Power Acoustik HDVD-73BG Headrest Review
Our Rating: 
The HDVD-73BG from Power Acoustik seems like a nice it should be ideal for anyone’s car ride home. Featuring a wide feature set, including built in FM transmitter and a compact 7 inch screen, initially when taken out of the box it seems as though this is a quality product. It’s well made and feels very solid, and the color and texture of the product seems very professional, as you would expect from a Power Acoustik product. Our friends at Sparco gave us a loan of the beige model to try out, but it also comes in two shades of gray, as well as black for you cool cats out there.
Initial impressions are very favourable, with the unit displaying great picture quality with no obvious ghosting around the edges of the screen. The array of inputs and outputs on the unit really is quite impressing, with USB and SD cards accepted so the kids or whoever will be able play anything on their stick.
Media Formats
As far as video formats go, this unit appears to play just about anything you can throw at it, including PAL and NTSC DVD formats, DIVX and VCDs too for extra measure. It had a little bit of trouble with some high quality DivX’s I threw at it however, with a little bit of stuttering every couple of seconds. Now this could have been just down to the encoding used on the media file – I didn’t have any other divx videos to test on it before I had to give it back.
Installation was completed in 10 minutes; the headrest arms adjust quite easily once you get the hang of it but the useless one single page of instructions did not provide much use towards working it out. Thankfully I am MALE so I don’t read instructions anyway so I got there in the end, after realizing that I had to change the pole diameter.
The radio transmitter built in is ok, but it crackles a bit, probably due to interference with the car radio.
Picture Quality
OK, onto picture quality – it’s great. The 640 x 236 resolution screen is crystal clear and presented my movie of choice (The Incredibles) in vibrant color. Sound is also pretty good for one of these models.
Now the bad. When playing a DVD there seems to be some sort of rubbing noise within the casing – this can get quite distracting. Our friends at Sparco report that they have had to send a few back for scratching DVD’s, so perhaps I received one of the models that were affected. Regardless, this rubbing noise can be annoying, and if there are other reports of the unit damaging DVD’s then it is hard to recommend this model.
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