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A Control 4 Media Controller, which is operated via that company's 10.5-inch touchscreen remote, is hidden in an equipment cabinet along with the other source components. "The Media Controller that runs everything also has an 80-gigabyte hard drive that can store MP3s and other digital content," Garipay notes. "When you use it with the Sony 400-disc DVD changer, you can enable an auto-detection feature so the changer will go online and download information about a movie. Select Video on the Control 4 touchscreen and you can browse your entire movie library on the TV screen, just like you would with your music library on an iPod. And you can sort the library by title or genre or whatever. It lets you manage your movies without having to spend a ton of money."

The guest bedroom has a Hitachi 42-inch plasma HDTV, a Mirage UNI-Theater speaker (a single enclosure that handles the left, center, and right front positions), two SpeakerCraft AIM7 MT Three in-wall speakers for the surrounds, and a Monitor Audio Radius 360 8-inch subwoofer. All of the bedrooms are connected to the Control 4 components so they can access the whole-house music system and be operated via touchscreen remotes.

"The 13-zone music system runs throughout the home," Garipay says. "We put speakers in the palapa, around the pool, in the entry, in all the bedrooms, and even in some of the bathrooms. The system will play anything from Sirius to music stored on the Media Controller to music from the satellite-TV system."

Staying with SpeakerCraft, Garipay used AIM7 MT Three in-wall speakers for the other bedrooms and bathrooms, WS720 outdoor speakers for the palapa and the master-bedroom patio, and 620Rox rock speakers by the pool and at the house entry. Control 4's Audio Matrix Switch and 16-channel amplifier, stashed in the palapa's equipment rack, provide the signal processing and power for the whole-house system. NXG Pro Sapphire Series audio/video cables and Liberty Wire and Cable speaker cables tie everything together. "We used Liberty's Direct Burial speaker cable for all outdoor applications and to go between buildings," Garipay says. Four Panamax surge protectors help keep the gear safe.