(Credit: Crave UK) Do you think valve amps have a place in today’s home cinema systems? If not, look away now, because Philips is about to annoy you. Its MCD908 micro hi-fi is an affordable blend of DVD upscaling, DivX playback, and potentially decent speakers.

It claims to be an audiophile system, in part as a result of using a valve-based preamp, and while this is of course fairly gimmicky these days, its combination of neodymium ribbon tweeters, silk dome tweeters, and a whopping great woofer in each 150W speaker rather makes up for it.

For 239 pounds (about $472), this extremely attractive system promises a hell of a lot of audio-visual goodness, and while it’ll positively arouse those of you who draw thrills from seeing good-looking equipment beside your HDTV , it may depress anyone expecting audiophile sound from a hi-fi with a price tag under 300 pounds.

So what’s it good at? Well, it’s loud, has tons of connectivity–including HDMI, component and a whole bunch of audio outputs–and it’ll upscale your DVDs and videos to either 720p or 1080i. Its valves, while fundamentally pointless for anyone who isn’t brain-softeningly nostalgic, do offer a certain warmth to musical playback, notably acoustic and vocal-driven stuff–good old Alison Krauss sounded remarkably more seductive. DVD playback, even when upscaled, was OK, but with certain issues.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 3:40 pm and is filed under CD soundmachines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.