Compact all-in-one systems obviously have their place. After all, the biggest hurdle to most households pursuing their home cinema dreams is the amount of space taken up by dedicated full-sized speaker systems.

But there's also a problem with the majority of compact all-in-ones: they sound awful. This is really no more than you might expect, as basic scientific principles suggest that to get a 'big' sound from a speaker, that speaker needs to be big as well.

But today those brainiacs at Pioneer appear to have ridden roughshod over science to deliver a truly compact all-in-one home cinema package, the DSC-363, that sounds anything but rubbish.

The first thing to say about the DSC-363 is that it shuns the current vogue for 2.1 systems in favour of a full 5.1 speaker package. So it should be able to deliver a true surround sound performance.

However, the 5.1 speaker package on test here really is remarkably unobtrusive, thanks to the cubic front and rear left and right speakers measuring just 100mm down each side. And the centre speaker isn't much bigger either.

The subwoofer, by comparison, is quite butch, but it can, of course, be easily tucked away out of sight behind a sofa.

In an ideal world the satellite speakers would have been a touch prettier, seeing as essentially they're just black boxes. Having said that, their sheer smallness will still make them hugely appealing to many households.

The main DVD receiver unit, meanwhile, is a very attractive affair, and plays host to a pleasing number of features to boot. Not least among these is the ability to upscale your DVDs to either 720p or 1080i through an HDMI output. Admittedly, there's no 1080p, but then this would be asking a lot of a system costing just £300.

Another handy touch is a surprisingly comprehensive suite of picture adjustments, including gamma and chroma level options which, provided you use them carefully can be used to make genuine improvements to LCD TV and projector pictures.

The disc player, meanwhile, can spin MP3, WMA, iTunes AAC, JPEG and DiVX files as well as DVDs and CDs, and the system even provides a USB port so that can play files from USB storage devices too.