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To the casual observer, the home theater world probably looks relatively homogenous. After all, home theater isn't big enough, established enough, or varied enough to break itself into endless sub-categories yet, is it? The truth is, categorization has been a part of home theater from the beginning, and the gap between its two main sub-categories—let's call them conventional products and custom-install products—is wide. When it comes to speakers, the gap is only getting wider.

Odd as it may seem for a speaker review, I must begin with my first visual impression of Paradigm's new Reference Signature speakers. Granted, I usually stress that a speaker's physical appearance means little—after all, we don't buy speakers to look at them. If the current trend is any indication, though, many people don't agree, as evidenced by the proliferation of smaller, prettier, and more aesthetically sensitive speakers.

What can you get from a single box not much larger than a DVD player with three small drivers firing forward and a woofer port firing rearward? If the box is the Zvox 315 Sound Console, you get more sound than you might think - full, wide stereo and a surprising amount of surround sound.

Media Center PCs are designed to replace a stack of A/V components, letting you watch live or recorded TV shows, play or burn DVDs, download movies and music, and play home videos and photo slideshows. Available in various hardware configurations from several computer manufacturers, these remote-controllable systems share the Windows XP Media Center Edition 2004 operating system.