I bought the above remote on eBay for ~$140, and after using it for a few hours it is WELL worth the money. I've never owned a really good all-in-one remote before, but I have used my friend's Pronto remote and seen a few others in stores. This one came with good reviews and a thumbs up from an audio guy I know so I took the plunge.

Setup is a breeze. It plugs into your PC with a USB cable and everything is configured through a web-based interface. The UI could be a tad bit better, but I'm not complaining - no more punching in device codes to try to get stuff to work. The software walks you through creating macros like "Watch a Movie" or "Listen to Music" that are convenient. I had to tweak a few things to get everything working perfect but it was relatively painless. The range is good and I like the recharging base station. It helps me keep the remote in one place.

It even controls the Empeg with codes downloaded from the website.

Harmony remotes are very cool. I thought I would mention that the lesser models don't offer much less functionality. I had a Harmony 628 remote which was reasonably cheap and did all of the interesting programmable macro things. Differences I can see are the 880 has the lovely rechargable docking station (batteries in the 628 last for about 3 months max), colour screen, and looks much better.

If you are looking at a Harmony, you need to be aware of one quite important detail. To get the most out of the remote, your devices must be able to switch to a certain input on a keypress. My Technics stereo could not switch from Tape/Tuner/CD to Aux using the remote (oh the pain). Also my Samsung TV could not switch to a specific input (Tuner, SCART 1, SCART 2, S-Video) with a single button - it has one button which cycles through the inputs.

Because of this, I would press 'Play Xbox', and the Xbox would turn on, the TV would come on the wrong input and the stereo would be on Tuner. It was a mess. I sold it to a guy who got everything working perfectly. YMMV - I think my devices are an exception.

The "lesser" remotes in the 6-series are in fact a notch above the 880.

The key layout on the 880 frankly stinks. The key shapes although pretty to look at are not very functional, especially the volujme and channel buttons. The oval direction pad is pretty good and definitely better than their others.

The color screen is pretty useless. They employ roughly 8-bit color only on the activity screen. After that you've got white text on a blue background and that's it. The font rendering is hideous to say the least. To top it off, the remote is slow. It queues up commands like crazy (even if you adjust the settings and delayes for the respective devices that you're controlling).

As a point of reference here are some of the remotes I have:

Harmony 880
Harmony 688
Harmony 748
Pronto TSU 2000
Pronto SBC-RU 950 (European version of TSU-3000)
Home Theater Master MX-700
Home Theater Master MX-850
Radio Shack model 15-1994
UEI Kamelen model 9000-series
and a ton (maybe 10-12) device-specific remotes, like the TiVo peanut, DirectTV white DVR remote, etc..

I picked one up a about a month ago. I love the stupid thing My roommate took one look at it, and instantly decided that he'd never be able to figure it out. After showing him the 'Watch TiVO' button, he changed his mind to 'wow, this is simple'. One of the best features is the backlight turning on as soon as you move the remote.

I have two minor gripes about it. First, I really don't care for having to enter all my devices through their website. Something during the registration kind of bothered me, but I don't remember what it was any more. Guess it couldn't have been too awfully bad. The second is how easy it is to hit the >> button when trying to hit the play button. It might just be lack of familiarity, but I seem to do that way too much while fast forwarding through commercials.

I didn't realize you could set it up to control the empeg... that would be awesome. I'm going to do that as soon as I get home tonight.

Edit: I just added the empeg to my setup, now I just need to update the remote when I get home. I really do love this remote.

-- Tim

I've got that remote too. Paid full price though, but I do consider it to be worth every penny. I did have to do a ton of tweaking since my TV doesn't have descrite codes for the different inputs I guess it's time for a new TV

Wow... I too would be interested in your opinion. I currently have a Pronto that is woefully out of sync with my current setup. My friends have recommended the Harmony line and they look interesting. Especially the 890 with the RF to IR blaster.

Ok, I just wrote a nice long post but apparently I took to long and when submitting it wouldn't take. Came back and... post gone. Argh.

Summary: LCD touch-screen remote have only an initial wow-factor. none of them are ideal or well suited for controlling visual media (mainly because there's no tactile feedback and you have to look at them, taking focus away from what you should be concentrating on).

