System 1 a discreet all-rounder

Sometimes discreet is better. In the early years of What Hi-Fi?, and certainly before then, home entertainment kit was hidden away, or disguised as other pieces of furniture. There were stereograms the size of sideboards and televisions hidden away in cabinets. Often the only equipment not lurking out of view was a pair of loudspeakers.

In the past few decades, however, changing technology has brought changing lifestyle habits with it. Now, people don’t blink at 55in or larger television screens dominating a relatively small living room. (It’s those tech changes, you see; they might think twice if it was a 55in old-school cathode ray tube set hulking down in the corner. Imagine that? You would need a crane to get it in situ…). Equipment these days is often proudly out on show – and, where once it was just vinyl, radio and television, there are now so many more ways to get your home-entertainment fix.

Discreet still has huge appeal though. Whether your living area is bijou, or you would rather devote your available space to something else, there’s a lot to be said for the subtle.

So what we have here is a system that, in the third decade of the 21st century, will cover most bases for the more minimalist music and movie fan.

It centres around the excellent Elac Debut ConneX powered speakers. It might be an old What Hi-Fi?adage that separate products perform better than all-in-one systems, but it’s undeniable that multi-tasking pieces of kit can still do a wonderful job, taking up way less space while they do so. And when they perform as well as the Elac pair, it’s a no-brainer to combine speaker and amplification into these clever little boxes. They are Bluetooth enabled as well, so you can stream directly to them from a smart device if you feel the need.

But if you don’t have to do that, you probably shouldn’t. There is no CD player in this system, but pretty much every other 21st century means of getting your tunes out of a hi-fi is included.

Remarkable for the outlay

Streaming duties are performed by the excellent new WiiM Pro Plus. WiiM was a new name to our testing rooms when this little unit appeared a couple of months ago. But the Pro Plus impressed us so much that we awarded it a Best Buy in our 2023 Awards recently.