Good standard

Perhaps surprisingly, the Art 42 SL really comes into its own with standard-definition images, particularly from the DVB tuner. Shop demos tend to feature HD material to hook you in the store and then disappoint when they look soft and smeary with regular TV back home, so Loewe has concentrated on smartening up standard-def by enhancing the sharpness and removing motion blur with its DMM processing.

You can turn the effect up by degrees to find the optimum balance between naturally soft images and artificially sharpened ones and your hours of tweaking the picture will be automatically saved for that input the next time you switch the TV on. It all means that this set looks a lot better in regular TV mode than many of its Full HD rivals.

To be honest, the Art 42 SL user interface takes a little getting used to, but persist and it comes good. It's a matter of moving the cursor horizontally and vertically along a pair of axes to navigate the menu. At least the remote is made of weighty metal.

Loewe has also added a few user-friendly features that other manufacturers have overlooked. You can set up your favourite channel list to include other sources for instance. So while channel one might be BBC1 on Freeview, channel five could be your Xbox 360, or a satellite channel.

However, one area where Loewe's TV does fall short – particularly in regards to the Pioneer Kuros – is in calibration. With no individual colour management tweaks, our Tech Labs were unable to achieve anything sufficiently close to a 6,500K colour temperature. I suspect this means that some dedicated cinephiles will immediately cross if off their audition list.

Full Metal Jacket

Matching the Art 42 SL for style is the world's first aluminium subwoofer. The Highline sub is brand-new, and buried beneath the metallic surface is a potent digital multichannel amplifier that drives not just the woofer, but all five of the satellite speakers as well.

This means that the only other component you need is an audio processor, which could be as simple as a module that slots into the TV. Loewe didn't have one available for this test, so I used the brand's Auro DVD 'preceiver' to process sound externally.

Given the mix and match nature of the components, the system gels seamlessly together. There's just one Loewe remote control, which operates the TV and audio system on the same onscreen menu. In fact, the same remote also controlled my Panasonic BD35 without any programming.

You just hold down the 'TV' button for a few seconds to make the remote operate the Blu-ray player's deeper controls, or hold it down again to gain access to the TV's more advanced controls again. There's really no need for a more sophisticated universal remote.

The Highline sub then connects to the four Individual speakers to complete the cinema setup. The two towers at the front and bookshelf speakers at the back match the TVs own internal speakers tonally. Four speakers? Isn't this a 5.1 rig? Kinda: you'll need to tell the Art 42 to act as a centre speaker in the menu.

The slinky aluminium cabinets look very smart in brushed metal with their interchangeable coloured trim and grills, but they don't at first sight look as though they're built for big cinema thrills. But hold on: this is no case of mere style over substance. The single metal extrusions that make each speaker are so rigid that they provide enough stability for the drive units to generate a remarkably large sound.

What they can't manage is the deep room-filling bass that big wooden boxes are good at, but that's where the Highline subwoofer steps in again. Technically, the Individual speakers can manage a wide dynamic range, but the system works better set at a high crossover with the sub taking care of the bass.