Coby has long been a name associated with marginal to decent quality home theater systems at bargain basement prices. If you want a new home theater system, and you don’t much care about the bells and whistles, and you don’t want to pay over two hundred bucks new, you turn to Coby. And while sometimes we’ve had good words for Coby, today will not be one of those days as we check out the Coby DVD958 home theater system.

The Coby DVD958 home theater system is a thousand watt, 5.1 channel home theater system with four satellite speakers, a subwoofer, a center channel speaker and a DVD player with HDMI upconversion. You’ll also get both Dolby Pro Logic II and Dolby digital surround sound decoders, an AM / FM tuner, and support for a variety of media, from JPEGs to CD-R.

There have been many reports of “buzzing” sounds coming from this unit, and while I can’t personally attest to them (didn’t hear it myself, though didn’t like what I did hear all the same), it’s definitely an issue you’ll want to keep an eye on. Aside from that, though, it’s a very basic, very simple system that doesn’t have a lot of extra features on board but it does do the job, to varying degrees of success.

But where this truly–and pretty much solely–shines is in the price. The folks out at Amazon want $190.95 for this brand new, while if you buy a refurbished model you can go all the way down to $70.49, and if you need something for, say, a basement rec room (where the basement is potentially prone to flooding) or possibly even outdoor use, you might do just fine with this system. This is a great one for situations where you want something that puts out some power but you really don’t care if it gets damaged due to accident or roughhousing or the like.

Still though, chances are you’ll do better elsewhere than the Coby DVD958, and just know up front that here, you’re likely getting just what you pay for, which is, not much.