Watching the loudspeaker industry struggling to cope with the demands of flatscreen television displays has been an unedifying sport. Yet this is outclassed by the even bigger compromises made by the manufacturers of the sets themselves, who seem to delight in throwing the baby out with the bath water by sacrificing any pretence of sound quality in the pursuit of ever thinner and smaller form factors. And don't even get me started on the unholy fiasco the industry has made of civilizing the subwoofer...

Well, here's a system designed to match the packaging advantages of a sub/sat array - and it's strikingly successful in the way it does so. Interestingly, it comes from MartinLogan, a loudspeaker manufacturer with an established track record of excellence, which it is patently not about to sacrifice on the alter of diminutive packaging.

So let's get it on record straightaway: as a sub/sat system (albeit one larger than the designation might normally infer), this Fresco i/Dynamo 5.1 system is in a class of its own. It has a tonal balance that's light and open, perhaps a little too forward if I was pushed, but undeniably detailed and analytical, with negligible levels of obvious colouration.

As a 5.1 system, MartinLogan's Fresco i/Dynamo is particularly impressive with the often unnoticed off-stage sounds - the subtle sounds of water lapping in Swimming Pool for example, and the way that the different surroundings modulate speech dialogue quality in the same film.

As so often, it is the more subtle and less in-your-face audio events where this system really struts its stuff, though to its credit it also packs real power in the action scenes of Ridley Scott's sonically excellent Black Hawk Down. I suspect you could run out of grunt when playing back this film too enthusiastically, butthe subtly nuanced stuff is, well, subtle and nuanced.

Speech quality is always crisp, intelligible and genuinely lifelike - someone has done some serious listening while developing this model - and the music and special effects that flesh out most soundtracks are well-defined and colourful, with justa hint of aggression at times.