OTHER TECH

"My System" by Charlie Wessler When I was seven, I took the RCA radio off the table in my parents' room and carried it into the garage. This was 1962, and the radio was about twice the size of a four-slice toaster - which was state-of-the-art miniaturization in those days. I wanted to fix this thing (it was working just fine), and to accomplish my task I ripped the tube-filled box into a couple hundred pieces. During the disassembly process, my dog Sydney ran by, and somehow I got sidetracked.

It turned out that my father liked that radio, and he was a little upset about its lack of wholeness and inability to make sounds. Even though my butt hurt for at least a week afterward, that incident was the beginning of my minor fascination with the electronics that give us music.

Choosing a system for my new house turned out to be just as difficult as trying to put that radio back together. I kind of knew what I wanted: excellent-sounding m usic anywhere I happened to be st anding at any time - not washed-out background music, but something with real midrange, thrilling highs, and deep lows.

I also wanted a place where I could sit alone or with four to six friends and watch a DVD or a sports program off satellite TV. And that place couldn't be a separate home theater but had to fit into the living room, since my house is more of a giant cottage and less of a traditional house. And everything had to be simple to operate. The components are on Middle Atlantic racks in a cabinet in the living room. A Chief mounting bracket allows the TV to be pivoted toward different viewing positions.

Luckily, I planned this system while the house was still on paper. Twenty-four miles of cable and speaker wire later - and after about 40 nonconsecutive days of installation - my music and TV systems were ready to go. As hard as it is to believe, both for me and for my fellow electronics nitwits, the system actually works as promised. Well, damn close anyway.

My favorite part is that I can access a multitude of sources - the music server, CDs, satellite-TV music channels, and so on - from any room. For example, I can listen to Beethoven in my bedroom while my girlfriend listens to the Beastie Boys in the bathroom while my girlfriend's friend listens to Britney in the kitchen while her friend listens to Jimmy Eat World in the office. We can all easily access the sources through the screen on the Elan Via! touchpanels. Because the installers asked me how I wanted the screens' "pages" to look, we were able to eliminate any "buttons" I didn't understand or need. My only suggestion is that Elan should make the onscreen volume and channel buttons bigger.

Every room has B&W speakers in the walls or ceiling. There are no freestanding speakers anywhere. I love the B&Ws. They sound vivid and real, and they don't compete with my art for wall space.

Picking a TV was easy. I visited a lot of retailers that displayed plasma and LCD s ets, and I asked a crapload of questi ons of a bunch of salespeople who knew even less about these things than I did. So remember, take a DVD you're very familiar with when you go shopping and make them show it on every screen in the store. I took Girls Gone Wild: Uncensored as my reference disc.

Ultimately, I chose 50-inch plasma HDTVs for the home theater and for the workout room in the basement, and 23-inch LCD TVs for my bedroom, office, and guest room - all from Philips. You gotta love a company that makes stuff in Belgium.

The Sunfire amplifiers drive the spe akers like an elephant pulling a matchstick - power to spare. The Faroudja video processor makes the satellite-TV signal crisp and clean. DVDs looked like daytime soap operas until we put the Faroudja into the system. Now they actually look like movies.

While the few HDTV channels I get through DirecTV are nice, the Voom satellite service specializes in high-def. My favorite Voom channels are the ones showing classic films. Watching them will give you a whole new respect for the great filmmakers and cinematographers of the '30s, '40s, and '50s.

The bottom line is that I did get the system I was hoping for - and more. Now someone is going to have to tear me away from it so I can get a job to pay for it all.