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While building the Philips 46PFL9706's speakers into its stand is certainly a novel idea, it's not necessarily one that you'd expect to lead to brilliant sound.
But actually, while the Philips 46PFL9706's sound isn't quite as clear and refined as that of last year's 9000 series (which used rear-mounted bass woofers on the main TV chassis), it's still way more powerful, well-rounded and bass-heavy than that of the vast majority of its peers.
Value
Clearly £2,300 is a hefty amount to cough up for a 46-inch TV. But the Philips 46PFL9706 isn't just any 46-inch TV. It's the very definition of a flagship model, all the way from its sumptuous build quality through to its massive feature list and a fantastic innovation in the Moth Eye filter that has lead to it delivering the best 2D picture of this TV generation.
Gaming performance
Finishing up with the 46PFL9706's performance as a gaming monitor, it's pretty brilliant in most ways.
Its combination of sharpness, dynamism and terrific black levels gives HD games an almost unbelievable amount of 'snap', while the set's motion handling avoids the sort of blurring as you pan around that's common with LCD TVs.
The split-screen into full-screen two-player feature works well to some extent too (once you've tracked the feature down through the 'Adjust' button's menu).
The only catches are that you can see a faint representation of the other player's screen 'under' your own, and that during our tests the processing required to resize the top/bottom split-screen image to a full-screen one led to a couple of inches of the picture disappearing off the left side of the screen so that, for instance, you couldn't see much of a Call of Duty map.
The first 46PFL9706 review sample tested disappointingly registered a quite high input lag figure of 80ms. But a second set Philips sent over thankfully produced a vastly more satisfying result of around 30ms, which is easily low enough to 'keep up' with all but the most frenetic of twitch gamers.
