Pity poor Ferrari. Everyone talks about how fast the company’s cars go, how precisely they handle, and how sexy they look. But few people ever mention one of Ferrari’s greatest accomplishments—despite the awesome capabilities of its products, they work just like any Honda, Hummer, or Hyundai. A 75-year-old grandmother can step straight from her spongy General Motors sedan into Ferrari’s new 515-horsepower 575M Maranello and make it to Sunday services in record time. If you can handle a stick shift, you can handle a Ferrari.

One Box, Five Speakers
M&K’s MP-4512 carries left, center, and right speakers on its front, and a surround speaker on each side. It mounts easily above or below a wall-mounted plasma or LCD TV. The KX-10 subwoofer is a great match for the MP-4512. (Click image to enlarge)

 
Sadly, the same cannot be said for high-performance home theater sound systems. Even experts sometimes slam down the remote in frustration, unable to figure out why their surround-sound processor refuses to budge from its DTS ES-Discrete + THX Ultra2 Music mode. We have faced many embarrassing moments when visiting manufacturers could not figure out, say, how to make the Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack of a DVD player emerge from their state-of-the-art speakers—and our experienced editors proved equally unable to solve the problem. These systems pile complexity upon complexity. Most now require the use of at least eight speakers, and some are practically unusable without the addition of a $10,000 touchscreen remote.

Hope is on the horizon, though. A new breed of super-simple systems has emerged, promising the excitement of surround sound in user-friendly packages. These products employ just one, two, or three speakers to create a surround-sound effect, and many are no more difficult to operate than a 1985 CD player.Of course, they have their limitations—a $300 all-in-one product can no more match the performance of a $20,000 audio system than a Chevy Cavalier can outsprint a Ferrari. Wisely, most manufacturers of these super-simple systems make no such claims. In fact, they pitch these systems mainly for use in bedrooms and vacation homes, not in full-blown home theaters. But can such stripped-down devices yield a satisfying sound?

That is just what we decided to find out. We abandoned the luxury of our own high-end audio systems, settled down in front of a 20-inch Sony TV, and put three of today’s most promising all-in-one surround systems to the test. Let’s see if two serious audio snobs can survive grandmother-friendly sound.

The Power of One  Some company runs commercials with the tagline, “The Power of One.” Is it a bank? An insurance company? A divorce attorney? We cannot remember. But it might be a more effective tagline for Zvox Audio, whose product perfectly embodies that concept. You see, the $199 Zvox audio system consists of a single box that sits atop or beneath your TV set. All of the speakers and electronics are built in. It doesn’t even come with a remote control because it doesn’t need one.Inside the Zvox hide three 3.5-inch speakers, a woofer, amplifiers, and an audio processing circuit that uses the company’s PhaseCue quasi-surround-sound technology. On the back are controls for overall volume and woofer level, a knob that determines the amount of the PhaseCue surround effect, a power switch, and a couple of input jacks that let you connect audio sources, such as a TV, a DVD player, a satellite receiver or cable box, or an Apple iPod music player.

B&O on a Budget
The main unit from Sherwood’s VR-670 Hollywood-at-Home system echoes some of the style we normally associate with Bang & Olufsen electronics. The unit incorporates a DVD player, a stereo amplifier, limited source switching, and Dolby Headphone processing. (Click image to enlarge)

Hookup and operation could not be much simpler. The instruction manual is a two-pager, and one of those pages is filled with lawsuit-deterring boilerplate warning you not to immerse the Zvox in a bathtub or lick its internal components during a lightning storm. We at Home Entertainment almost always encourage our readers to engage the services of a custom installation firm, but anyone who cannot install the Zvox themselves shouldn’t be allowed to light matches without supervision.
 
The sound that emerges from this little box is rather amazing. Despite its size, it produces the most spacious, enveloping sound of any all-in-one home theater system we have heard. And the basic quality of the sound is shockingly good. Dialogue, in particular, sounds natural. The PhaseCue circuit boosts the treble somewhat, which can make the Zvox sound a bit bright, but we find that setting the PhaseCue knob in the 12 o’clock position achieves both a smooth sound and a just-right degree of spaciousness. The internal woofer is the weak link here—it distorts fairly easily and limits the Zvox’s maximum volume.The Zvox is ideal for the person who wants to jazz up the sound of a TV set. It outperforms almost all TV speakers, particularly the lousy speakers built into flat-panel TVs. And now that the Zvox is available in charcoal gray or silver, in addition to the original black finish, it makes an even better plasma TV partner.

The Fun Machine   We technical types often miss the forest for the trees. We love big-budget action blockbusters packed with stunning visuals and frantic soundtracks, even if the dialogue makes the Star Wars scripts seem as erudite as Sideways. We enthuse about a fantastic music recording but overlook the fact that the artist was deservedly booted off the major labels 20 years ago. In short, we forget to have fun. But with Sherwood’s $399 VR-670 Hollywood-at-Home system, this mistake is impossible to make.

Fun is what Hollywood-at-Home is all about. Ten minutes after you slit the tape on the box, you are listening to a satisfying system that is almost foolproof to operate.The sleek main unit incorporates a DVD player, an AM/FM tuner, and amplifiers; in the right light, it looks more like a Bang & Olufsen product than like something you’d pick up at Best Buy. It comes with two speakers that look like the plastic mediocrities accompanying most home-theater-in-a-box systems, but actually sound OK. A small subwoofer with a built-in 100-watt amp rounds out the system.

