Buy a new Corvette, and you won't have to study the car zines to figure out what brand of V-8 you'll need to install under the hood. Every Vette comes with a maxed-out Chevy engine, transmission, and chassis, so all of the parts work together in one finely tuned road machine. Assembling a home theater audio system from different brands' speakers and electronics might be a bit more complicated, but it's really not that big of a deal. Even so, the synergies that a single-brand home theater audio system can afford are obvious, and I really think this new, more holistic approach might turn out to be one of the most promising trends in consumer electronics. I had my first glimpse of that future when Now Hear This (NHT) unveiled their first integrated electronics and speaker system, the Xd, in 2005. For that project, NHT joined forces with DEQX, a leader in digital speaker-correction techniques, and PowerPhysics, a top developer of digital power amplifiers. More recently, Vinci Labs acquired NHT and immediately collaborated on development for the Controller surround processor and the Power5 and Power2 amplifiers.

It wasn't until I uncrated both the Paradigm Cinema 330 speakers and the Harman/Kardon AVR 340 receiver that I realized I'd found something rare in the home theater realm—a visual match between speakers and receiver. Did some invisible hand simultaneously guide Paradigm's whizzes in Toronto and Harman/Kardon's design squad in Northridge, California? These two large companies have no connection that I know of. Yet, this month's Spotlight System is a genuine fusion of Canadian and Californian design sensibilities.

Say your Great-Aunt Edna died and left you $10,000 or so in her will with the stipulation that you had to spend it on a home theater system (that's why she always was your favorite great-aunt). You and I could while away the better part of an evening arguing the particulars of what gear to buy—and especially how the money should be divided between the audio and video parts of the system.

Imagine what it would be like if shopping for a new car involved the same number of decisions we must make when buying a home theater system. First, we would pick an engine, then we'd need a chassis to mount it in, and, to top it off, we would hire a coach builder to design a body to our specifications. This is, in fact, the way people bought luxury cars prior to World War II, before the car companies came to recognize that advancing technology required them to think of the design as an integrated whole rather than as a hodgepodge grouping of discrete components.

I recently visited Berkeley, California, to take a tour of Sumiko, the U.S. distributor for many high-end European audio manufacturers, such as Sonus faber, REL, Primare, Pro-ject, SME, CineVERSUM, SEQUENCE, and Vienna Acoustics. They gave us several demonstrations, including a rather moving and educational listening session with their Cremona speaker line in a two-channel setup. They played several types of music for us, and, with every track, I felt myself getting more involved, more entranced, almost emotional. It wasn't unlike the first time I'd attended Carnegie Hall and listened to a symphony. I was enjoying music explicitly, not listening passively while I cooked, cleaned, exercised, and otherwise lived my life.

After the parade of international system mates that we've had in every other installment of this column recently, we finally settle into a system whose parts share their nation of origin. Don't be too quick to assume that it is the United States or Japan I speak of—this month's system hails entirely from merry old England. This isn't terribly surprising, but it does give me an opportunity to say a few things to our friends across the pond that I've been meaning to say for a while, such as: Sorry about that whole revolution thing (although I don't really mean that sincerely), and thanks for the Rolling Stones, Lord Stanley (who gave us the Stanley Cup), and Elizabeth Hurley—in no particular order, of course.