Like many of you, I assume, a welter of remotes sits on the table next to my TV watching chair. Among them are remotes for the TV, the preamp/processor, the DVR, three DVD players, a CD player … nine in all.
Yes, it's true, that each one works quite well with the device it controls. And for any given activity I generally pull just two or three of them out of the drawer to keep at my side. But even after all this time – some of these components I have owned for years – I still sometimes cannot remember for a particular remote whether the volume or channel-change control is on the left or the right, whether the pause function is deactivated by touching play or pause again. I could go on. And if I suddenly need another remote in the dark, I have to feel around until I find one that has the right shape. Sometimes I am wrong. Sometimes I give up and turn on a small flashlight I keep by my chair.
Over the years I have programmed so-called universal remotes that ship with certain components to manage other equipment in addition to the one piece the remote was designed to handle – setting up the TV remote to handle basic playback functions of a DVD player, for example. That is helpful but hardly a global solution. So for a long time I have been curious about high-end, dedicated universal remotes. You know, the models that come "naked" and are designed to adroitly handle every piece of equipment you have. So here we have assembled three of them for survey: The Monster Central Controller AVL 300, the Logitech Harmony 1000, and the Universal MX-3000.
All three are set up using a computer and proprietary software, and the Monster and Harmony remotes must be set up over the Internet. All three have backlit LCD displays, two of them touchscreens. All three have rechargeable batteries and docking stations into which you can nest the remote. The Monster and Harmony remotes each sell, list price, for $499.95 and can be programmed relatively easily by consumers. These two remotes are strikingly similar. More on that later. The Universal remote sells for $999.95 and is designed to be set up by a custom installer. And all of them did what they are advertised to do, more or less.
For those of you who may not have looked in a while, universal remotes have matured. The big thing now is "macros." If you are old enough to remember, early DOS programs used to offer macro buttons that could be programmed so that the program carried out a series of functions every time a single button, or a sequence of buttons, was pushed. So it is with remotes.
All three of these remotes and most others on the market today allow you to tell the associated software what components you have and which ones you want to turn on when you chose a certain activity. To watch a DVD, for example, you could program the remote to turn on the TV, turn on your preamp/processor or AVR and switch it to the DVD input, then turn on your TV and switch it to the proper input. For me, that alone is worth the price of admission.
I looked at each remote in turn and used it awhile before turning to the next one. I began with the Monster AVL 300, which had the most traditional look of the three– a long, narrow device that fits easily in the hand. The body of the remote is black with a wide silver band at the top that houses the LED display. It is not a touch screen. Instead it shows a series of commands, depending on what you are doing, and to activate one you push the button adjacent to the graphic.
This remote, like the other three, has an interesting and useful way of determining when and how to turn on the backlight. Pick it up and the light turns on, triggered by a built-in motion sensor. Once, as I turned off the lights for the evening, I bumped into the coffee table in the dark and woke up all three of them. Together they nearly lit the room!
In truth, however, the Monster was the "dimmest" of the three. It has a tiny LCD screen, only 1.5" x 1.25 inches. And the resolution is quite low – soft, even fuzzy. The resolution appears to be even lower than on my cell phone, which I know to be 240 x 240.
As with all the remotes, this one had to be charged overnight before first use. It comes with a precarious charging cradle, a plate with low sides into which you rest the remote. But making sure that the contacts between the remote and charger are aligned takes a bit of practice. They can easily be jostled out of place. The design here is quite poor.
To set up the Monster remote, I first had to load the software. Assuming you are online, the program searches for updates as soon as it is loaded. In my case it found one, even though Monster had sent me the remote just three weeks earlier. The program leads you through a series of questions about how you use your system and what components you have. It's best to come to the computer with a list of the components you want the remote to control and their model numbers.
Be warned, however: The Monster software comes with no instructions. Nothing. It is relatively self-explanatory, but if you want to do something it did not predict, or you make a mistake, beware. You can find yourself deep in a forest with no obvious escape. The software has a help tab, but when I clicked on it, up came a blank screen.{mospagebreak}
Along the way, the software asked me to enter the make and model number for each piece of equipment I owned. It found nearly all of them, but it still asked me to place the original remotes near the Monster remote and press two or three buttons so the Monster could learn the other remote's commands. Changing or upgrading components would be relatively easy using this interface, which is a plus.
