Recently, I had a small room that I wanted a surround home theater in but did not want the need to run wires to rear surround speakers. So I checked out the Yamaha YSP-800 and the Polk Audio Sound Bar. The Yamaha was the better of the two for sure, but at $800 and the need for an additional amount of money for a subwoofer this was way over budget. I had heard the SHARP SD-SP10 with new Dolby virtual 1.1 was pretty awesome but it has yet to land in the US from Japan, although I did see one on eBay but again the budget numbers did not meet.
Then I found the Soundmatters MAINstage HD. This is a small box about the size of a cable TV box that can sit on the TV itself or above it or below it. It has 80 watts, and 3 speakers, left, right and a woofer. I opted for an additional SONY SAW2500 10" 150 watt sub for $100; this brought me to $500 dollars for the system well within budget.
The sound from this little box is really amazing. I have been tempted to open it and take it apart to see how the richness of the sound is actually accomplished. Sound from CD/mp3 is as good as some more expensive Cambridge Soundworks speakers I have, and the virtual surround it good enough to make me think someone is sneaking up behind me in a scary movie. The remote allows volume, bass and input control, as well as a "dialog" button that focuses spoken word towards you allowing the volume to be lowered. This is handy when other are sleeping while you are watching sports or news late at night. It certainly is not as good as a hardwired surround home theater, but for a small room it is excellent. It has coaxial input and digital optical input for Dolby digital sources (it does not support DTS). So you can hook up the digital cable box, the DVD player and have a full system ready to go.
So again, this is great for a small room where running speaker wires is difficult or just ugly, if you had a bigger room I would go for one of the Yamaha units.