Philips DCM292

I can remember watching a programme about posh houses a few years ago and the owners of this very luxurious house had a hifi system mounted on the wall. To insert discs the tray slid up and down and the whole system oozed panache. For ages we were stuck with a very boxy Hifi with two equally boxy speakers and nowhere to play our ipod! When I saw this hifi, it brought back memories of the hifi I had swooned on the television and I had to have it. It looked so futuristic and modern and would fit in nicely with our newly decorated house. I thought something of this design would cost a lot of money but I was quite surprised with the price!

PRICE

The hifi system cost £115.00 and I was expecting to pay more for it. I would never spend much more than this on a hifi system though. Although we use it to play music every now and then, it is not something we use every day.

HIFI

The hifi looks reminiscent of all the black glass wall mounted televisions. When people come to study the technology of today they will mock our obsession with shiny black electronics. Despite this, it does look very luxurious. The whole thing is so slim that you can have it mounted on a wall or you can use the black glass stand and have it stood on a unit somewhere. My observations at this stage are that the system is quite long and would really take up quite a lot of room. We outed to wall mount ours in the dining room and made a bit of a feature out of it. It is probably around 60 cm long by 25 cm tall but only 8 cm thick. It is nice looking having a flat system with built in speakers but the advantage of having detachable speakers is that you can hide them or stack them on shelves. At the front of the hifi is a large LCD screen that is very bright and easy to read.

IPOD DOCK

At the front of the hifi is the iPod dock. It is compatible with: iPod 5th Generation, iPod classic, iPod nano 1st Generation, iPod nano 2nd Generation, iPod nano 3rd Generation, iPod nano 4th Generation, iPod nano 5th Generation, iPod touch, iPod touch 2nd Generation, iPod touch 3rd Generation, iPod mini, iphone 3GS, 3 and 4. The ipod dock neatly folds away when you are not using it. Thr hifi comes with a remote control (although no batteries included!) that can be used to control the iPod as well as the other functions of the hifi. This device also charges up my ipod so we often just leave it in the cradle until we next want to use it.

RADIO

The radio tuner only has FM reception, this is disappointing as we enjoy listening to many medium wave channels! There is an option to pre set up to 20 channels which are easy to recall at the touch of a button. Some of the newer models have a DAB radio but these were a lot more costly and I can not see that it is worth the price. We have a mini DAB radio in the kitchen and probably would not use the main hifi as much for this feature anyway.

CD PLAYER

This is my favourite part of the hifi as I love the way a disc loads. The tray slides up in a really futurist way and loads so quickly. It is so quiet when it loads too that you can seamlessly change discs without it disrupting the ambiance of the evening too much. I like the way that some discs have the tack name on the LCD display and I like how responsive the remote is when I want to select a new track.

ALARM

You can set the clock and have an alarm sound. It can potentially play music from the CD player or radio to wake you up. Using the clock can also mean you can decide when the machine turns off. If you want to play 2 hours of music, you can programme it to stop playing in two hours time.

CONNECTIONS

There is a 3.5mm headphone jack if you want to utilise your headphones with this hifi and you can also link up your MP3 player. Therefore if you do not own an ipod you can still play your music though this machine. There is a port for your wire to connect the devices together.

Sound quality

The sound quality is really, very impressive and I can honestly say that I have not experienced sound like it. It is so loud and clear and even when we are in the living room we can hear the music clearly rather than the thudding that we used to get with our old system. We really enjoy our music on here, whether CD or played though the ipod I just think that it is really good quality. The speakers must be really impressive. I enjoy listening to Adele and her voice is carried so beautifully through the house. The sound production is by far the best advantage to these speakers.

MY RECOMMENDATION

I cannot fault this hifi it does everything I ask of it and it does it to a high standard.