Last month, I introduced some basic concepts to help you design the ultimate home theater. For those of you who missed it, we invited three home theater design gurus to help us build a new listening room: Anthony Grimani, Russ Herschelmann, and Norm Varney. I tried to cover everything you'd need to build a great home theater, regardless of your budget. This month, I continue that approach as I discuss the construction and acoustic treatment of our room.

Thin is definitely the wave of the future. Just look at most Hollywood actresses. Their faces get more gaunt with each passing season. Television displays are the same way. People are tired of the little black box. Consumers have clamored for skinny plasmas and liquid crystal displays (LCDs) since their introduction a few years back. The only problem's been that plasmas have come in large screen sizes (42 to 60 inches diagonally) while LCDs have been relegated mostly to computer-monitor service. Sharp, longtime master of the LCD panel, has now brought forth a midsized panel for midsized environments.

Power output is often the biggest selling point for receivers and standalone amplifiers. Bells and whistles aside, you can often spend a lot less money for an amplifier or receiver that has a lot less power. While there are several factors that influence an amplifier's sound quality, we're not going to go into many of them in this article. We're going to focus on power. Ideally, an amplifier should be rated with low distortion, measured over the entire audible frequency range and with all channels driven. You should always listen to an amplifier before you purchase it. Whether you should test the 60-watt model or the 150-watt version depends on many factors, including your listening environment, the speakers you'll be using with it, and your listening habits.

I could make some witty comment about how difficult it is to use the typical home theater, but, at this point, that would be a cliché. Basically, unless you take a great deal of care or spend considerable funds on a touchpanel-based control system, it's likely that, at best, only one person in your house will be able to play a DVD in the correct aspect ratio with 5.1 sound. To be honest, I'm surprised more people don't just read a book. It would certainly take less effort.