It's tough being a consumer in the home theater market these days. You want eye-popping visuals and earth-shattering sound, but sometimes the only eye popping and earth shattering that occurs is when you find out the prices of some A/V systems. Never fear. We at Home Theater hear your cries for a powerful system that won't give your wallet a beating, and we understand. That's why we've gathered our top minds and put together five excellent home theater systems that cost around $5,000. Loudspeakers, universal disc players, HDTVs, projectors, and screens—you name it, we've got you covered. So take a peek over the next few pages, and see the systems for yourself. With all the money you'll save by purchasing the systems we've shown you, you'll be able to spend a little extra to upgrade your wire, cable, and interconnects—and maybe even purchase a sexy stand to hold your new gear. You definitely deserve it.

Take an informal survey of HDTV owners and you'll find few complaints about HD- or DVD-sourced picture quality. Most are thrilled by what they see. But ask about the view from standard 480i NTSC cable or satellite and the grumbling begins. Part of the problem is, once you've seen HD, regular television is bound to disappoint. Another issue is screen size—the bigger the screen, the worse non-HD images look. First-time buyers of HDTV big screens learn what owners of analog big screens have known for years: Blowing up noisy, low-resolution video just highlights and magnifies flaws not readily seen on small screens.

What could be better than a head-to-head competition between four direct-view HDTVs and HD monitors? How about four direct-view HDTVs modified to function as robot-smashing dump trucks, then placed in a ring to beat each other's video-processing brains out! OK, so the Home Theater version of garage/robot wars didn't quite come to fruition. Budgets, deadlines, and wisdom greater than mine prevailed, and we stuck with our tried-and-true formula: several judges and several products, all in the same room at the same time. Still, the resulting upset was exciting.

The successful transition to digital television depends on several factors. For one thing, broadcasters, satellite providers, and cable companies must upgrade their equipment to transmit DTV signals. In addition, consumers must upgrade their video screens to accept and display DTV images. Unfortunately, this is a chicken-and-egg problem: content providers are reluctant to invest in the upgrade until a significant number of homes have DTV reception, and consumers are unwilling to spend extra money on a digital television until there is a significant amount of programming to watch on it.

RCA, that good old standby brand name, is still around and doing well. About two years ago, the company's entry into the HDTV market, the F38310, made a big splash. I saw this display at the National Association of Broadcasters show in 1999, and I was surprised not only by the set's excellent picture quality but by the fact that such a big CRT display could produce that quality. Back then, RCA showed high-definition images through the Sencore video streamer, an early version of the unit I now use in my test lab. Of course, back then, the Sencore was about the only source for displaying 1080i demo footage, and no 720p material was available. Since then, RCA (now officially known as Thomson, although they still trade under the RCA name) has made improvements to the F38310. In keeping with Home Theater's general philosophy regarding product reviews, senior technical editor Mike Wood and I agreed to wait and review the new version of the F38310. It was worth the wait.

Bridge technology. I almost hate to use the phrase, since it undoubtedly originated on the PowerBook of some Madison Avenue hack. Still, the phrase works so well because we need so much right now. One cannot dabble in technology these days without instantly becoming familiar with the concept of bridging. We don't have it quite as bad as our cohorts in the computer industry, but (whether we like it or not) the grand digital-television experiment has put us all squarely in the gap between the present and the future of video. Sure, you could resist, as so many of us have been tempted to do. But your trusty old television is going to look pretty funny in 2006, when all it coughs up are 500 channels of blank screen. I wouldn't hold out hope that the FCC will balk on their blackout deadline for the analog transmissions. Word is that the analog portion of the spectrum has already been whacked up amongst the bandwidth-hungry cellular companies, which are willing to pay for it. Pop quiz: Who do you think the FCC wants in that space five years from now—television broadcasters (who they've been berating for some time now about dragging their feet on the digital transition and who don't pay a penny for the space) or cellular companies that are going to swoop in, drop a lot of cash, and swoop out with their bandwidth . . . no muss, no fuss. The first person to answer right wins a free chance to buy a new TV (and some expanded cellular service, too).