Sony BDV-E300

The basics

The Sony BDV-E300 is a Blu-ray home cinema system with 5.1 speakers and a total of 1000W audio power. It supports optional wireless rear speakers, meaning you can increase the surround setup to 7.1 channels.

An Ethernet slot and USB port (for storage only - media playback is available through Sony’s proprietary DM Port connector only) means BD-Live capabilities are available.

The good

Not a fan of tweaking speaker settings to get the best performance? No problem – Sony has included an automatic calibration mode on the BDV-E300, which tests the speaker placement using a series of bleeps and adjusts the settings accordingly, giving you optimum audio performance without the fuss. It also loads up Blu-ray movies fairly swiftly, and most importantly delivers on both the sound and picture fronts.

The speakers supply a dynamic, distortion-free performance with a wide, enveloping soundstage – and that applies with both loud, bassy content and quiet, more dialogue-led scenes. The player’s picture quality boasts the levels of detail and clean, rich colour we’ve come to expect from Blu-ray, and its upscaled DVD performance is excellent to boot, adding detail without adding noise.

The bad

There really isn’t much to pick at here, although Sony’s use of the proprietary DM Port instead of standard USB for media file playback means you’ll have to shell out extra for its own brand of connector.

It would also have been nice to have seen Wi-Fi included, both for BD-Live and media streaming, as you’ll find it on rival systems from LG and Samsung.

The bottom line

While the Sony BDV-E300 isn’t hugely impressive on the feature front, it hits its marks more than adequately when it comes to the nitty gritty of audiovisual performance. Factor in the easy setup and it makes for a truly solid all-round home cinema system.