In the same way that there is a definite hot price point of around £350 for subwoofers, there is a massive amount of competition for your money from speaker manufacturers aimed at those cinephiles who will be prepared to spend around £1,000 on a 5.1 speaker system.

It's not enough to start reaching into the realms of audiophilia, but just the right amount for you to have an awful lot of your urges satisfied. Enter KEF's Q Series.

I have recently had a run in with a collection of smaller-footprint systems, but the setup here is not clamouring to be let into the designer bracket. Even so, it's not ugly, and the Q Series is big enough in cubic capacity to really encompass some air and have the ported enclosures shift quite a decent amount of it about.

Its performance is lovely in a lot of ways. For one, it treads pretty far in the direction of Partner Acceptance. The loved one mightn't want you to install dog-coffins all round the living room, but these look nice and techy without being too big, and they are all ovoids. From the cross-sections of the boxes - including the active subwoofer - down to the feet, there are few square and ugly edges.

Also, and much more importantly, they sound lovely. Potent and fast, with wicked dynamics and a subwoofer that really underpins and adds huge emotional impact.

Attack of the cones

The corner speakers are the smallest-of-the-range iQ1 enclosures. They are petite and have a brace of drivers - a tweeter nestles at the apex of a 130mm bass cone. A long-proven device called Uni-Q by KEF, it has the advantage of having the HF and LF source coming from the same virtual point in space, which is good for phase coherency.

The centre (the iQ2c) has the same speaker complement. There is a bigger centre in the range, though, and the iQ1 has a bigger brother and three tower models using up to three midbass drivers.

The difference between my iQ2c centre and the four corner boxes is that while the centre is rear-ported, the iQ1 has a fat port just below its upper-mounted driver assembly on the front drop. KEF supplies foam bungs for stoppering these if the bass is too overblown.