Marantz ES7001

Want surround sound without the wires?

Don't we all - but the fact is that, without lashing up five speakers and a sub to your kit, you're not going to be able to experience proper surround sound, right?

Well, not exactly, according to Marantz. The high-end hi-fi maker is the latest firm to trot out a surround sound "bar." This metre-long solution uses technical wizardry to fool your ears into thinking there's a ton of speakers in the room.

Setup is Jade Goody-simple. You just select a few parameters (distance, number of listeners) and the surround effect automatically adjusts itself. And with a good selection of inputs, including a couple of HDMIs, hooking up several pieces of AV kit is easy.

And the best part is, the surround actually works. It manages to "bend" sound round your sitting position convincingly for the rear left and right channels, plus delivers crisp centre-channel dialogue and front left and right effects. It's not quite as punchy as a multi-speaker setup, of course, but it's a much neater alternative.

One area that's slightly lacking is bass: there isn't as much rumble as you get from, say, the Logic3 SoundStage, and in order to boost this low-end grunt to truly floor-shaking levels you'll have to hook up a separate subwoofer - a little galling given that you've already shelled out £800 for the bar.