OTHER TECH

Onkyo USR-5RF The USR-5RF's wide body fills the palm of your hand. Although it's the most expensive of our three remotes, at least it has a nice sense of style. It even has a chummy acronym, CHAD, for Custom Home Automation Device. Its 2-megabyte memory allows extensive customization. And its touchscreen uses graphic icons as well as dot-matrix labels to guide you. You can add, delete, and relabel buttons or menus. Because the "pages" are customizable, you can put often-used buttons on earlier pages and move less-used ones further back.

CHAD can associate learned commands with every device button, and you can create a "nearly unlimited" number of macros with up to 255 steps each. The total number of macros, timers, and devices it can control is limited only by memory. Macros and timer events can be grouped, with each group containing up to 25 macros or events. The remote is preprogrammed with codes for more than 500 brands.

The home menu lets you select the type of device you want to control, and each device has several menu pages. There are eight different operating modes, each with its own set of menus, that let you control devices, learn commands, assign labels and icons to buttons, and add components or macros. You can also delete a button, component, or macro, change the order of commands in a menu, tell the remote what gear you want it to control, and configure it to issue infrared (IR) or radio-frequency (RF) commands. There are two hard buttons, located below the LCD, that change function depending on the circumstance. To the right of the LCD are five dedicated hard buttons for channel and volume up/down and mute.

Onkyo's CHAD worked well, with minimal quirks. Its menus are quite pleasing - the best looking of the three by far - but because many of them have large dark areas, they weren't always as clear as simple text-on-white displays. Fortunately, a handy thumb control lets you adjust the LCD's contrast for optimal viewing.

CHAD is also the most complex of the three remotes, and with so many menus and functions, it wasn't always easy to operate. For example, Onkyo doesn't supply a printed code list. The advantage is that you don't have to go hunting for the manual when you need to program CHAD to operate a new piece of gear. The disadvantage is that accessing the right stored code set requires a lot of button pushing, which I found a bit cumbersome. CHAD was quick to learn from my dedicated remotes, however, and was indifferent to all but the brightest ambient lighting.

Befitting its flagship status, the Onkyo remote has a number of optional accessories. The BCC-5 docking station ($150) shown in the photo on page 66 recharges its batteries from a supplied AC adapter. I particularly like this charger because it lets you lay the remote flat and operate components with it even while it's charging.

The CHADEdit software for Windows 95 and higher (free from Onkyo's Web site) duplicates the remote's setup functions in an easy-to-use PC environment. (The remote connects to a PC via a minijack that accepts the supplied RS-232 cable.) The editing tools let you customize the layout of the touchscreen, create macros, and anything else you can do using the remote's own interface. In addition, you can change the typefaces of button labels or use your own custom bitmapped images as icons instead of labels (although that consumes a relatively large amount of memory). More important, you can use CHADEdit to load firmware updates into the remote.

An emulator in CHADEdit lets you test a new setup to make sure it performs as you want. For example, I tried out some selected IR codes by hooking up the remote and verifying that the components responded correctly. This software is a great feature, but I expect it will appeal only to power users. Then again, given its sophistication and price, CHAD itself might appeal mostly to power users. Too bad, because once it's configured, it has user-friendly features that even neophytes and technophobes will appreciate.