OTHER TECH

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The Rosenfields' whole-house system began not with a home theater but with a car. Going through a midlife crisis, Dan decided to indulge himself with a 2002 Porsche Carrera 4S. But not having any place to put his sleek silver beauty, he tacked a new garage onto the house. And realizing that he needed a guest room, he had one built above the new garage. Once he saw how good the new garage looked, he decided the rest of the house could use a makeover. Then came the luxury kitchen (his wife's payback for agreeing to let him get the car), the exercise room, the karate/yoga studio - and on and on, until the house had grown from 4,500 to 6,300 square feet.

Along the way, Dan became dissatisfied with his various entertainment systems and decided to beef them up as well. "The renovation took a year and a half," he says. "We had six big TVs, and every time we'd finish a room, I'd give one of the workmen a TV." The house now holds nine HDTVs, ranging from a 23-inch Westinghouse LCD in the karate studio to a 50-inch Pioneer plasma in the family room. "I wanted a 60-inch in there," says Dan, "but every single model on the market was just about an inch too wide for the wall unit we had made."

By the time architect Arthur Chabon, builder Bill Fiorito, and John's team were done, Dan had systems in the family room, living room, kitchen, exercise room, karate studio, master bedroom, guest bedroom, and his son and daughter's bedrooms and "teen lounge" in the basement. And for a while, he was happy to keep the systems independent of each other. But as frequently happens, Dan soon wondered if it wouldn't be better to be able to share music between the rooms. Having just suffered all the many inconveniences of a renovation, the Rosenfields were in no hurry to breach the recently repainted walls, so John offered a wireless solution: placing Sonos ZonePlayer modules in each room where they wanted to share music and using a Sonos controller to operate this system-within-a-system.