Samsung HT-BD1250

Good electronics generalists that they are, Samsung also sells home cinema systems. Of which the HT-BD1250 is one, an all-in-one that includes an amp and Blu-Ray player.

Design and build: easy to install

Samsung has given consideration to novice users here, colour coding the amp and sockets. A simple but practical idea for those of us who don’t set up home cinema systems every day.

When it comes to design however, not so much effort was put in. The satellites are basic indeed, made up from large hardly-rounded rectangles in cheap looking plastic. When you pick them up they’re so light they feel as if they might float away.

The remote, in line with other Samsung products, is relatively user-friendly.

The Blu-Ray player interface is however not the best we’ve seen and rather reminiscent of the sort of thing we used to get on older generation multimedia hard drives. Don’t look too hard for the settings either, you won’t find many.

Satellite: very small central speaker

Samsung obviously wanted the central speaker to be as discrete as possible. While this is understandable from the aesthetic point of view, you do pay in terms of sound quality: its terrible. Just about ok for dialogue, forget about it for music. The satellites make up for it a bit but sound quality remains sketchy and muddy.

Subwoofer: more of the same

The subwoofer isn’t the most lively either. The bass sounds aren’t really there and there’s a really disagreeable muddiness. All you can say is that there’s a certain homogeneity between the different audio components.

A bit of a disappointment, then, this Samsung system, as we were hoping for a compact, nice-looking, high-performance all-in-one and this is far from what you get. If you add to this the disadvantages of an all-in-one in terms of replacing different components, we’re struggling to recommend it.