OTHER TECH

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The Control 4 system includes a house-dedicated hard drive. I downloaded my MP3 collection to the drive, and each room has a controller that gives me my entire collection, including cover art. In certain places - such as the screening room, the office, and the master bedroom - it also gives me complete control of the various TVs, DVD players, and satellite systems. The Control 4 touchscreen remote in the screening room also gives me access to the Sony DVD megachanger. I can look up any of the 400 discs by name, director, actor, genre, or even MPAA rating. (For about another 18 grand, I could have had this megachanger hooked up to every TV in the house, but I was already over budget.) The Control 4 was easy to set up and didn't require rewiring my house. It could have also controlled my heating and lighting, but I already have a dedicated LiteTouch system (which my father sold me at what he claims was a steep discount) to handle all the lighting.

We installed the brilliant Sonos music system throughout the house. It has an iPod-like wireless remote that gives you command of your iPod and, via subscriptions to the Rhapsody and Pandora sites, lets you use the over 3 million songs on those services to create your own music stations. You can choose by artist, song, genre, and subgenre, and then queue your selections for an evening of eclectic music. (One bit of warning: Having both the Control 4 and Sonos systems running on 2.4-GHz wireless networks will really slow down your wireless Internet connection. If there is a God, Qwest will deliver 7.5-GHz service to my home soon.)

There's no cable TV in my area of Telluride, so my only option is satellite TV. Because I have so many rooms and TVs, and rely on the satellite system so profoundly, I decided to go with DirecTV's Titanium option. Although this is quite a layout of money - $7,500 a year - it provides me with 10 HD DVRs and allows every set to receive every channel offered by DirecTV, from pay-per-view, special events, and the NFL games to adult channels (it took me many hours going around to each box to block those). You also get a special concierge number to dial when things go wrong, but so far, so good. The images on the HD channels are fantastic, and the boxes have decent-sized hard drives so you can TiVo some football games and have some pay-per-view movies waiting for you when you get home after your wife convinces you it's time to actually get out of the house and take in the beauty of the San Juan Mountains.

In my office is an extraordinary 57-inch Sharp Aquos flat-panel LCD monitor. As I mentioned before, plasma doesn't work well at 10,000 feet, and this Aquos is as contrasty and brilliant as any other flat-panel TV I've owned - especially at this size. Because of the height of the placement, a rear-projection set wouldn't have worked in my office. Although viewing rear-pro TVs from the left and right has gotten quite good, up and down is still challenging, and if you're not on axis with the height of the TV, the screen quickly darkens.