Canton, Germany's largest loudspeaker company, appears to be making a bit of a push across Europe with an appearance at the CU Exposed technology show in London. That gave Pocket-lint an excellent chance to go hands on with one of the best 2.1 home cinema solutions we've ever heard.
Let's get the bad news out of the way first. The Canon DM 90.2 isn't cheap. It'll cost you somewhere in the region of £700 and, for that, you could quite easily buy yourself a perfectly decent, full 5.1 home cinema set-up. The big advantage you get here is that the virtual surround sound quality isn't a long way off the real thing and all without having to compromise the look and feel of your living space with trails of cables and walls full of speakers.
The Canton DM 90.2 is a fully-active 2.1 music and home cinema system with FM tuner. There are four kinds of digital input on the rear as well as two analogue and what's packed in under that front grill are 2 x 25mm tweeters, 2 x 110mm mid-range, 4 x 110mm woofers and a sub, and all of that pushes out a beefy 350W from the amp inside. It's a pretty chunky thing to sit your telly on but it can look normal enough underneath anything 32" and over.
There's not much more to say about it apart from that it works, and works really well from what we gathered with our hands-on time. You don't quite get the head-turning effects of 5.1, as you look to see where the audio sounded like it came from, but you do get a very decent impression of a proper surround image, even if the scope of it is more 120 degrees than 360.
The quality of the sound is also very impressive and it's of little surprise that the brand is so popular in a country like Germany which holds high standards in audio.
As we say, 5.1 is always preferable but this feels like as good as it gets otherwise and, more to the point, it's something that sits easily underneath most tellies in most living rooms the world over without any negotiations at all.
- ZyXEL WHD6215 wireless HDMI kit review