OTHER TECH

Up Close & Personal Essentially creating a room within the larger room, the back of this home theater includes a poker table with its own 42-inch NEC plasma HDTV and a bar area.

Mounted on the ceiling, Yamha's flagship DPX-1300 DLP projector ($12,496) beams images to a custom-made 140-inch diagonal (that's nearly 12 feet!) Stewart FireHawk screen ($5,500), the kind used by many neighborhood megaplexes. "It's an oh-my-God, mouth-hanging-open experience," Weiner promises.

The Stewart screen is positioned above a small stage - an unusual and dramatic approach, but one taken for purely practical reasons. "There's a huge boulder there that the contractor couldn't remove," Weiner explains with a laugh. "It's called Rockland County for a reason. So we just built a stage around it."

Since the homeowner and his two younger children really like to be up close to the action, a row of black-leather Berkline home theater loungers rests just 9 feet from the screen - which can make viewers feel like they're sitting in a roller coaster. For his wife, daughter, and anyone who prefers not to sit so close, a large, comfortable sofa is positioned 12 feet from the screen. Game systems and laptop computers can be connected to the system via a panel hidden beneath a hatch in the riser area, with all the action displayed on the big screen.

With the master bedroom sitting right above the home theater, it was important to make sure the surround sound system could deliver the appropriate wallop in the theater without rattling the bedroom's rafters. Fabric-padded walls and an acoustic-block ceiling provide all the necessary dampening. And rather than use a massive, high-power subwoofer placed at the front of the room, Weiner placed two ultra-compact, 1,500-watt Sunfire True Subwoofer Super Juniors ($995 each) next to the seating areas.