The Home Theater Masters are some of the best built and feel really good in the hand despite their slightly larger size. They can be programmed (albeit very manually via software) to work in an all-activity method. No state tracking like Harmony, so it's best if your devices have good discrete code support or can use work-arounds to achieve specific starter-states (it supports pretty long macros which are easily set up via software). It's missing a few keys which are fairly important for some devices/activities. Its transport controls are not well organized. Great direction pad on the 850 (one of the best around) and also the best feeling buttons of any remote I've used (again only the 850, previous versions used awful clear-coated "gem" finish).

I use a Harmony 880 as my primary remote right now. I think the best Harmony is likely the newly released model under the Harmon Kardon brand. I have yet to see the screen in person but in press shots it looked like it was going to be a lot better than on the 880 and the button layout is definitely better. The remote shape loses the peanut shape like the 520 and XBOX remote which will weaken its comfort level in the hand, but it still looks attractive and usable.

All the remotes in my list have varying levels of deficiencies. Unfortunately so do all the other products out there, regardless of price. So it becomes a question of finding one that is best balanced for your usage requirements.

I touched on a number of other points in my original message, but I'm way too tired to rethink and re-write it all right now... Sorry.

Bruno

Sounds good, thanks Bruno...

I've set up my Pronto so the two most useful functions (for instance, FF and Play for TiVo) are on the hard buttons. That solves most of my issues with the LCD, but I think it's time to move on.

The Harmon Kardon Harmony looks really nice. I might have to hunt that one down.

Wow. Just wow. I'm suprised by the reactions of the people here. I bought one of these about 4 months ago and returned it within a week. I absolutely hated the thing. The web interface was simply terrible and unintuitive, which is funny, given that's what it's designed for. I think the problem is that I knew what I wanted the damn thing to do, but I couldn't figure out how to tell the "user friendly" interface to do it the way it wanted.

Another problem is that they are woefully short on codes for older devices. Granted, this is a problem for all remotes, but they seemed to have less than I can find for my Pronto on Remote Central.

Back to my ancient Pronto for me. I just can't give up that much control.

Other than that, I can't agree more with you, Tony. Discrete codes are a huge pet peeve of mine with new electronics. IMO, they are the one thing that would make home theaters and universal remotes more accessible to technophobes than anything. I wish Logitech could somehow lobby manufacturers to make these codes more accessible.

ps-anyone know where I can find really good deals on Pronto remotes? I would love to have one with a few more hard buttons. Any suggestions? I still have the T1000, I think

I got one of these and have been very happy with it; the web configurator was nasty and required several attempts to achieve the desired result, but it did have codes for everything I needed and works well.

I had a Pronto Pro previously (the one with the CSTN colour screen) and had it programmed up to do everything but the lack of hard buttons really annoyed me.

The killer feature of the Harmony IMO is that it has a "help" button for all those times that a code gets lost (the devices I'm controlling are in two rooms) and you end up with audio but no picture or vice-versa. It steps you through a "is the TV on?", "is the amplifier on?" sequence, sending out appropriate codes as it goes which is absolutely necessary for non-techie users!

Of course, discrete codes would solve much of that problem if they existed for my kit...

Hugo

Bruno, thanks for mentioning the Home Theater Master remotes. For some reason I've never seen them on Remote Central, although I'm usually there looking for Pronto codes and miss their reviews.

The 850 looks good, although I'm really drawn to the 950. I like the design much better. Too bad it's insanely expensive ($390 is the cheapest I could find it for).

For now I'll stick with my Tivo remote. It's capable of turning on my TV and receiver, so if the receiver is already on the Tivo input, I'm good to go.

I still think Tivo should release a remote with just a few more buttons and make it a universal learning remote. That would be great. I have yet to find a remote that feels better in my hand, although the 880 was close (that's about the only thing I liked about it).

Digging up an old thread here. I've just bought a Harmony 785 and yes these things are pretty neat at the expense of what I can see could be quite a few hours of configuring, trying, configuring, trying etc.

The Logitech database seems to know about the Empeg, but doesn't have any discrete codes for things like Source, Power Off, Power On etc. As mentioned this is a big downfall of the concept when a device is missing the discrete codes - not really Logitech's fault though. I even had to go and set up my plasma to use discrete codes for on/off and input select (it defaulted to sequencing but the plasma supported the discrete codes)

For some reason it also seems to think the two sources are CD and Tuner. When it "turns off" the empeg, it actually switches it to auxiliary.

What did you guys do? At the moment I can't use my empeg remote since the battery is flat but even then it doesn't have buttons I can teach the remote to switch direct to the the MP3 or on or off.