LG has been playing the style card a lot recently, and it's paying off.

The LG HT953TV may only be a mid-price DVD system, but the elegant speakers and glossy black styling perfectly match the current crop of luxurious glossy black flatscreen TVs.

In fact, it could be the ideal partner for a posh plasma or LCD telly – it offers 1080p upscaling, an HDMI input and enough power on tap to fill your front room with genuine 5.1 surround sound.

10.1 Surround sound

We've seen a lot of all-in-one systems shedding their rear speakers and relying instead on pseudo surround effects with a varying degree of success, so it's refreshing to find LG combining innovation with a full quota of speakers. But the Korean brand has gone even further by using its own digital sound processing to create – get this – virtual 10.1 surround sound.

And with legendary high-end audio guru Mr Mark Levinson onboard, it seems LG is really pushing the audio capabilities of its all-in-one systems.

Lovely bubbly

The impressive-looking tower speakers are mostly plastic with some metal reinforcement, but LG's 'champagne flute' design is a big step forward, making the competition at this price look distinctly clumsy.

Lifting all of the tweeters high puts them level with your ears, and endows them with a serious sonic advantage in terms of sound-staging.

Of course, a more solid front pair would deliver extra weight, but with the powerful subwoofer on hand to reinforce the low-end, LG has pitched this speaker system just right.

Like the speakers, the main unit looks a little precarious on its pedestal, but it, too, is anchored by
a heavy base plate, and the advantage with this form factor is all about space-saving and convenience.

The vertical panel makes it easy to tap in your commands and read the display, while the slot-loading disc drive is touch-sensitive for that extra wow-factor.

Well-connected system

The LG HT953TV is pitched at the mid-price range, so there's no Blu-ray support or internal hard drive for storing music and video. That's not to say LG has been stingy with the features.

There's a USB input that can play MP3 files from a flash-memory storage device (and record onto it) plus a memory card reader and 30-pin iPod socket that'll fire all 'Pods and give you full onscreen control of your music and video through the remote control.

More significantly, is the HDMI input at the back, which is frustratingly absent on the majority of systems at this price. Significant because it means you can add your own Blu-ray player at a later date,
or a games console, or set-top box.

It's version 1.3, so passing a full 1080p signal with multichannel audio is no problem either.

Stable speakers

The tower speakers snap together easily enough, leaving a hollow channel at the centre for cable management and weighty metal feet at the bottom. They're quite stable, but if you have children or big dogs, you can be sure they'll get toppled at some point.

Long runs of speaker cable with colour-coded plugs are supplied in the box, as is a generous 5m HDMI cable, so getting connected is painless.

LG still hasn't polished its graphic user interface (GUI) to the extent of Sony's excellent Xross Media Bar system, but the basic graphics make it a fairly straightforward case of scrolling through the GUI to set the output resolution and tweak the sound to suit your room.

Enthusiastic audio

It's reassuring to know that Mark Levinson himself has already tuned this system. It's not quite the megabuck pre-power hi-fi that he's used too, but you can appreciate the effort that's been made here.