LATEST ADDITIONS

Our home theater started out as an unfinished basement room with dimensions of 14 by 18 by 9 feet. The room is rectangular, with three doors and no windows. Audio problems are inherently more difficult to solve than video problems. Fortunately, the room dimensions are friendly to acoustic resonances. Since the theater would be right under the great room of the house, the main goal was to decouple the theater from the rest of the house as best as possible.

Integrating 21st-century home electronics into the architecture of a newly built 18th-century-style Italian villa would, at first glance, appear impossible. After all, about the only thing technological in the 1700s was the nutcracker. Add to this the advanced needs of a tech-savvy young couple who are inspired by the past but make their careers within the computer and video-gaming fields, and you have seemingly irresolvable conflicts. This property's sheer size further magnified the task at hand. It's a three-level, 12,000-square-foot home situated on 2.3 acres in the hills of Southern California. Enter Sound Solutions of Culver City, California, premier systems integrators with a 29-year history and a reception area full of national awards, including  Crestron's first annual Biggest, Baddest Home Award and the CEA Mark of Excellence Award, both given for this project.

The annual Williamson County Parade of Homes in midstate Tennessee is an opportunity for Williamson residents to display the genteel aesthetics that characterize the affluent side of the South. But it's also a chance for a little bit of neighborly, good-ole-boy one-upmanship. Last year, for instance, one of the mega homes along the route had its own rock-climbing wall off the patio; another had an indoor driving range.

On the heels of Paramount's stunning announcement that it will be supporting HD DVD exclusively, Fox and MGM have jumped back into the fray with a massive slate of 29 "new release and must-have" Blu-ray Disc titles that will be in stores by the end of the calendar year. Included will be six Blu-ray titles released day and date with DVD, led by <I>Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer</I>, <I>Live Free or Die Hard</I> and Fox's hit TV show, <I>Prison Break</I>.