The software also asked me to connect the included "omnilink" box to the computer, too – though no cable was supplied. I didn't have another of these particular USB cables and had to go buy one. Quite irritating. But I was chagrined when I learned that the "omnilink" box was for use only if my component were in a cabinet or otherwise out of sight of an IR signal. That was not the case, and so I didn't need it. This was the first high-end universal remote I had ever used, so I simply followed the software prompts and wound up taking a trip and spending $20 unnecessarily. As I said, there are no instructions.
The Monster is also able to control lighting – lamps and light fixtures. But you have to buy light-station controllers at an extra charge for each light to be controlled. I did not try these. But the remote does not control its own lighting very well. All of the buttons have a bit of backlighting, but for some, particularly those on the bottom half of the remote, the lighting is quite dim, making the controls hard to read.
Once programmed, I tried out a macro – watch a DVD. And sure enough the remote turned everything on and set each device to the correct input or output. So I watched a DVD and tried to control everything with the remote. It was a challenge. One of the great debates in the world of universal remotes is how large to make the screen. Many users want ever-larger screens so they can see more of the controls at a time. With this tiny screen, I can understand why.
After turning everything on for watching a DVD, the Monster displayed these controls, in this order: Eject, Chapter plus, Chapter minus, audio, subtitle and aspect ratio. (The remote has dedicated buttons for play, stop, fast forward, chapter skip and pause.) The selection of controls seemed utterly random. To find other controls for the Pioneer BDP-HD1 Blu-ray DVD player, I had to push the "Component controls" button, choose the DVD player and then scroll through four pages of commands. In the end, for anything but the most basic commands, it was easier just to reach for the player's own remote.
For some components the Monster offered enigmatic controls. When I asked it to let me "watch TV," it turned on the TV, the cable box, the preamp and amp. But the controls it threw onto its little screen when finished were just these three: "Fav," "aspect," and "E." The first two I understood. As for E, pushing it had no effect, and I never figured out what it was for. To access all the other controls for the TV required scrolling through ten screens of commands. Forget it. But then, this is a weakness, more or less, of every universal remote.
After using the Monster for a week, I was more than ready to move on. Next I pulled out the Logitech Harmony 1000. This is a larger remote, more pleasing to look at because it has a large, bright, colorful LCD screen. The remote itself is brushed aluminum with a black frame surrounding its 2.75 x 2-inch screen.
Unlike the Monster, the Harmony has very few "hard" buttons, as dedicated buttons built into the remote are called in the business. The Harmony's hard buttons are volume, channel, mute, go back one step, a four-way menu navigation control with "OK' in the middle, and separate left and right buttons. There's also a button to bring you back to the opening screen, and another to turn everything off.
The Harmony remote looks neat and clean, but a good portion of the top area, perhaps one third, is empty. Why is it there? With all that empty space, one wonders, why not put in more hard controls? How about pause, or stop or menu?
In any case, I installed the software and started to set up the remote when I noticed – Logitech-Harmony uses the same software as Monster. Exactly the same. Well, I called Harmony, and it turned out that Logitech makes the remote for Monster – to Monster's specifications, of course. But the software is the same, so all the benefits and liabilities of the Monster program apply to this one, too, including the ease of setup and ability change components easily.
Once set up, it turned out that for most functions the Harmony displays a graphically pleasing suite of basic commands: Play, stop, pause, fast-forward, etc. buttons, while other controls along the side of the touch screen and in all four corners allow you to call up other menus, like a numerical keypad. The screen is large enough that it does not look crowded.
The macros turn everything on (and off) just as they should, and most of the commands for basic viewing are either among the hard buttons, on the opening screen or just one screen away. The Harmony had a much more open, pleasing and easy to use feel than the Monster, and the price is exactly the same: $499.95. With that, I cannot understand why anyone would buy the Monster. The Harmony, too, offers an RF communication system at a separate charge and can be configured to control lighting – again after buying some additional equipment.
On the Harmony, all the hard buttons were perfectly backlit. This one, too, I used on its own and found that for normal viewing I could control everything relatively easily with the one remote. A greater array of basic commands was available on screen. But for anything complex – making picture adjustments, changing other settings, as examples – it was theoretically possible with the Harmony but much easier with the component's original remote. I liked the Harmony, but I could not bring myself to put the original remotes away. So in fact, the Harmony simply added a new remote to my 17-inch-wide row of remotes. The Harmony increased the row's length to 21-inches.{mospagebreak}
Next I tried out the Universal MX 3000, a $999.95 version on this theme. It's a little bigger than the Harmony and offers roughly the same number of hard buttons. The screen is very slightly larger. It's 3 x 2.5 inches. But the biggest difference is that the Universal doesn't easily allow the end user to set up the remote. The software isn't included with the remote. The tiny bit of literature that comes with the unit directs buyers to Universal's Web site to download the software and a copy of the manual can be downloaded from there as well. Users must register online and enter the serial number of the unit to download the software.
