I get an idea of what I'm in for before I even set foot inside the house. Huge transformers in a room off the garage hum softly as the electronic systems designer, Kyle Griffith of Texas Integrated Systems, describes the home's power system. "There are three transformers for the house and one for the pool house," he explains.

"There are three electrical panels just for the media system and two grounding rods with special clay packed around them to help eliminate electrical noise. We had to upgrade the outside service four times as the job grew"—a fact confirmed when I see that the curbside service box is about three times as large as those of the neighboring homes in this development outside Austin, Texas.

What kind of audio/video system could demand thrice the power that a typical suburban home draws? I soon find out. Griffith leads me up a flight of stairs and opens a pair of huge bronze doors decorated with cast figures of lions. Behind the doors lies one of the most ornate—yet apparently simple—home theaters I have ever seen. Its character lies in the details. "The fabrics are hand-screened and hand-embroidered," interior designer Mark Cravotta points out. "All of the sconces were cast from original antiques. The carpet is handmade in a single piece."

"And all of that gilding you see is 24-karat gold," Griffith adds. "We were all walking around with gold flakes in our hair for a couple of weeks."

The decor quickly fades from my consciousness when Griffith taps the Crestron touchscreen to bring down the lights and fire up the home theater system. A few seconds of King Kong are enough to tell me that this theater is to a typical media room what an F-16 fighter is to a Gulfstream business jet: something in the same basic category, but at the same time totally incomparable.

My theater chair shakes violently as brontosauruses stampede across the screen. I look down, wondering if Griffith might have added some sort of tactile transducers to shake the seats; he notices and turns the sound down to explain that the theater hosts an astounding 24 subwoofers. "They're all 12-inchers," he says. "I'd rather use a lot of smaller subs than a few large ones because the smaller ones are quicker and more efficient."

Thanks to its huge complement of CAT/MBX speakers and amplifiers, and to extensive on-site tuning by Griffith and a team of CAT engineers, the system sounds as clean at a deafening volume as a typical home theater system does running at grandmother-pleasing levels.

When I play my favorite music DVD—Live Aus Berlin, by German industrial rock band Rammstein—Griffith does not restrain me as I crank up the volume on the Crestron to levels I have never before heard with this DVD.

It's an amazing experience. It seems as loud as being right next to the band's PA speakers, yet it sounds as smooth as a great high-end audio system quietly playing Bach's sonatas for solo violin. I can tell that more than a few minutes' exposure to such a high volume would damage my hearing, but the sound is so clean that my ears never hurt.

The theater's power is almost dangerously addictive. Yet it sounds just as amazing—although in a completely different way—when I play James Taylor's Live at the Beacon Theater DVD. I have listened to this DVD through hundreds of audio systems, but can recall none that so accurately portray the Beacon's ambience or Taylor's gentle voice.

To each side of the screen lie gorgeous crimson curtains—"The style of the room is based on turn-of-the-century Parisian opera houses," Cravotta notes—that conceal two of the theater's three equipment cabinets. These two cabinets contain only amplifiers: models from Audio Design Associates designed specifically for use in CAT/MBX systems.

The choice of crimson is a compromise between the perfect video environment Griffith wanted and the look Cravotta and the client desired. "Kyle needed as little light reflection as possible—he'd have liked to do all black, but that wasn't going to work," Cravotta says. "So we settled on the dark crimson and toned down the wood finish in the theater so it wasn't so shiny. All of the wood, by the way, is finished using a process that takes seven to nine steps, concluding with polish and wax."

The Runco MBX-1 projector that provides the video images weighs more than 200 pounds and measures nearly 3 feet long. It's essentially a commercial-grade projector, capable of producing images as large as 40 feet wide. Driving this theater's 8-foot-wide screen, the MBX-1 is loafing. Yet it's the projector's many lens options and wide horizontal and vertical offset capability that made this installation possible. Griffith explains,

"We didn't want the projector hanging from the ceiling, but there's no way we could put a lift in because the central support beam for the house blocked us. We also couldn't put it way back in the room because the doors are right in the center. We ended up mounting it 42 inches off center. It works, but I wouldn't recommend your readers try it. Pat Bradley from Runco has been here four times to perfect the image."