There's a market for things that are able to please both the partner who wants surround sound excitement with their movies and the partner who will simply not put up with trailing speaker wires and enclosures dotted all around their room.

The manufacturers know this: Yamaha and Pioneer have offered multi-driver single-product surround style items.

JVC and others have attempted to get the wrap-around sound effect with just the speakers attached to the main product.

British-brand Evesham is pushing a different approach. While the Soundstage tested here is listed on the company's website under 'TV stands' - and can house a sensible amount of AV kit on its shelves - it also incorporates a set of powered surround speakers.

And I mean the whole soundstage, not just the fronts; the Evesham uses ceiling reflections and secondary wall-bounce-off to impart the sensation of sounds coming at you from all directions.

There's no psychoacoustic chicanery nor wild claims made in the manual. Instead, there's just a pretty diagram showing the directions of reflection the Soundstage is likely to create in your room if placed centrally.

Building bricks

I'll confess I am grumpy when it comes to making up flat pack furniture and so I was apprehensive about building the product. It turned out to be an utterly needless worry, as even I could assemble this in moments. It took longer to lovingly remove it all from the packaging than it took to make.

You get two big old cartons and already it looks to be scoring brilliantly on the VFM front, as for the cash asked, you are getting wooferage, speakers for all the channels, power amps to drive them all and even a smart TV stand too. It weighs a fat 44kg, too.

You get two subwoofer-looking enclosures, each with a port on the front and a grille on the side. One has a pair of springy steel strips that marry up to another set on the underside of the main speaker and amp-housing crosspiece.

This is to connect the driver that sits within the woofer, as all the power amps are in that main table part. The other enclosure has, erm, nothing in it at all. The second 'woofer' doesn't actually exist - take off the grille and there's a bare wooden panel! So you can kiss goodbye to the idea of 5.2 sound.