Onkyo LS-T10 TV speaker system

Onkyo has come up with a new type of sound device for improving the audio from your TV. It'’s the LS-T10 TV speaker system, which the company also calls a 'soundbase'. It's basically a soundbar that has a lot more depth so that it can also be used as the resting place for your television (about 35kg weight is supported).

Physically, it's a slim, rectangular unit that has everything built in to it, including the sub-woofer. The unit has six speakers sitting on three sides (four at the front and one each on the left and right), while the sub-woofer sits at the bottom and fires downwards. The full-range speakers have a diameter of 7cm, while the sub-woofer has a diameter of 12cm. The side-mounted speakers basically give the sound a bit more 'space' through a wider firing range. It can also do Dolby Digital decoding when you play movies.

Overall, the LS-T10 TV speaker system can produce powerful sound, and that's despite having a small sub-woofer enclosure compared to what a regular soundbar with a wireless sub-woofer has. That’s not a bad thing though. The sound from this soundbase is well rounded and not overly bass heavy — and you don't have to find a separate resting place for the sub-woofer. It’s perfect for listening to music, and watching TV and movies. There are built-in filters that allow you to switch between music, news and movie modes, with the ‘news’ mode being suitable for sound that’s mostly dialogue. You can really tell if you’re using the wrong mode for your music as it will sound completely different to what you expect.

The power emitted from the soundbase is enough to easily fill a lounge room with rich sound, and it's a device that we think is fine for an apartment in addition to a regular-sized house. If the bass is a little too loud for your taste (and your neighbours' liking) then you can use the separate bass control to turn it down a few notches, but we didn't find it to be as bass-heavy as some soundbars that we've seen recently, such as Polk's 5000. Some overly powerful tracks with lots of bass can overwhelm the Onkyo a little (The Chemical Brothers' Under the Influence is one of them, and it usually does this to most speakers systems we look at), but other bass-heavy tracks we played, such as The Herd’s A Thousand Lives (Sietta remix) performed just as we expected, with their rolling bass lines coming out of the speaker smoothly and clearly.

The style of the LS-T10 soundbase is clean and understated, and there is only one LED that lights up to indicate that the unit is powered on. You don’t get any annoying blue lights or a display screen, though this is also a drawback as you can't tell at a glance what mode the base is in or what level the bass is set to, for example. Construction is solid, and the primary structure is made of wood, so it sits sturdily on the furniture. Its strong construction is needed, not just to reinforce the sound, but also because it has to support any TV that’s placed upon it.

There are simple connections on the rear for a TV; mainly, you can use the optical connection to hook up your TV, and there is an analogue connection (3.5mm) to connect an MP3 player or any other older audio device of your choosing. The best part is that the base also includes Bluetooth. You can easily pair it to your phone or laptop to play your tunes through the soundbase’s speakers. If you have a hard drive full of music that you want to connect to the soundbase on a permanent basis, you can use the USB port — it will accept Fat32 formatted drives. There is a coaxial digital connection as well, but you can only use it if the optical digital connection is not in use.

You can control the soundbase using its credit card-sized remote, which we think is way too small, but Onkyo informed us that the unit is preprogrammed to work with the remote controls of the nine most popular TVs on the market. It can also be programmed to work with the remote of your own TV, should it not be one of the nine most popular on the market.

All up, the Onkyo LS-T10 TV speaker system is a worthwhile product for those of us who want a neat solution to a messy audio problem. All the speakers are contained within the base of the unit and setting it up requires nothing more than the power cable and an optical cable to be connected. The only hard part is lifting your TV and placing the soundbase under it.