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I have spoken to a lot of people and not one of them – including dealers – have heard of the ‘big big plus’, however being mean you will have to read on to find out what it is.

The speakers are a matt silver colour and are 16x8x11cm but you need to add another 5cm for the plug to the 11cm depth. The sub woofer is 26x14x29cm with leads inserted. Total weight of the package is around 6.2kilos. Unlike most 2.1 systems I think you are unlikely to place this on the floor as you would be forever bending down for the controls etc. I placed it on a table beside a PC where I could easily attach it to an MP3 player using the speakers as an external outlet.

The front of the sub woofer has a mirrored panel that has black knobs for volume, treble and bass below these is a push button for Aux/USB. To the right of these are four further buttons and an LED to control the USB socket below.

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The woofer itself is below this panel and the overall sub woofer colour is grey.

As an amplified set of speakers it works well when plugged into a PC as a lot of the onboard sound chips do not have enough energy to promote a listenable volume. As an external source for an MP3 player it is fine.

Now for the bonus feature that I or anyone I have spoken to knows of nowhere else so can I tentatively call it ‘currently unique’. You can place a stick drive (pen drive or USB stick) into the USB socket and any MP3 files will be played by the speakers. In case of confusion I mean the USB stick has MP3 files on it, I do not mean that the stick is an MP3 player. So plain MP3 files can be played on these Ministry of Sound speakers. If you do nothing the files will be played sequentially but the four buttons above the USB socket allow you to skip forwards or backwards or otherwise control the files. 

In the main this works brilliantly. On the face of it this would be a candidate for a 5x5 award. However on occasions when I added extra MP3 files to a disc it refused to play them at all. The only solution was to format the stick drive and recopy the files. The first time I was thinking I had done something wrong / just one of those things but when it happened a second time I became a little uneasy, after this I worried. However it always worked how ever many times you played the files copied in a single session even if you played them over many weeks.

Certainly as a 2.1 speaker set it is fine, as a method of playing files from an MP3/WMA fine again and nice not to tie up a PC. With the unique? feature of being able to play MP3 files from a stick drive it works well, always perfect with files copied in one go onto a newly formatted stick. However I am still investigating why when you add extra tracks onto a stick drive it just refused to play.

I have only one other gripe that the on/off switch is on the back of the unit.

I will keep trying and testing and if I find a solution then you will be told. So with the one proviso that you should only put copies of files on the stick drive I give this a very positive yes as a Gadget that does several things and with only a possible minor flaw, as my unit may have a fault. The price is currently £39.99 from  http://shop.ministryofsound.com/Cultures/en-GB/Products/MOSAS113.htm?CatalogNavigationBreadCrumbs=MinistryofSound|Audio|Speakers