The Simplest Solution
Zvox combines three speaker drivers, amplifiers, and audio processing circuitry in a single box. Practically any stereo analog audio source can connect to it, including TVs, computers, and Apple’s iPod music player. (Click image to enlarge)

The main unit has an audio input that lets you pipe the sound from your TV through the VR-670. It also has audio inputs and outputs labeled “tape.” We wonder what function these might serve until we read on the Internet that people used to record sound on ribbons of tape covered with a rust-like substance. Who knew?

The speakers do not look like much, but inside, each one has a separate woofer and tweeter—a rare find in such an inexpensive system. At first, they do not sound like much, either, but turning the treble control on the main unit down 4 decibels brings out their best. With the system thus tweaked, everything sounds pretty good, including dialogue, sound effects, and instruments in music recordings. The surprise is the woofer, which proves far more robust than we expect. It does not reproduce deep bass—one could hardly expect such a small box to perform Herculean tasks—but what bass it does produce sounds powerful and clean. The system plays loud enough to rock a small bedroom or the den in your mountain condo.The unit plays in stereo when you load a CD or a DVD, but activating its Dolby Virtual Speaker technology creates a convincing surround-sound effect. It also features Dolby Headphone processing, so you will hear surround sound even when you plug in a set of headphones. The DVD player itself performs pretty well, producing a sharp picture in either its interlaced or progressive-scan picture mode.

Hollywood-at-Home is not intended for audio connoisseurs, yet we find this system so gratifying that we continue using it long after we finish our evaluation. It’s fun, easy, affordable, and stylish—the Mazda Miata of all-in-one systems.

Muscle in Miniature Imagine your surprise if your daughter put on a CD by a hot teen actress and you heard a voice reminiscent of Ella Fitzgerald, backed by tasteful orchestral arrangements. Of course, that will never happen, but you can experience a similar sense of shock and delight if you give the M&K MP-4512 a listen.At $649 for the MP-4512 and $599 for the KX-10 subwoofer, M&K’s offering costs much more than other all-in-one solutions we have encountered. Plus, you need an audio/video receiver to power it, which will bump up the bill $200 to $600 depending on the receiver you choose. (Yes, you could use the MP-4512 with a $2,000 receiver—and you could also put a $3,000 set of wheels on a Chevy Cavalier.) Yet this system seems like a bargain.

Inside the Super-Simple Systems
The M&K MP-4512 (left) has separate pairs of binding posts for each of its five internal speakers. Behind the Zvox grille (right) lie three drivers of better quality than one might expect in a $199 component. (Click image to enlarge)

Pop the grille off the front of the MP-4512 and you encounter woofers and tweeters of the same high quality found in other M&K speakers. Somehow, M&K squeezed three two-way speakers into that little box—and tacked two wide-range drivers onto the sides to produce a surround effect. M&K suggests that the MP-4512 can mate with any of the company’s subwoofers; the tiny KX-10 we use features an 8-inch woofer and a 75-watt amp.

Except for the fact that you have to place only two speakers instead of six, the MP-4512 is no easier to install than an ordinary 5.1-channel speaker system. You still have to run five speaker cables plus a line to the subwoofer, and you still have to pick your way through the receiver’s setup menus. The real benefits are the speaker’s compact design and the fact that you do not have to run wires to rear speakers.The MP-4512 falls short of its competitors when it comes to the surround effect. You get some sense that there are speakers behind you, but the effect is subtle. Comparing the M&K system’s tonal quality to the others’, though, is like resurrecting Billie Holiday to appear in one of those “divas” TV specials with Lindsay Lohan and Hilary Duff: It’s a hopeless mismatch. The M&K’s tonality is as natural as that of the best $1,000 home theater speaker systems. There is no emphasis of any particular frequencies, and both male and female voices sound lifelike. It blends perfectly with the KX-10, too. The KX-10’s powerful, well-defined bass also helps put this system in an entirely different class.

Where the other systems run out of gas, the MP-4512 asks for more—it plays at least 10 decibels louder, so loud it can fill even a medium-sized living room with sound. Its slim design also makes it more practical than other all-in-ones for use with plasma and LCD TVs. So while the MP-4512 is no Ferrari, neither is it a Chevy Cavalier; we’re talking Audi-level performance here. Given the MP-4512’s size, this upper-middle-class sound quality is a remarkable accomplishment.

So can you get pleasing surround sound in super-simple packages? Well, yes, but what strikes us is that you have three very different yet viable options here. You can opt for the Zvox, a super-super-simple system that sounds pretty good and is easy for anyone to set up and use. The Sherwood Hollywood-at-Home system steps up in sound quality at the expense of slightly more complicated setup. And the MP-4512 produces high performance in a super-compact package, although it offers little reduction in complexity. So while our search yields no equivalent of an easy-to-drive Ferrari, it does uncover an attractive option for practically anyone.

M&K Sound, 818.701.7010, mksound.com; Sherwood America, sherwoodamerica.com, 562. 741.0960; Zvox, 781.599.5493, zvoxaudio.com