Buy a Home Theater Without Leaving Your Home

Media Concepts' HOMtheater.com offers expert advice and interactive tools to entice home theater buyers to shop online.

Lincoln Spector, special to PCWorld.com

A home theater seems like the last thing you'd want to buy online. Do you really want to choose a large-screen TV, DVD player, high-end stereo, and six speakers without trying them out first? Media Concepts, which is rolling out a Web site called HOMtheater.com, thinks you will.

Initially, HOMtheater.com will sell high-end audio and video playback equipment, intended for people who want the best picture and sound when they watch a movie at home. Eventually the site will offer graphic tools for designing your home theater. The company's expertise will bring people to the site, according to Media Concepts' president, Erik Vidrio.

"We've been [setting up home theaters] for a long, long time," Vidrio says.

The site rolls out in three phases, starting November 6. The first, basic version will be a standard retail site, selling audio and video components and complete systems.

Media Concepts prepares those systems itself, combining components from various manufacturers, cabling the pieces together for you, and even programming a universal remote. System prices will range from about $1000 for a simple 5.1 audio system to about $15,000 for a high-end theater with a large-screen, HDTV-ready console; a DVD player; and a game-ready PC.

Coming Soon: Reviews and Multimedia

The information-oriented phase two will go online in late November or early December, just in time for the holiday season. That phase will enable you to visit HOMtheater.com to get product reviews and ask questions of Media Concepts engineers. (See "Shops Must Mix Bricks With Clicks.")

But can you trust reviews written by people with an economic interest in making a sale? Might their desire to push a product color their advice? Vidrio says his team only has the customer in mind.

"The people here aren't in that [product pushing] mode," he says. "We would sell anything that would meet the clients' needs."

The final, third phase of HOMtheater.com will be an interactive, multimedia environment for creating your optimum home theater. When you first go there, you'll have to answer questions: "What's the size of the room?" "Will you be using it for music as well as movies?" "Can you make the room dark?"

Once it has your information, HOMtheater.com will display a drawing of your room, into which you can drag and drop to arrange furniture and pick components. The Web site will point you to equipment that is appropriate for your room and budget. It will even help you pick the color of your acoustic tiles.

Once you've defined what you want, Media Concepts will assemble the components and calibrate them to match your environment. (Surround sound systems sound best if you've given details like the distance between the listener and the speakers). Although the interactive environment could provide enough customization to lure home electronics buyers online, Media Concepts doesn't have even an approximate date for when phase 3 will go online.