Sounds in Wolverhampton to buy one of the Toshiba's that they had on special offer for £129.99.
"Yowm too late yow am mate" he said, "We'm sold out of Toshiba's aye we, yam yam yam yam..."
The only other multi-region player within my price range was the CyberHome so, disappointed that I didn't get a posh one but encouraged by the good word of mouth about the player, I parted with my £99.99 and scurried home to try it out.

Things didn't look good from the moment I turned it on, however. After pushing the crude, plastic and downright tacky on/off switch an irritating and surprisingly loud buzzing noise sprang from the machine as if it was about to explode - the kind of buzzing you can hear when you stand under a pylon. Meanwhile, my TV screen had suddenly been graced with a dull, grey and frankly ugly CyberHome screensaver, complete with the company's website address at the bottom - www.cyber-home.de
Hmm, German. Should've known...

It didn't get any better when I opened the disc tray either. Rather than gliding out, smoothly, swiftly and silently, ready and eager to accept my latest shiny Special Edition, it sort of groaned, whined a bit, crawled out to end of its track and looked at me as if to say "Oh do I have to"?

When you close the disc tray you may as well go and stick the kettle on, make a few phone calls, walk the dog, possibly write a book, because the time it takes for the CyberHome to load up a DVD can be measured in lunar cycles rather than seconds, it's just ridiculously, unforgiveably slow. Not only that, the load-up time is usually underscored by a chorus of whizzing, whirring and whining noises from the machine's drive mechanism which, while irritating, at least detracts from the buzzing, pylon sound from the power supply for a while.
I'm sure the buzzing noises have been mentioned in one of the other Ciao reviews too so it's clearly not just my player that is at fault, it's just a dodgy player in general. But I haven't finished yet. Ooooh no....

Picture quality is mediocre at best.
Well, compared to, say, a video recorder, which is what most 'budget' players are probably being compared to by the average reviewer, the colour and clarity no doubt appears to be wonderful but the CyberHome's playback quality is noticeably inferior to the Samsung player it replaced (when the Sammy worked, that is). It's difficult to put your finger on exactly how it's inferior, but it is. The picture just doesn't seem as vivid, as colourful or as lifelike as it did on the Sammy and you certainly don't get that dazzling 'wow' factor that you should do when you play a particularly well-mastered DVD (Star Wars Ep's I and II for example).

The audio quality is the good news.
When fed through a decent speaker set-up the CyberHome does give some impressive results - rich, clear and accurate sound placement that will make your car chases and explosions sound fantastic. However, the real test of a DVD player's audio capabilities are not the loud, whooshy, whizzy bits that you might expect but the quieter, more subtle moments. For example, check out the scene in Mission: Impossible where the Cruiser is dangling from a wire in a sound sensitive vault. When viewed properly this sequence is chillingly silent - I mean totally, utterly and completely silent, no trace of any sound whatsoever, no hissing, no humming, no crackling... nothing.
Except of course with the CyberHome player you've got the incessant buzzing of the machine's power supply and the steady, rhythmic strumming of the disc spinning round to contend with, which kind of renders the whole scene pointless, don't you think?

So what can I moan about next, I'm sure there was something else?
Oh yes - the remote control. It's awful. It's probably the worst remote control in the history of remote controls. It's plastic, tacky, dull, illogical and half the time you have to press the buttons at least twice to make them register.
All the buttons are exactly the same size (small) and are arranged in neat little rows of five with nothing to distinguish one from the next. Surely it makes sense to have the 'freeze frame' button next to the 'slow motion' button, and the 'play' button alongside the 'stop' button? Not on this machine it doesn't, here they are on virtually opposite corners of the remote with only a tiny symbol on them to inform you of it's function. After nearly three months of ownership I still find myself having to switch the light on to see what button I'm pressing. This is not good, there's just been zero thought put into this remote control and it needs to be redesigned sharpish.

Now then, you'll be pleased to hear I've finished whinging, I do actually have something good to say about this DVD player, albeit begrudgingly.
No matter what disc I put into this machine, be it an American region 1 disc, a 'region-code-enhanced' disc, a CD, a CD-R, a CD-RW, a DVD-R, or even a tatty old porn VCD with scratches all over it, the CyberHome played it, straight the way through, without glitching, skipping, freezing or any of the other fancy phrases that appear in the DVD monthlies. Not once. Now that's one thing I can't say for the old Samsung.

Also on the plus side is the fact that it comes with all the connections you'll ever need. Two SCART sockets, Hi Fi sockets, digital audio sockets - both coaxial and optical, headphone sockets, the lot.

The multi-region hack is dead easy too, all you need to do to convert your player from a region 2 only player into a machine that will play DVD's from anywhere in the world is to open the disc tray, press the stop button on the remote and then type in the numbers 1, 9, 9 and 9. The rest is fairly self explanatory - an engineers menu screen will appear, highlight and enter the 'region code' option and then use the 'up' and 'down' buttons to select 'all' and bingo! Job done.

So then, to recap, the CyberHome ADL528 is indeed a reasonably priced, reliable and easy to use DVD player. It has all the features and functions you'd expect and if I'm being totally fair it does actually do the job it was designed for, namely playing DVD's. To some people that may be enough.
The trouble is it just doesn't do it very well and it certainly doesn't do it with style or sophistication. For someone who rates price, reliability and ease of use as the most important factors then the Cyberhome may represent a good purchase but for a self confessed movie anorak for whom presentation is everything, the slowness, the clumsiness, the buzzy, spinning noises and that dreadful remote control are simply unforgiveable.

Not surprisingly, not recommended.