Like most Home Theater readers, I’ve known SRS Labs primarily as the company that does virtual surround sound and other audio solutions for HDTVs and soundbars—features largely dismissed by serious enthusiasts as lightweight hocus-pocus. So it was with some skepticism that, back in March, I rolled into the firm’s Santa Ana, California, headquarters for a private demo of some new surround sound technology.

Homeowners love what technology provides but many prefer to keep its presence at a minimum. Such was the case in this beautiful Southern California home in the upscale Pacific Palisades area. "This project had a good sized budget of $100k to provide whole-house distribution of audio, video, phone and data," said Mark Schafer, President of Custom L.A. "Still we all encountered a few challenges such as the family room, where the client wanted a completely invisible Home Theater in a wide open space".

In this brand new condo, the homeowner required something simple, primarily to watch TV and DVDs. He had a complex automation system installed by an inexperienced integrator in his previous residence and found it too cumbersome and complicated to operate.

"Simplicity and high quality components were the client's two main requirements", said Chris Abbott, the Project Manager for Abbott's Technology Design Group of Las Vegas, Nevada. "Normally we don’t do 2-channel systems but this was a long time customer with a very specific wish list."

We all know that California has it own unique car culture. Here a person's automobile and their personality are often closely aligned. One homeowner loved their Bentley so much; they couldn't get enough of it and choose it as the theme for their dedicated Home Theater.

A kid who went from racing go-karts at age 7, to becoming the first Rookie of the Year to take home the Shootout victory at the 70-lap Budweiser Shootout, to scoring the highest-points finish ever for a NASCAR rookie in 2006, Denny Hamlin, age 27, is loving life. And with that success has come the means to enjoy his home in a way that suits his ultra-fast-paced lifestyle. For Hamlin, that means technology.

During a time when movies were made entirely by hand, Ray Harryhausen knew better than anyone how to make the most spectacular cinematic creatures come to life. Inspired, like so many, by the original King Kong, Harryhausen honed his filmmaking skills on a variety of short subjects before he tackled his first feature film, Mighty Joe Young, working alongside Kong's stop-motion maestro Willis O'Brien. For you kids reading at home, stop-motion animation is the painstaking process of moving one or more specially designed models a precise fraction of an inch for each frame of film. Do it perfectly 24 times in a row (which can take a full day or more), and you've created one second of a movie. Along the way, Harryhausen even invented the Dynamation technique to more realistically combine his creations with live-action backgrounds, and his work became the gold standard that continues to stoke Hollywood's collective imagination. His 1957 black-and-white, monster-attacks-Rome opus 20 Million Miles to Earth was colorized and released on Blu-ray disc, the first Harryhausen title in high def, along with a new DVD boxed set that adds colorized special editions of Earth vs. The Flying Saucers and It Came From Beneath the Sea, all from Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.