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Home theater is truly for everyone — regardless of the size of your house or apartment, your economic wealth, or your taste in movies. And home theater is bound to mean something different to everyone. It's not just about boxes, cables, and remotes, or about discs, records, and cassettes: A home theater can be a real adventure.

When you hear the term home theater, you probably think of big screens, cool sound, DVDs, CDs, and lots of remote controls sitting around your living room. And football games, popcorn, and other fun images, probably sneak into that image as well.

The basic home theater

So what's in a home theater? Well, a home theater is largely what you make of it, but at least three major elements constitute the core of a home theater:

• A large-screen display: More and more, the receiver aspect of a television is being divorced from the display aspect, in the form of set-top boxes, external TV tuners, computers, and other source devices. Appropriately, the display is being optimized for what its main purpose is — displaying the wide range of video output from a home theater system. These displays can be huge —more than 120 inches diagonally, which is 10 feet for those of you who didn't do the math!

• A digital video source: Although you could say that a digital satellite or cable service is a digital video source, the mandate is DVD capability. DVD is the focal point for all digital video innovation that will drive your home theater.

• A surround-sound capability: You need to have surround sound to take advantage of all the audio power stored in your DVD content. With surround sound, you are truly starting to mimic the theater experience.

If you lack any of these elements, you really don't have a home theater. Without the display and surround sound, you lose the impact of the visual and audio experience, and without a digital video source, you just have a loud and big TV system. You really need all three. Figure 1 shows these elements in their native environment — your home.

The complete home theater

This section shows a fairly comprehensive list of what you typically put in your home theater. (The list doesn't include all-in-one units because they merely integrate various combinations of these devices into one unit.)

• Sources: These provide the content you watch or listen to.

• Tape cassette player/recorder

• CD player/recorder/MP3 player/audio server

• Turntable

• AM/FM tuner

• DVD player

• VCR

• Personal video recorder

• Camcorder

• Satellite or cable set-top box

• Gaming console

• Home theater PC or Windows XP Media Center PC (a specific Microsoft software product)

• Receivers/controllers: The heart of the system, these feed content to your displays and speakers.

• A/V receiver

• Controller/decoder

• Power amplifier

• Displays: This is what you watch.

• Direct-view, rear-projection, or flat-panel TV display

• Front-projection with separate display screen

• Speakers: These are what you listen to.

• Two front speakers

• One front center speaker

• Two side speakers

• Two or four rear speakers

• Subwoofer

• Connections: These are connections to content coming from outside your home.

• Over-the-air antenna

• Satellite or cable video feed

• Internet connectivity — preferably broadband, such as DSL or cable modem

Naturally, as you extend your home theater to other points in your home, you can add to the quantities mentioned here, but most of the components are the same. You also may choose different qualities and (in the case of displays) sizes of these things, but the basic formula remains the same, too.