Yamaha YSP-1100

If you are officially banned from having speakers and the associated cables strewn all arough your lounge, then you'll probably welcome the Yamaha YSP-1100 with open arms. It's certainly large, but it's been designed to sit underneath a stand or wall mounted television, and when you consider the sort of thing that it's replacing, it's an enormous space saving. You can't see them, but believe it or not there are FORTY TWO speakers in this unit. The first FORTY are directional mid and high frequency cones the last TWO are designed for bass response. Like a fully featured surround sound decoder the 1100 needs setting up to create the correct surround sound effects. You can do this manually, through a fairly complicated menu system, or you can plug in this microphone [show] and let the system set itself up, which it does by sending a series of tones and white noise from the speaker, to the microphone. This gives the unit a decent idea of your room acoustics, which it uses to adjust itself. The remote control is decent, and has one excellent feature we really liked. If you are listening to a movie at night, and want to avoid disturbing people, you can use the "my beam" mode, which focuses the speakers on your location and reduces the bass. It does this by beaming out a sound which is received by the remote control. The 1100 is a great system. We love the sound, but we weren’t amazed by the surround sound effects, while the system makes stereo sound amazingly wide and involving, it doesn't quite manage to convince us that there is stuff happening behind us. I'm Ian Morris and this is the Yamaha YSP-1100, quite literally a bar of sound.