Brainstorm Magazine

The Good

You’ve just bought that fancy LCD with LED backlighting and mounted it on your wall. Too bad it doesn’t quite do justice to the great sound in your HD movies.

Well, for first-time flatpanel owners, Yamaha’s S400 is a fantastic all-in-one solution. A simple, threespeaker soundbar sits neatly under almost any TV. Designed for TVs of 40 inches or less, the S400 can also be wallmounted to match your LCD installation. Setup is dead easy: the soundbar has a single ribbon cable going to the subwoofer, which also doubles up as the control centre.

The rear of the sub has three HDMI inputs, for things like an Xbox, PlayStation, disc player or media streamer, and an HDMI output to the TV.

Sound quality is great, but the surround effect is startlingly convincing. The “Irene” scene in Black Hawk Down – a staple in audio testing – actually had us looking left and right to make sure no speakers were behind us.

The Bad

Designed for the modern generation of digital TVs, the S400 has a great set of digital inputs and outputs. There’s even an analogue RCA input, for a good ol’ CD player to be connected.

For these things we cannot fault it. It’s even well-priced, compared to other systems with similar performance (sometimes from more speakers).

But it doesn’t have an analogue video ouput. While we fully understand Yamaha’s intention to market this to the LCD TV generation, some old tube TV users could’ve used something like this, too.

Verdict

A compact, hidden-wires solution for HDTV owners. Even if there’s a big home theatre room, this can still be discreetly linked up to a TV in the bedroom or a guest room, and offers excellent performance for the money.