so I called Curtis Customer Service 800-968-9853 and after being put on hold for 5 minutes I was greeted by their tech support whom I assumed is from India due to his Indian accent. After telling him about the “Test Tone” he instructed me to replace (I guess that meant unplugging them.) all the wires for 30 minutes and unplug the system then carefully plug everything back making sure the wires are properly connected. If that doesn’t work, return the unit to the store and have it replaced.

After hanging up the phone I wasn’t satisfied with his advice since I used to do tech support for satellite receivers myself 10 years ago so I didn’t follow his suggestions of replacing all the 20 color coded wires behind my wall unit which is not easy to get to. What I did was examined the DVD I was trying to watch that I rented from Netflix. It is labeled Dolby Digital. It didn’t say 5.1 Dolby Surround. I took another cd from my collection and I found one that’s labeled 5.1 Dolby Surround. So I played that and Bingo! all 5 speakers worked.

I have no experience with Home Theater systems before and now I know that Curtis home theater systems only works on dvds with Dolby Digital Sound tracks up to 5.1 channels. I’m not sure about other brands but when I’m ready to spend $1,200 for that Bose home theater system, I know what questions to ask.

So if you bought a Curtis Home Theatre System Model DVD6091 and you can only hear the 2 front speakers working? Insert another DVD that’s labeled 5.1 Dolby Surround and choose that 5.1 Dolby option in the menu before calling their tech support from India.

This product’s quality is pretty decent for $48.95. The volume has a maximum limit which is ideal for apartments because you can’t really blast it loud enough. I mean it’s loud but not loud enough for my taste. The other downside for me is the dvd player that it came with. My BluRay player doesn’t have the inputs for its home theater speakers so I’m stuck with the Curtis dvd player if I want surround sound quality.

My overall review on this system is 6.5 out of 10

By the way I phoned Curtis tech support again informing them that I wanted to give them a feedback and let them know how I fixed my problem and that the tech support that answered me previously didn’t know anything about their product. So I politely explained to him why I was only hearing 2 speakers and gave him a short lesson on DVDs how some of them are not compatible with 5.1 surround sound systems and that he’s going to get the same support question soon since these units are flying off the shelf this Black Friday. Then he hanged up on me, or the line was dropped for some reason LoL. Not even a thank you. Oh well. This is why I’m not a big fan of “Off Brand” products. Their support sucks.