I finally did manage to get a copy of the software, using a borrowed ID and password. But once I had downloaded the MX-3000 editor, I discovered that an "end-user" without training is lost. The software is Windows-based and functions like any other windows program. Looking at that would be like looking at Microsoft Excel for the very first time, with no background in spreadsheets and no instructions, and trying to figure out to make it work. Although a programming manual is accessible through the Help tab, the learning curve here is steep, something Universal acknowledges up front.
Universal offers half-day training for custom installers, and they have an online training program that would take at least half a day to work through (although that, too, is password-protected.) I didn't have the time or the inclination. So Universal sent over training manager Robert Durbin to set up my review sample. It took just over three hours – four times as long as it took me to set up the Monster or the Harmony- for Durbin to program, test and customize the remote to control my system. As a consumer the setup would have cost me an additional $300 to $500, maybe more, depending on the installer.
This also means that, unlike the Monster and Harmony remotes, anytime you add a piece of equipment or change your system in any significant way, you have to call the installer back to reconfigure your remote. So what do you get for all that extra money and trouble?
Well, you get the ability to customize the appearance of your remote endlessly. You can even use a photo of your choice as the wallpaper for any of the remote's "pages." You can add animations. Robert added a cartoon shark that chomped away as the remote turned on my equipment.
You can set up different control programs for different users. You can add sound, including sound effects of your choice, even verbal instructions. On screen " buttons" can take several forms and styles and be labeled however you like. And the Universal, like all the others, can be set up to transmit RF signals instead of IR.
Durbin noted that the Universal can pace the commands it issued – say, turning on the TV only after the HD DVD player has booted. He set mine up that way since the duration of HD DVD boot-up times are notoriously long.
On the day I wrote this review, it happened that The New York Times ran a review of the Harmony remote, and in it the writer quoted a custom installer, who said the Harmony (and Monster) would be adequate for a system with just a few components.
"If someone has a room with a projector on the ceiling, a drop-down screen, satellite receivers and surround sound," the installer said, "your user-programmed remote probably isn't going to be adequate."
I wonder why that is so. Both the Harmony and the Monster can control 15 components each. Before I moved last fall, I had a projector on the floor, a drop down screen, a satellite receiver, surround sound and much more. I see no reason the Harmony could not have controlled those pieces of equipment, just as it controls everything I have now. But for what it's worth, Universal claims its remote can control no fewer than 255 components.
In fact, after using the Universal I found it to be a formidable product – well made, reliable and impressive. But its basic functions – turning equipment on and controlling it – were little different than Harmony's. The screen offered different graphics that some users may or may not prefer. It is infinitely more customizable, from a cosmetic point of view, and also includes provisions for multi-zone audio. But in practical daily use in my system, I found little difference between the two.
If you care a lot about cosmetics, want a remote that can be programmed to control every function every one of your remotes (and don't mind having to call your custom installer back for a few billable hours now and then), you will like the Universal. If not, the Harmony carries out more or less the very same functions just as well – and for a lot less money and trouble.
Keep in mind that with the Monster and Harmony remotes, you'll most likely have to keep your components' remotes nearby or do some additional programming to carry out or anything beyond the basic functions. But I still found them quite handy, and if I were to buy one of the three, I would buy the Harmony.
Monster MCC AVL 300
Highs
Easy to handle
Can control lighting with added accessories
Lows
Controls can be enigmatic
Small, low-resolution screen (not a touchscreen)
No setup instructions
Logitech Harmony 1000
Highs
Easy to use once set up
Large, clear, uncrowded screen
Lows
Same setup software as Monster, with no instructions
Universal MX-3000
Highs
Vastly more flexible and configurable than the other two
Well-made, reliable, and impressively designed
Lows
No user setup
Expensive, and installer setup is an extra charge
You'll pay again for a new setup whenever your system changes
Monster MCC AVL 300
Screen size: 1.5 x 1.25 inches
Controls: Up to 15 components
Price: $499.95
www.monstercable.com
Logitech Harmony 1000
Screen Size: 2.75 x 2 inches
Controls: Up to 15 components
Price: $499.99
www.logitech.com
Universal MX-3000
Screen size: 3 x 2.5 inches
Controls: up to 255 components
Price: $999.95
www.universalremote.com
Reviewed by Joel Brinkley
