Home cinema: understanding the risks

Home cinema sounds like a great idea when you're standing in Tottenham Court Road looking at shining silver speaker stacks and admiring The Fifth Element on a sixty-inch plasma, but it's an entirely different thing when you actually bring these alien devices into your home and they take all your money and your living room and keep getting bigger and more powerful.

When you finally take the plunge and buy your first system, you'll learn more about HDMI interconnects, DLP chipsets, and component inputs than anyone who isn't paid to be a broadcast engineer should ever have to consider. You will outrage your partner by destroying the artfully discreet symmetry of your living room.  Your children will weep as you mess about with miles of cabling and they discover that watching CBeebies involves hand-cranking a generator and pumping a 17-digit code into your universal remote.

Eventually you'll have balanced the numerous satellite speakers on various occasional side tables, copies of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, and a vase from Heals you've never liked. You'll sit in the 'sweet spot' on the sofas as the system makes funny noises while you calibrate it so the bullets sound like they're actually whizzing over your head. You'll dim the lights, unplug the phone, and watch Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or some other highly visual epic, and -- you'll be blown away. The first time.

The first time the sound effects are spookier, the dialogue has more impact, and the windows do rattle during explosions and special effects. You'll be in the movie. You'll jump out of your skin when a car door is slammed, and be unclear for the rest of your life whether it was a plot point or your neighbour coming home late. Unfortunately it's amazing how quickly you get used to a certain level of home cinema action. It quickly palls.

Then you need seven speakers, not just five. A projector screen. High-end cabling from Monster.  A remote control that glows in the dark. It suddenly feels reasonable to talk about only spending £2,000 pounds on a receiver. A £2,500 projector becomes a "a decent mid-range model." I've been doing this for a while and frankly it takes a £20,000 Sony projector and built-in sofa bass units providing direct buttock stimulation to get my blood pumping these days.

Even when the thrill is gone, there are some compensations. Projectors and a good home cinema system are particularly good for mesmerising gangs of small children at parties, thanks to our good friends at Pixar. The rich saturated colours of cartoons like Wallace and Gromit and Valiant look great on a projector, and after fifteen minutes or so you'll creep into the darkened room to find one child asleep, another busily eating dirt from a pot plant, and sixteen Dads having a heated argument about pixilation, throw lengths, and the rainbow effect.

If you're scared about jumping in, why not try a free sample? Lobby hard at work for projectors to give your PowerPoint more impact. Take home the projector from the office, after promising to buy one of your IT guys a drink. Plug it into your laptop, hook it up to your hi-fi, and have a go. Just remember the first one is free. After that you're on your own.