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There are some redeeming features, however, such as the subwoofer's hearty bass output. It's a little wild at times, lacking the control shown by pricier bass-boxes, but it packs just the right amount of muscle to make those crunching Middle Earth fight scenes sound suitably exciting, even if the front speakers don't keep up their end of the bargain.

And for a £240 system, the quality of DVD-Audio playback is impressive, with our 48kHz/24-bit jazz test disc sounding sharp, clean and controlled - highlighting that the system is perhaps more at home with music than movies.

Moving back to DVDs, picture quality is solid rather than spectacular. Colour reproduction is rich and realistic, motion is smooth and there's a pleasing lack of digital noise, though with the upscaling set to 1080i, images seem just a touch softer than we're used to. Nothing major, but it stops the deck reaching the heights scaled by rival 2.1 systems.

In terms of digital media playback, the system shows no weaknesses, with smooth, glitch-free reproduction of our test DivX, MP3, WMA and JPEG files.

Verdict

To us, it seems as though Samsung spent too much time perfecting the HT-X200's (admittedly gorgeous) design and not enough time tweaking its sound quality. If it had, we could have had a bona fide bargain on our hands, but despite those jaw-dropping looks and its generous feature list, this system is a big disappointment.

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