The best seat in the house

THE THEATER IN YOUR HOME OFFERS QUALITY, CHOICE! AND CONVENIENCE. BETTER YET, IT'S CLOTHING-OPTIONAL. HERE'S TO STAYING IN TONIGHT

THE SCREEN: When it comes to flat-screen TVs, we like plasma sets for their superior color saturation and exacting reproduction of speeding race cars and running backs. Sizewise, 50 inches is big enough to show off all the glory of your high-def sources in nearly any room, but it's not so large that you look as if you're overcom-pensating. Panasonic's TH-S0PZ7S0 ($3,500) has a built-in HDTV tuner, plenty of digital and analog inputs and an SD memory-card

Eometimes we have to be reminded how fast technology is moving. Just 30 years ago the wireless remote control was a new invention. Twenty years ago much of the country was not wired for cable. A decade back only hypernerds had a high-speed Internet connection, and only Michael Jordans had a flat-screen TV. Ain't progress grand? Today for around $10,000 your living room can meet or surpass the experience offered by your local 12-plex. And the content selection is unmatched—as is the food (we'll take champagne and caviar over popcorn and soda any day). The entire connected home theater you see here will run you just under $17,000. Important note: This is not the highest-end home theater you can purchase. Buy­ing into the upper reaches of the consumer-electronics hierarchy is usually an exercise in diminishing returns. These products all hit the sweet spot between whiz-bang and wallet-friendly. You may not find this stuff on sale at Best Buy, but each piece offers an extremely respectable price-performance ratio. So let's raise a glass to technological innovation and jaw-dropping price cuts, and let's get on with the show.

. for displaying digital photos and video clips. THE AMP: Denon's AVR-4308CI ($2,500) was designed from the ..bund up to serve as the hub of a wide-ranging digital system. Four HDMI inputs provide pristine digital connections for your gear, plus there's an Ethernet jack and integrated Wi-Fi. On-screen menus let you browse and play audio files from networked PCs or servers. Add support for the latest high-def Dolby and DTS audio formats and even an optional iPod dock and you have about as futureproof a receiver as you're likely to find. THE SPEAKERS: Definitive Technology's spectacular new Mythos STS SuperTowers ($1,500 each) offer sound that's at once powerful and pre­cise, warm but never muddled, with a big bass boom courtesy of built-in powered subwoofers in each. We paired them

with Definitive's Mythos Three ($500), for the center channel, and two Mythos

Gem surrounds ($250 each, not shown). THE REMOTE: Built-in Wi-Fi means you don't need a PC to set up Acoustic Research's Universal Smart Remote

($400) to control all your devices. It can also directly access the Internet to re­trieve the latest TV listings, which you can browse on its sharp 2.2-inch color screen, along with news, sports scores and weather reports. THE DISC PLAYER: Blu-ray may have won the aggravating high-def-disc format war, but HD DVD

stuck around long enough for there to be hundreds of excellent titles avail­able in the format, most of which are now deeply discounted. The LG BH200 Super Blu dual-format player ($800) handles all the features of Blu-ray and HD DVD like a pro.

THE SERVER: The HP MediaSmart Server (500 gigabytes, $600; one terabyte, $750) is a

hard drive that sits on your network and serves music, photo and video files to any con­nected computer. When you're out of the house it lets you access your files from any Internet-connected computer and does automatic backups. THE GAME CONSOLE: The Wii may be fun, and the PS3 will eventually get some good games, but for now the Xbox 360 Elite ($480) is the console of choice thanks to stunning games such as Halo 3 and BioShock and the ability to download movies and TV shows (many in high def) directly to the console's 120-gigabyte hard drive. THE COMPUTER: The PCs made by Okoro Media Systems have

high-def and surround-sound output for movies and TV and enough horsepower to manhandle PC games like Crysis and S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. This box has a sizzling Core 2 Extreme quad-core processor, an Nvidia GeForce 8800 GTX graphics card and optional dual CableCARD slots. The seven-inch touch screen echoes the main display so you can choose tunes when the TV is off.

Starting at $4,600, it's not cheap, but its aesthetics and performance made us weak in the knees.

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