OTHER TECH

At the heart of it all is a home theater built around a 50-inch Philips plasma HDTV. The TV sits recessed in a wall on a Chief mounting bracket that allows Charlie to angle it down to the viewing area. The bracket also lets him pull the TV out and swivel it so it can be seen in the sitting area in the other half of the room. The living room features separate home theater and music listening areas. The plasma TV (right) and in-wall speakers make up the home theater at the far end of the room.

To either side of the plasma TV are B&W Signature 8NT in-wall speakers, with another Signature 8NT beneath it for the center channel. Below the center speaker, near the floor, are two Triad Bronze/10 PowerSub in-wall subwoofers. The surround channels are handled by two B&W Signature 7NT speakers mounted in the ceiling behind the viewing area.

One unusual wrinkle was Charlie's decision to have separate home theater and ster-eo listening areas within the same space. The room is 30 x 40 feet, but it's effectively divvied up between the 15 x 17-foot home th eater and the 15 x 23-foot listening are a. The stereo system has Signature 8NT speakers to either side of the fireplace, with a Bronze/10 sub in the wall to the right. Charlie remembers, "I told Jim and Wayne I wanted to be able to lie on the couch with my girlfriend - or somebody else's girlfriend, I'm not picky - and listen to music and relax. I also wanted to be able to sit here and have discussions with friends, and not have to rely on speakers that are 13 feet away. I hate that." To the left of that area, two B&W in-wall speakers (to either side of the fireplace) and a Triad in-wall sub provide stereo music playback.

The components for these systems, and for the multiroom audio and video system, sit on Middle Atlantic racks in a built-in cabinet to the left of the Philips TV. Closing the cabinet doors makes the gear invisible. And with the components in the living room instead of secreted in a hallway closet, Charlie can easily feed them DVDs, or just check to be sure everything's okay.

A Faroudja DVP 1510 DVD player/video processor not only handles DVDs for the home theater but also processes the video from all of the sources feeding the room, using its DCDi (Directional Correlation Deinterlacing) chip to upconvert standard-definition signals to progressive-scan. TV signals come from DirecTV and Voom satellite receivers, with the Voom supplying all-high-def channels and the DirecTV both regular and high-def. The DirecTV HR10-250 HD receiver also has a TiVo recorder built in.

Charlie's favorite music source is Elan's Via! DJ server, whose 160-gigabyte hard drive holds about 2,800 hours of music encoded at 128 kilobits per second. The DJ goes online automatically and pulls down track information and cover art from the Gracenote, CDDB, and XiVA databases. But Charlie says the results have been mixed.

"There's no cover art for about half the CDs I've loaded into the DJ. On the other hand, I loaded two mariachi-band CDs that I picked up in Mexico, and the artwork was available. But the Beatles, Abbey Road - no artwork. There's just a picture of Louis Armstrong. Whenever they can't find the right art, I get these default pictures. So I have, like, Louis Armstrong and a boat."

Surround sound and other processing duties are handled by a Sunfire Theater Grand IV preamp/processor. A five-channel Sunfire Cinema Grand 200~five amplifier powers the home theater, while a two-channel Sunfire 300~two amp takes care of the stereo system. Also in the cabinet are the outboard electronics and amps for the three Triad in-wall subs and an Elan D1200 12-channel digital amp for the multiroom sound.

The surround speakers in the home theater, as well as the other ceiling-mounted speakers in the house, are actually in-wall models - a choice for which Charlie offers a typically quirky explanation. "I won't buy round speakers that fit in the ceiling. They remind me too much of bus terminals. Any institutional place you go to has all these round speakers, so I have this aversion to anything round that sound comes out of."

The kitchen, master bedroom, master bath, office, and guest bedroom all have B&W Signature 7NT in-wall speakers. Charlie doesn't feel he compromised at all by going with in-wall instead of freestanding speakers. "They're awesome. They're like world-class speakers in the ceiling."